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.

Think Before You Pink.

We sort of fancy the colour, here at DAMMIT JANET! - especially the shocking shade associated with Elsa Schiaparelli.

What we don't fancy is the glurge associated with the pink ribbon campaign.

And thus we are linking to an excellent post Zoom wrote at her blog Knitnut last March.

More to consider from The Canary Report:

I fully support Breast Cancer Action, an organization based in San Francisco helping to transform breast cancer from a private medical crisis to a public health emergency. And I love their Think Before You Pink campaign that “calls for more transparency and accountability by companies that take part in breast cancer fundraising, and encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink ribbon promotions.” Think Before You Pink also highlights “pinkwashers”—companies that “purport to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon campaign, but manufacture products that are linked to the disease.”

Linked, as in statistically linked - but cause-and-effect has yet to be scientifically demonstrated because little funding is awarded to this type of research.

Sports and Alcohol - when does it stop being fun?

It's all fun and games until someone is taken to emergency, apparently suffering from alcohol poisoning.

Carleton University suspended its women’s soccer team on Friday after a rookie initiation party ended with a player being taken to the hospital by ambulance following excessive drinking.

It is believed that a team party last Sunday saw one player so incoherent from alcohol that an ambulance took her to the hospital.

These incidents do not occur in a vacuum. Particularly revealing are athletes' parents response to the University sanctions and media coverage.

One father of a rookie player suggested yesterday that the situation was being "really overblown." And a mother, who didn't want her name used out of respect for her daughter, a return player who went through a similar rookie party, suggested this was a case of someone drinking too much - not a hazing. "I know most of the girls on the team. I am just disappointed that their best intentions for team bonding have been misconstrued."

D-E-N-I-A-L, anyone?

Athletes are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure since the acceptance and admiration of team members is a powerful motivator for team success. As well, individuals who are blessed with such talents and skills tend to push the boundaries of their bodies' physical strength and abilities.

Patrick Swayze, who died two weeks ago and who had waged a life-long battle against substance abuse, observed: "My big regret is the physical damage I've done to my body. I can do almost anything physically and I used to believe I was invincible, breaking bones over and over, playing football, doing gymnastics, diving, ballet, doing my own stunts, kick boxing, staging fights ... It all seems a little stupid to me now."

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.

Silent and Deadly.

What do these women have in common? 

Dianne Heatherington. Rosalind Franklin. Gilda Radner. Laura Nyro. Coretta Scott King. Marcheline Bertrand. Jessica Tandy.  My sister, two weeks before her 41^st birthday.

Yes, they all died from ovarian cancer.

September is Ovarian Cancer awareness month.

In a marketing and publicity world that is obsessed with the artifacts of female beauty and tactics to leverage the charms of female celebrities to sell their products, it’s not surprising that Breast Cancer has been branded as the sexy affliction while ovarian cancer is just another dirty little secret, a disease that affects women “down there”.

Perhaps it’s a small blessing that conservative bible-thumpers and the “All your wombs R ours” zygote zealots have not claimed this bandwagon.  Shrieeeking is not a savvy public relations instrument.

Ovarian cancer is a pernicious and quiet killer of women.  When it starts manifesting itself, its symptoms are often confused with the innocuous signs of peri-menopause.

Some physicians are not inclined to explore the complaints that women bring to their attention.  Yet this form of cancer when caught early on can be successfully contained and eradicated.  Hopefully more women will become aware of the warning signs of this disease as well as more knowledgeable about the ways that cancer-fighting foods and exercise can help prevent it.

Cancer-fighting foods. 

Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. 

Always Look On The (b)Right Side of Life!

Inside the Queensway's Kady O'Malley liveblogs the H1N1 hearing: (Flu) shots all round!

ToeDancer who frequently comments at DAMMIT JANET! and who is a veritable source of wisdom and knowledge spotted this observation from Conservative MP Cathy McLeod cited by O'Malley:

Hey, did you know we were “really lucky to have SARS”? Because we were, according to the Conservative MP up now ... — it allowed us to prepare for *this*. Why, going on that logic, aren’t we lucky to be facing a possible H1N1 outbreak, since you never know when the bubonic plague might make a return appearance?

Oh my. I guess that McLeod felt prodded to speak up, given that MP Carolyn Bennett expressed strong concern about the fact that much of the preparation work was being done via conference call, and asked how well the government is measuring and testing capacity to revise “the plan”, while MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis suggested that the government was putting a “rosy face” on its readiness, but witnesses delegated by native communities were presenting a completely different version of reality, including the startling revelation that some Manitoba communities are being forced to hold fundraising drives for flu kits.

The hearing was concluded by a rousing chorus of "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life" by the members of Stephen Harper's Conservative Government.

Kidding.

His Poopiness Will Hate This

It's still early days but this looks very promising for women's health -- combined contraception and protection against HIV, controlled by women.

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College have published results showing that a new contraceptive device may also effectively block the transmission of the HIV virus. Findings show that the device prevents infection by the HIV virus in laboratory testing. The promising results are published in the most recent issue of the journal AIDS.

The new device is a vaginal ring that releases multiple types of non-hormonal agents and microbicides, which would prevent conception as well as sexually transmitted HIV infection.

What a boon this would be for sex workers and women in high-HIV areas in Asia and Africa. I hope it will be cheap too.

And I wonder how long it will take before His Poopiness declares that this too, like condoms, helps spread AIDS.