Love Your Body NOW
2008 Grand Prize Winning Poster by Whitney Calvert
The National Organization for Women (NOW), is running the Love Your Body campaign. Each year, NOW hosts a poster contest that promotes healthy body image and “the grand-prize-winning poster will be used as part of a national campaign to challenge the media’s use of violent, drug-addicted, starved, surgically enhanced images of women and to fight against industries that profit from women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies.” Entries for the 2010 contest are being accepted now and are due by December 1, 2009. Continue reading
Liz Lemon, You Can Have It All!
I’m up for a pretty prestigious honor at my university, where I will be graduating in a few short weeks (gulp!). When I told a friend this news, he was pleased and happy for me. Then, curious, he started asking how I managed to do so well at college. So I answered a few questions, how I work hard and do the best I can–but then he cut me off. “Oh I know how,” he said. “You’ve never had a serious boyfriend in college.”
Tina Fey as Liz Lemon on 30 Rock
Excuse me? Was he actually suggesting that women can never succeed while we’re seriously dating someone? Because, you know, having jobs and internships and hanging out with friends and casually dating — that’s nothing compared to what it would take for a woman to maintain the attention of a boyfriend? Why is it that our society thinks women can’t have it all?
And that’s how I landed on people like Tina Fey.
Susan Boyle’s Got Confidence
These days it often seems like it is a requirement to be good looking to be a good singer. Simon Cowell is known for his harsh words for singing contestants regarding, not just their singing, but their looks too. All of this changed when Susan Boyle came onto Britain’s Got Talent (the UK version of American Idol).
Beat the Beauty Blues
W, Cover April 2009
While I often feel “above” the media’s messages, the truth is that I’m only human. And while knowledge is power, this power doesn’t always grant me immunity to the media’s toxicity.
One of my many personal vices is my unwavering devotion to W magazine, which I’ve read since I was the all-too-young age of twelve. Once the magazine was in our possession, my sister and I would lay it flat on the living room floor and drool over all the colors and patterns until our eyes crossed.
Little did we know that these images would impact the way we viewed our own beauty–indefinitely.
Hooray for Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson
I am so happy that Scarlett Johansson decided to take action against the media’s obsession with unhealthy, ultra skinny bodies!
Scarlett Johansson just wrote a fantastic article called “The Skinny” for The Huffington Post. Her article responds to media coverage that claims she is on a crash diet to lose 14 pounds for her upcoming film Iron Man 2. Scarlett Johansson supports having a healthy body image and in her article writes:
A Brave Step for Mainstream Rap: Webbie’s “Independent”
Webbie's album cover: Savage Life 2
If you have seen popular music videos recently, you know that women are often wearing little clothing and dancing provocatively around men. The lyrics to these songs can be just as oversexualized, if not more so. Although there is no shortage of music featuring women in these second-class roles, there is a brave new popular rap song and video that goes in a new direction.
Continue reading
Allow Elizabeth Arden to Point Out Your Flaws
Vogue April 2009 Prevage Ad
It’s not enough that in advertising most photos are endlessly retouched, often beyond recognition. But to have the chutzpah to use a mannequin in place of a real woman as part of the ad is ridiculous and insulting! Well, that’s Prevage, the new product from Elizabeth Arden
The obvious dividing lines around the major limbs of the body (for easy detachment and renewal, perhaps) are what caught my eye in the ad in the April 2009 issue of Vogue. Of course, such lines are never found on a real woman, but only on a mannequin.
Do you want to win America’s Next Top Model or the Nobel Prize?
Whitney, An America's Next Top Model Winner
It’s absolutely appalling that 25% of young women questioned in an Oxygen TV poll reported that they would rather be awarded first prize on America’s Next Top Model than be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize! A total of 50% said they would happily marry an ugly man if he was rich!
I thought this was incredible too, speaking to female competition: “More that 25 percent said they’d make their best friend fat for life if it meant they could be thin.”
What is going on with our female population? Is anyone paying attention? Where are our priorities? Continue reading
The Benefit of Laughter
Benefit Cosmetics Storefront, Fillmore Street, San Francisco
I wore a beautiful smile all afternoon on Friday thanks to Benefit Cosmetics, and I didn’t even get a makeover! I was swiftly walking down Fillmore Street in San Francisco in search of food when I noticed a storefront window that read, “Laughter is the best cosmetic… so grin and wear it.” Continue reading
“… so we went ahead and pieced together a new girl.”
"(Lucky magazine) preferred her over this model, so we went ahead and pieced together a new girl." (click image to watch the video on NYTimes.com)
Jesse Epstein, the filmmaker who made the terrific short documentary “Wet Dreams and False Images,” is back with a video op-ed on the NYTimes.com. In it, she asks whether American magazine editors should be required by law to disclose how much they have retouched images in their magazines. Well, should they? Continue reading