More racism in your misogyny?

When I originally started drafting this post, my topic was the skinny on skinny or why do you still have too much fat on your body? Faithful readers of DJ! have read my screeds on that topic here, here and here.

So. There's a young actress in a blockbuster film that has become the target of the slash-and-burn media.

NY Times critic Manohla Dargis calls her "a new female warrior" [...] then in the next sentence says that she doesn't look hungry enough and that her "womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission." [...]

This is beyond disgusting. Lawrence looks normal. Her male co-stars look even healthier (and have some seriously big muscles) yet no one thinks they are too healthy or big boned or big boobed or just plain old fat. Look at her. She's not fat. She's even thin and she is also totally normal about her food intake. She likes to eat and won't diet. Power to her.

Sometimes I think that we are so used to seeing such skinny women in the movies that when we see a normal looking girl we think she is big.

"... when we see a normal looking girl we think she is big." Yeah, about that normal-looking thing ...

A blogger at Jezebel goes to town on this product, the latest installment in the never-ending creation of new markets for self-loathing - a business model that requires self-loathing to ensure the consumer target is receptive to its newest crap.

Needless to say, certain citizens are troubled by this product—which, in addition to just being fucking insane, brings up painful issues about the hierarchy of skin tone within the Indian community. As if it isn't bad enough that darker-skinned people are encouraged to stay out of the sun and invest in skin-bleaching products like 'Fair & Lovely', and that white actresses are being imported to play Indian people in Bollywood movies, now everyone has to be insecure about the fact that their vaginas happen to be the color that vaginas are??? Splendid! God, I was just saying the other day that my misogyny didn't have enough racism in it.

The meticulous parsing of the advert was a tad absurd, though the purpose of the product is too sadly evident. Bleach your punany, cos it has to be lily-white, virginal and pure!

Yes. The Georgia O'Keefe plate, from The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago, 1979.

The skinny on fashion pix.

Last January we posted this when altered photographs were published, giving the impression that a curvaceous actress had overstepped the boundaries of what the fashion world considered fashionable.

Today @Amphitrit directs us to her blogpost that features a number of NSFW photos that contrast two women's bodies; one is average and the other is the couture and fashion photographers' ideal.

Guess which one?

Yes. The scrawny-as-a-coat-rack frame is the one that works best to display designer clothing.

Go read her.

More at Plus Magazine, which had the courage to publish this full-bodied feature article and a powerful editorial: What is wrong with our bodies?

The answer to the question is this, there is nothing wrong with our bodies. We are bombarded with weight-loss ads every single day, multiple times a day because it’s a multi-billion dollar industry that preys on the fear of being fat. Not everyone is meant to be skinny, our bodies are beautiful and we are not talking about health here because not every skinny person is healthy.

Here, let's make that broad broader.

The fashion police or more properly, vigilante stylists have taken it upon themselves to loudly shame women who have the nerve to appear in public with visible curvaceousness.

See the above? That's not a 'before and after' photo-shopped slenderized model.

The photo on the right was the original picture taken on the red carpet. The one on the left was distorted, perhaps to reinforce the point the NYT flak was trying to make about 'big-boned' gals.

Here's a phenomenon we've noted, that shows itself in the outright attempt to humiliate women who don't and won't obey the imperative of "You can never be too thin ...."

We wrote about it here. Jezebel has been documenting the revisionism, calling it The Photoshop of Horrors, when images are manipulated to turn models into stick figures.

Hopefully, Brigitte - the German magazine which made an editorial decision to no longer use models in its pages (not sure if the ban applies to advertising too) but rather to photograph real women with their flaws and natural beauty, without any digital embellishments - will be successful. Then perhaps girls and women will no longer torture and starve their bodies.

Zaftig or Skeletal?

The Regina Mom sent me a link to an article that features the photographs seen at the top of this post.

London Fashion Week starts today, a seven-day parade of the Emperor's Designer Clothes, made of tinfoil or feathers or rubber. A few years ago, I was sent backstage to cover this event ...

At the end of the cat-walk, there stood a parade of young women who looked like they were about to collapse. On camera, fashion models look worryingly thin. In the (non-)flesh, they look so emaciated that the only other place I have ever seen people like them is reporting on African famines. Their eyes are glazed, shut-down because they have no fuel to run on. These coked-out jangles of gristle and bone were smeared with cosmetics, squeezed into a dress design that appeared to be made of rubbish bags, and pushed out to shimmy down the cat-walk ... When they stumbled back, they appeared faint and listless, and leaned against a wall, looking like they needed an IV drip.

The fashion world claims two sets of victims. The first are the women who it uses as models, for a brief window, before discarding them. They are on average 25 percent below a normal, healthy woman's weight. We know how they achieve this, because many former models say so: they starve themselves. They live on water and lettuce for weeks. When they fall below a Body Mass Index of twelve, they start to consume their own muscles and tissues. Several models have dropped dead from starvation after success at fashion shows in the past few years.

But there is a broader circle of victims, far beyond the cat-walk's cat-calls. They are ordinary women who are bombarded with these highly manufactured images of "beauty" every day, and react either by feeling repulsive or trying out semi-starvation for themselves. A Harvard University study found that 80 percent of women are unhappy with their bodies, and only 1 percent are "completely happy."

The other photograph accompanied an article in the Daily Mail online, again about London Fashion Week.

... take London Fashion Week's current stand on what constitutes beauty. There have been lots of initiatives to inject a few curves and laughter lines into the event, most notably from knitwear designer Mark Fast, who sent plus-size models down the runway, a brave statement that meant his stylist walked out, furious.

Was the stylist angry that the clothing clung to the models' curves, instead of hanging off the skeletal frames of clothes-hanger-thin, barely alive mannequins? How gauche.

In August Antonia Z wrote about the resistance to female flesh, sometimes expressed as hatred towards women who don't and won't conform to the current fashion demand for taut, tight or gaunt. The photograph of Lizzi Miller who brazenly shows off her voluptuous body, including her little belly created quite the uproar.