A new study of 1,000 American girls between the ages of 13-17 by the Girl Scouts finds that 9 out of 10 girls say they feel pressure from the media and/or fashion industry to be skinny. More than 80 percent of the girls polled said they’d rather see natural photos of models than digitally enhanced or altered photos.
Specialists calculate life expectancy for people with anorexia to be 25 years shorter than average. Patients who recover however, may expect full lifespans.
A Chicago mom and grandmother shares her story of finally overcoming anorexia after 25 years of battling the disorder.
Remember the mental health parity law that passed in 2008? The The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the Treasury jointly issued new rules this week governing the law.
The Website Realself.com tracked cosmetic surgery trends by region and even city with some surprising results.
New “groundbreaking” study shows abnormal brain function in people with body dysmorphic disorder.
It’s Friday (!) and in case the mid-afternoon slump strikes, here’s a couple videos to slack off to.
A new PBS documentary follows four girls as they grapple with body image issues, unhealthy and confusing media images and the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. “A Girl’s Life” is hosted by Rachel Simmons, the author of the New York Times bestsellers Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. An educator and coach, Rachel also blogs about dating, relationships and other issues at TeenVogue. Click here for more info on the project.
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How to be the perfect wife, mother, career woman and super hot sex babe? Just buy more stuff! Sarah Haskins zeroes in on consumerist messages aimed at women in 2009.
If you’re, say, mid-twenties or older and female, chances are you’ve read at least one Ann M. Martin book. Martin, of course, is the author of the The Baby-Sitter’s Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial 13-year-olds that taught girls everywhere the basics of capitalism. Now, in what may be filed thus far in “Best News of the Decade,” Scholastic is re-issuing the first two books in the out-of-print, 213-title series (213? whoa!) as well as a prequel.
Outdated uncool references to perms and cassette players aside, I think the series, which was published in the mid-80s, is still relevant to today’s adolescent girl. The characters, all diverse and unique, struggle through emotional, family and friendship issues that transcend generations. I mean, who didn’t cry when Mimi died? And who among us hasn’t faced at least a snob or two in the daisy chain of angst that is middle school? The series is also pretty body-positive — the one time I recall dieting mentioned is when Stacey’s ex-best friend Laine visits and they all think it kind of dumb. The series is being revamped to appeal to younger generations — will Claudia get in trouble for Facebooking on the job? Will Mary Anne get caught texting to Logan in class? Let’s just hope that in bringing the series into the 21st century doesn’t go by way of the recently re-released Sweet Valley High series, which saw the “perfect size 6″ twins Elizabeth and Jessica downsized to a “perfect size 4″ and the insertion of such colloquialisms as “omigod.”
The BSC re-release is set for April. Until then, check out this LiveJournal page called “Stoneybrook High School” with character bios on everyone the babysitters go to school with, complete with their celebrity alter egos. Yep. Or refresh your adolescent memories with Raina Telgemeier’s BSC comic book adaptations. And finally, find out which babysitter you are with this handy dandy pop quiz. I always considered myself a kind of Mary Anne/Claudia hybrid: shy and bookish, but also artsy and creative. Who’s your favorite babysitter?
Hard to swallow: Washington mom Juliet Lee has eaten five pounds of ribs, 43 inches of cheese steak sub, 31 dozen raw oysters, 13 slices of pizza, 13 pounds of cranberry sauce, and 13 date-nut-bread-and-cream-cheese sandwiches — all within minutes. Oh, yeah… she weighs 100 pounds and wears a size-zero.
Not only are “plus-sizes” considered taboo in high fashion, so too are large breasts. The well-endowed journalist Venetia Thompson delves into the issues supporting the busty bias in this Daily Beasteditorial.
Progressive or just prejudiced? After months of guised jabs at Rep. N.J. gubernatorial challenger Chris Christie’s weight, Democratic State Committee Chairman Joe Cryan blatantly “pounded” the issue home to supporters: “What would it feel like if the next governor weighs 350 pounds?” he asked the crowd. Meanwhile, Sen. Raymond Lesniak told the New York Magazine that Christie “looks hideous! And unhealthy… That doesn’t portray the discipline that’s necessary to lead this state.”
Fat studies scholar Amy Farrell appeared on Colbert Nation this week to discuss fat-shaming, health at every size and her new book, Fat Shame.
Meghan McCain: Still Republican, but I can’t help but like her anyway. In an editorial for the Daily Beast, McCain responds to the Simpson bashing with a call to stop the fat jokes. “My weight is the great constant in my life, no matter where I am or what I am doing it is an issue that comes up,” she writes. “I could probably cure cancer and solve all the Republican Party’s problems, and people would still make fat jokes.”
A new study finds that the simple act of exercise itself can improve body image even if you don’t lose an iota of a pound.
D’oh! The British government is spending more than a million U.S. dollars recreating a “healthier” version of The Simpsons in an effort it says to reduce the two-dimensional “obesity epidemic.” The campaign, which began last Monday and will run through Christmas, replaces Homer’s much-loved beer and doughnuts with fruits and vegetables and ditches the image of the family sitting on the sofa at the beginning of each episode (the fact that families need to be slumped on the sofa to even view the campaign is overlooked). No word on how Mr. Burns, the thin-as-a-rake, delicately fragile food minimalist, will be portrayed.
If I could travel to any part of the globe, India would be it. But as much as I love Indian food and culture, I’m not all that hip on Bollywood and the representation of Indian women in film. Luckily reader Kara (a.k.a. Filmi Girl) is a big fan. About 15 years ago, a friend gave her a cassette tape with the soundtrack from the 1980s hit Bollywood film Maine Pyaar Kiye. She was hooked. A few years later, she began watching the films the songs were centered around, and after realizing that her real life friends were uninterested in hearing her gush about Aamir, Preity and Rani, she started a blog. The 30-year-old librarian now spends her limited free time reading about her latest interest and watching large amounts of deliciously, over-the-top Indian films. She guest blogs today about the ever whittling waistlines of Bollywood actresses.
I began watching Bollywood movies about 10 years ago. Amidst the colorful songs and costumes and dramatic storylines, I began to realize something else that appealed to me about these movies – the actresses were all of normal and healthy weights. By “normal weight,” I don’t mean Hollywood normal, I mean real life normal. From Madhuri Dixit, whose ample thighs supported her beautiful dancing to Kajol’s sturdy tomboyish frame to Karishma Kapoor’s gawky slimness, the actresses all appeared healthy and well nourished. Being beautiful included a variety of different weights and shapes and sizes, rather than a single hard-to-achieve standard.
Yet, something disturbing has happened over the last few years, the variety is disappearing and in its place has taken root something very familiar – the new global standard of beauty.
In an interview this month with Rolling Stone, Jennifer’s Body star Megan Fox revealed that she used to cut herself. But, hey, it’s no biggie, because as Fox tells it, pesky things like self-harming and eating disorders are just normal teenage “phases” girls go through.
“Yeah,” she replied when asked if she’s ever cut herself. “But I don’t want to elaborate. I would never call myself a cutter. Girls go through different phases when they’re growing up, when they’re miserable and do different things, whether it’s an eating disorder or they dabble in cutting.“
That’s one to add to the LA Times ever-growing list of Megan Fox gaffes. The “23-year-old sex symbol” also opened up to the mag about her threats of physical violence to on-again boyfriend Brian Austin Green and her lingering low self-esteem:
“I’m really insecure about everything,” Fox said. “I see what I look like, but there are things that I like and things that I dislike. My hair is good. The color of my eyes is good, obviously. I’m too short. But overall, I’m not super excited about the whole thing.
“I never think I’m worthy of anything… I have a sick feeling of being mocked all the time. I have a lot of self-loathing.”
Ehem, Megan? Maybe you should be talking to a therapist instead of Rolling Stone.
I pretty much stopped watching Saturday Night Live after Tina Fey and Amy Poehler left, but now I have an actual reason to tune out. E! Online is reporting that SNL hasfired the delightfully fuller-figured Casey Wilson for not losing 30 pounds over the show’s summer hiatus and replaced her with a (yet another) “pretty white chick.” Writes E’s Ted Casablanca:
Casey’s been completely quiet on the matter… Could it be because of the totally bitchy and sexist way in which she was ousted from the sketch show?
Our inside comedy sources tell us SNL producers told the curvy Casey to lose 30 pounds during the show’s summer hiatus. They pretty much demanded it. And whether Wilson just couldn’t drop the weight or she just only wanted to give her middle finger some exercise, she didn’t drop a damn pound. And that’s when she was axed, we’re told.
Casey was pretty much the only female castmember the show’s had in years who wasn’t a size 6 or smaller (a pregnant Amy Poehler notwithstanding). Whereas SNL’s been famous for highlighting obese men—John Belushi, Chris Farley, Horatio Sanz, Bobby Moynihan, to name a few.
…what’s so friggin’ funny about a perfect-looking woman anyway? Lorne needs to wake up and realize we tune in to SNL to laugh, not get turned on.
In all fairness, Casablanca does mention that Wilson may have been ousted because she’s just not funny enough — she even made a Funny or Die video about people not finding her funny. But as Casablanca points out, to even suggest that Wilson lose an iota of a pound is “prehistoric” and I heartily agree. It’s well known that there exists a double standard for fat women in that they have a heavier load to bear than fat men. Fat characters form the minority in television, but of even these token few, fat male characters are represented almost twice as often as fat female characters and with less stigma. But the kicker here is that WILSON ISN’T EVEN FAT. Fat by insane size-double-zero Hollywood standards perhaps, but by no means fat by any medical definition of the word. Based on her photos — see here, here and here — I would estimate her to wear a U.S. size 10 or 12, at most.
SNL hasn’t been consistently funny in a long time. I’m not familiar with the new additions (Jenny Slate and Nasim Pedrad), but basing the comedic talent of your staff on the “would I sleep with her?” scale isn’t the way to gain laughs with this viewer. So, (assuming the reports are true) here’s a big BOO to you, SNL, and three cheers for the awesome Casey Wilson for standing her ground.
Oh, and if you want some actual feminist laughs, be sure to check out Bitch magazine’s feminist joke contest.
UPDATE: Casey Wilson is now denying reports that she was fired for her weight.
The parade recalls the Carnivals of the Caribbean, which began (as we know them) after the abolishment of slavery. Slaves, who were formerly barred from the lavish costume balls and feasts of the wealthy Spanish, French and British aristocracy, celebrated their new freedom by lampooning their former masters and mimicking the elaborate dress and behavior of the European gentry. Today’s women in barely-there bikinis represent a liberation of a different kind. As quoted in the New York Daily News:
The dancers weren’t naked, but there were plenty of sequined bikinis strutting down the Brooklyn parade route to calypso and reggae beats.
“We wine and we gyrate to the pulsating music,” said Barbadian-born Susan Dottin, 39, of East New York, Brooklyn, who wore a blue-and-gold feathered bikini and a headdress as she proudly waved her Barbados flag.
“You’re getting loose, you’re feeling no hangups, nothing, no inhibitions. It’s just about having a good time.”
Natasha Barnes has noted the “systematic paring down of an elaborate thematically inspired costume tradition that has given way to ‘Rio-styled’ Carnival pageantry in which spandex and string bikinis dominate” that occurred during the 1980s. In her essay, “Notes on Women and Spectacle in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival,” the rise of scantily clad female masqueraders and sexually explicit calypsos appear to be a point of contention among West Indian scholars as to their ascribed social and feminist implications.*
Feminist or not… a group of confident women of all shapes and sizes who aren’t afraid to show their fat, thin and in-between bodies before a crowd of two million people? Amazing.
* Barnes, Natasha. “Body Talk: Notes on Women’s Spectacle in Contemporary Trinidad.” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 93-105.
In conversations on body image and eating disorders, black women are often left out of the debate– it’s assumed that by virtue of their skin color, black women are somehow rendered immune to those ubiquitous pressures that plague white women (I would argue that the reverse might also be true: that because of racism, black women are even more conscious of and sensitive to how they present themselves and are perceived by others.) Here’s a round-up of recent news that shows that while no one ethnic or cultural group has a monopoly on eating disorders and/or body image insecurities, distinct social forces act in altogether different ways in influencing the self-esteem, health and happiness of women of color.
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Remember the study from a few months back in which it was found that black girls and girls from low-income families are more likely to develop bulimia than their wealthier white counterparts? Playwright and screenwriter Stephanie Armstrong is helping to fill a gap in the noticeably lacking eating disorder memoirs genre with her new book, Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia. Armstrong — now a recovered, married mother of one in her mid-40s — documents her descent into bulimia in her early 20s and describes her struggles as a black woman with a disorder consistently portrayed as a white woman’s disease, as well as why black women often do not seek traditional therapy for emotional problems. The work is being hailed as the first book by and among black women about eating disorders.
The Boston Herald has some background information on the project here and be sure to check out Armstrong’s website at www.notallblackgirls.com. The book, released Aug. 1, is available online at Amazon.
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Check out the trailer below for Chris Rock’s new documentary Good Hair, set for release in U.S. theaters on Oct. 9. The comedian extraordinaire was inspired to take a humorous look at the tangled political web of black women and hair after his daughter Lola came up to him crying and asked, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”
For more on the the snarled politics of black hair, check out Dianne Longwood’s awesome post from last month. As she explains:
Few of us are truly at ease with the coarse hair texture that comes courtesy of our African roots. In the beauty spectrum, our natural hair isn’t even on the map. Given the option, most Black girls would gladly wake up with a full, flowing head of hair instead of the short, hard-to-grow variety that is often our birthright.
Men like hair, so women who don’t have much of their own go buy some. To be called fake sends the message: If you’re not born with it, you’re not worth it. This is reinforced when some Black people use now-common terms like “good hair” to describe hair with texture as far from African as possible.
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Vogue Italia hoped to piggyback on the success of last year’s Black Issue by featuring a fashion spread of black Barbie dolls in its July magazine. The spread is, no doubt, inspired by Barbie’s 50th anniversary and comes on the heels of the introduction of Mattel’s new line of So In Style African-American Barbies that feature fuller lips, wider noses and curly hair. Vogue’s spread and the new black Barbies are meeting with mixed reactions from some black bloggers.
…I like the concept of using all Black Barbies in a Vogue spread. But I have to wonder if it is actually a step backwards. Barbies themselves use the white female body as a the prototype for beauty. Even the new Black Barbies do not have the hips, ass and curves that myself and other Black women possess. It’s great that Mattel has barbies of all shade, but what about all sizes? What taking into consideration that other races and ethnic groups have different ideas of what women’s bodies actually look like? The fashion industry often creates fashions, ad campaigns, and yes, even Barbie photo spreads that leave Black female bodies out of the equation and therefore, out of the question when defining what a “perfect body” looks like and who is able to possess it.
Aside from the appearance, the doll’s interests are both fun and scholarly—one doll prefers science and drill team while another one likes art and journalism. The dolls come in pairs of big and little sisters to encourage mentoring relationships.
They may not be mirror-perfect, but they come closer to the fantasy than my childhood playthings… I would want these dolls for my daughter.
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Share your own comments, related links and personal experiences in the comments below.
The incomparable Diablo Cody is on the cover of the Aug./Sept. copy of Bust magazine. The Candy Girl author and Juno screenwriter dished on her new horror film, Jennifer’s Body (named after a Hole song) and why the world needs to see more size-10 women naked. Here’s a few highlights from Jill Soloway’s interview with Cody:
On Jennifer’s Body[For a brief synopsis of the film, read here]:
…I decided instead to write a genre movie that reminded me of The Lost Boys and all the kind of movies that I used to watch when I was growing up, in the ’80s. And that’s what this movie is. What really appealed to me was the idea of working with a female director [Karyn Kusama]. I’m sure somebody will prove me wrong, but I had never heard of a woman director and a woman screenwriter creating a mainstream horror film.
…It’s really about girl-on-girl crime. It’s Mean Girls taken to an extreme. When the alpha girl becomes cannibal-like, nitpicking is no longer enough. Now she has to literally consume flesh… She eats men.
…The movie also references eating disorders. Jennifer’s eating habits revolve around a binge-purge cycle. She actually throws up before she eats. She’s possessed. She vomits disgusting black bile on her victims before she eats them. But in one of my favorite scenes, she’s binge-eating out of her refrigerator. I thought to myself, “Man if we aren’t getting that across…” I was happy about that.
On feminism, nudity and self-image:
I’m a 31-year-old feminist in Ugg boots and a T-shirt, so it’s funny to me when anyone accuses me of trying to be sexy or cute. I couldn’t do that if I fucking tried. I’m full-on rocking this post-feminist-academic-stripper attitude because I’m trying to confront, not titillate.
…I have no shame about nudity and I feel like nudity is confrontational in a way. Maybe the world needs to see a size-10 woman naked. Maybe they need to see my cellulite. I kind of feel that I would love to put that out there. Any time I do a red carpet, I feel vaguely confrontational. I feel like, “All right, now somebody’s going to come onto the carpet who doesn’t have a stylist, who did her own hair and makeup, who’s wearing a $25 dress from H&M. I have cellulite. I have big hips and big thighs. And you have to look at me.” I feel like people have to pay attention to someone who would typically be invisible.
If you’re, say, mid-twenties or older and female, chances are you’ve read at least one Ann M. Martin book. Martin, of course, is the author of the The Baby-Sitter’s Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial 13-year-olds that taught girls everywhere the basics of capitalism. Now, in what may be filed thus far in “Best News of the Decade,” Scholastic is 
The incomparable Diablo Cody is on the cover of the Aug./Sept. copy of 
