This Friday Serena Williams will appear on newsstands naked. She's posing for the cover of ESPN's body issue. Although I'm generally a little squeamish about the commodification of women's bodies that comes with the naked woman on the cover (magazines often use it to boost newsstand sales). But I couldn't help but feel a little happy that for once the naked woman was a beautiful, curvy, dark-skinned woman. All too often the women that pose naked on magazine covers all look the same: bronzed white women that look freakishly thin. But on Just Jared goes ahead and askes the problematic question, "Hot or Not?"
Some of the answers are wonderful. They mention how empowering it is for women to see a healthy black woman on the cover of a magazine.
Many comments pointed out that the cover was probably Photoshopped. Well, duh. Every commercial image we see has gone through Photoshop. France is even considering a law requiring that advertisements that are Photoshopped carry a "health warning."
But there are some comments that are pretty horrifying:
I don’t know why she had to do this. She’s a great athlete, but her body could be a lot better if she slimmed down some. I think she’s a little too thick and she does not have pretty feet.
I'm not quite sure how I missed this, but the NYTimes had this on Tuesday:
A new study finds that women who describe themselves as feminists are more forgiving than other women when assessing the attractiveness of women who are either very underweight or very heavy.
But:
Feminists and nonfeminists tended to agree on which woman was the most attractive. But that woman was described by the researchers as somewhat underweight, suggesting that even feminists cannot fully avoid societal pressures to be thin.
Gee, you mean feminists are subject to the same social pressures that everyone else is? And sometimes they fall victim to the exact same stereotypes everyone else does? Wow, thanks for that hard-hitting science. Granted, it was published in the very focused Body Images journal. I think the real conclusion to take away from this is that it's really hard to overcome stereotypes about what the ideal body is. After all, we're bombarded with images of the stereotype of attractiveness all the time. But the one thing that seems to help is when women identify as feminists -- i.e. don't buy into some of the ideas about how women are "supposed" to look and act -- the perceptions get a little better.
According to CNN, there's a web game out there called "Miss Bimbo" that encourages girls -- the site claims most users are between 7 and 17 -- to diet, find boyfriends, and get breast jobs. You know, all the things you want your little girl to aspire to.
Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game's clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars.
Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site.
And bagging a billionaire boyfriend is the most desirable way to earn the all important "mula" or bimbo dollars. ...
The site says: "Bimbo dollars is 'the cabbage,' 'bread,' the 'mula' you'll need to buy nice things and to get by in bimbo world. To earn some bimbo cash you will have to (gasp) work or find a boyfriend to be your sugar daddy and hook you up with a phat expense account!"
The advice on feeding the dolls is even more spurious, encouraging them to feed the dolls "every now and then" even though they want to keep their Bimbos "waif thin."
Although there are a number of parental activists that oppose the game (obviously), I tend to think the influence of the game is overrated. I think this might be feed into fears a young girl already has about her body image or sexuality, but if you're a normal, balanced girl, you'd understand the game is just a game. It's comparable to the argument about violent video games. Video games don't cause violence, but they sure can feed into tendencies that are already there.
Meanwhile, though, I'm not rushing to visit missbimbo.com, and I'm fairly certain the company created it knowing it would be perceived as controversial. Therefore, parents would ban it and therefore girls would want to play it more. But don't you love it when misogynistic sites feed into the fears of young girls and try to reinforce terrible stereotypes?
According to Women's eNews, Spain is fed up with the varying sizes that don't fit everyone's body types. The Spanish government measured more than 10,000 women to create realistic sizes and body types to give women a more realistic set of sizes. Although Spain isn't forcing stores, to conform to the new size standards, it gives women guidelines they can stick to. While it can be thrilling to drop a size or two in one store, it's also frustrating when you go to the next and go up two. I've often become frustrated when my size varies from store to store. As someone that's not hugely into shopping anyway, it often seems like a huge waste of time. The hope in Spain is that by coming out with a new set of standards, they'll help women feel good about the the body type that they are, not the size that they fit into.
Dove, the international skin, hair, and face product company, has garnered attention for their "Campaign for Real Beauty," which features billboards and short videos that aim to improve the self-esteem of girls and women. Read More »
Broadsheet links to a story in the Sidney Morning Harold about a push in Australia to outlaw underage models. If anyone's opened up a magazine or catalog lately, I think they'd be smart enough to figure out that the average age of these girls is about 14 or 15. That's mainly because the fashion industry likes to photograph the shit out of these girls before pesky puberty -- and therefore weight gain -- kicks in.
I think the conclusion we should draw from this news article is that not only do images of these sexualized teens and pre-teens make young women and girls feel bad about themselves, these kinds of photographs are bad for the actual models.
I should start this post by saying that yes, I'm 23, and yes, I still use Facebook regularly -- draw whatever conclusions you may about my maturity and level of emotional development. As Facebook users are well aware, the site recently started allowing its members to install user-created apps that add new functions to the site. For instance, the Graffiti app (created by a fellow Newton North High School alum and some of his friends) lets you post drawings on your friends' profiles. It's all good, clean fun, and without Graffiti I never could have created a drawing of numerous stick figures saying "WE HATE DAN!" while off to the left a stick figure labeled "DAN" cries, and then posted it on my friend Dan's profile. God bless the Internet. Read More »
Several young male journalists I know are rather taken with this Jon Zobenica essay in The Atlantic, which lodges three main arguments in defense of Playboy: first, that it's much more culturally sophisticated than newer laddie mags like FHM and Maxim (Hef loves jazz! And Neitzche! And in later years, reality television!); second, that at the height of Playboy's prestige in the 1950s and 60s, it was actually more progressive on gender issues than coastal intellectual movements like Gay Talese and George Plimpton's new journalism (Plimpton's ex-wife thought he was a misogynist, while Hef's likes to go on TV and talk about how swinging he was); and third, that Playboy is relatively feminist because its "Advisor" column told male letter-writers to learn to pleasure women sexually and commit to them romantically.
The essay is entertaining reading, but I think it's obvious why it's especially appealing to sensitive young men. Zobenica makes them feel like it's not only okay to read Playboy, but that it's mature and heck, even feminist. Fundamentally, this is just a rehashing of the infamous male excuse--"Hey, I was reading it for the articles!" I'm not an anti-porn feminist by any stretch of the imagination. But when I pick up Playboy, it's hard for me to take seriously the "Advisor" column's advice about sexually respecting your real-life girl when the centerfolds, month after month, have obviously fake gigantic boobs, identically hairless and child-like vaginas (Playboy seems to have a policy to never show women with visible vaginal lips), and completely flat stomachs. Women get upset by this because 99 percent of us can't live up to this standard and are bothered by the idea that the men in our lives find it attractive. And many of us, myself included, don't even find these women beautiful.
So I think that when talking about Playboy, it's always pretty disingenuous to overlook the pictures. Because really, when reading the magazine, nobody ever does.
Please remember that Campus Progress' terms of use do not allow promoting or endorsing any particular political party or candidate for office. Posts or comments that do this will be deleted.
Posts
!
