Tag Archive for "Beauty"

Posts Tagged Beauty

Waist not…

After the photoshopping fiascos from Ralph Lauren and Ann Taylor, I thought we’d seen the worst of overzealous, totally damaging digital alteration. But I guess I was wrong. Thanks to Photoshop Disasters for highlighting this horrendous ad from Proenza Schouler:

And check out this one: Victoria’s Secret, the company that wants you to love your body, aren’t just hypocritical. They’re also apparently really lazy!

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Women, Food, and God

When I was researching my book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, awhile back now, one of the authors that I found most enlightened in her approach to talking about women’s relationship to food, fitness, and success was Geneen Roth. Roth is widely known as the thinker who popularized the idea of “intuitive eating”; just as it sounds, it is the idea that we can be most healthy (body, mind, and spirit) if we reconnect with our organic hungers, investigate when we feel full, what our body really wants to eat versus our emotional subconscious etc.
It freaks people the fuck out, as you might imagine. What, you mean I can eat anything? What will prevent me from eating Oreos for every ...

By Chloe Angyal • 13 years ago

Australian government announces world-first body image initiative

Over the weekend, the Australian government unveiled a new body image initiative, created in partnership with the Butterfly Foundation, an eating disorders awareness and prevention group. The initiative includes a voluntary code of conduct for magazines, designers, retailers and modeling agencies, who will be recognized as “body image friendly” if they adhere to the recommendations of the government’s National Advisory Group on Body Image. Those recommendations include:

“disclosing and avoiding the digital enhancement of images; banning ultra-thin female models or overly muscular male ones, in addition to models under the age of 16 to advertise adult clothes; employing a greater diversity of ethnicities and model body sizes; eschewing editorial and advertising content that promotes negative body image through ...

By Chloe Angyal • 13 years ago

Unapologetic fat people, coming soon to your living room

Huge, a new show about teens at fat camp, and that stars Hairspray‘s Nikki Blonsky, premieres next week on ABC Family. Judging by this interview with Blonsky, and by the promos, this show is going to do its best to break the mold. Seriously, how often do you hear lines like “everyone wants us to hate our bodies. Well, I refuse to” in the mainstream media? How often do you hear a fat person saying, proudly and without remorse, that they have no intention of losing any weight? Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about Huge. In her interview with The Frisky, Blonsky says,

Huge is groundbreaking because it has never been done before. I don’t think ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Guest Post: What It Means to be Seventeen

by Krystie Yandoli, not 17 but way closer to it than anyone else in the Feministing crew
Jamie Keiles is the much talked about 18-year-old high school senior who started the Seventeen Magazine Project. She started blogging as a means of documenting her attempt at spending one month “living according to the gospel of Seventeen Magazine.”
Jamie claims that she doesn’t frequent the teen magazine genre, but prom season prompted her to glance over a few glossies. That’s what sparked her initial project idea, “I was surprised by, bluntly, how stupid most of these magazines were. I wondered if anybody my age actually followed these tips, and what happened if someone actually did follow all of these tips.” ...

By Samhita • 13 years ago

Just When You Thought American Apparel Couldn’t Fail Any Harder…

They manage to. To work at American Apparel you must email a full body shot to some mysterious email address after which you are approved or rejected. Failure.
Via Gawker.

Clearly, that standard leaves a lot of wiggle room. Now, a source tells us that American Apparel has a new hiring policy. For the past several months, they say, job applicants at AA have had their photos taken–photos which are then sent to the email address work@americanapparel.net, where they are “approved” by a nameless person for hiring. The applicant’s resumé is a distant second when it comes to hiring decisions, our source says.
Our source also tells us that a new policy now says that in ...

They manage to. To work at American Apparel you must email a full body shot to some mysterious email address after which you are approved or rejected. Failure.
Via Gawker.

Clearly, that standard ...

By Jessica • 13 years ago

Hooters waitress told to lose weight or lose her job

Hooters waitress Cassie Smith, 20, was told during her employee review that she would have to lose weight within 30 days or risk losing her job. The ever-sensitive corporate bosses offered Smith a free gym membership. Not that I expect a ton of awesomeness from Hooters, but still – gross.

By Jos Truitt • 13 years ago

Lebanese immigrant wins Miss USA, right wingers lose it

I am no fan of the Miss USA competition or its skeevy owner Donald Trump. But I do think it’s significant that Rima Fakih, who is Lebanese, Muslim, and an immigrant, won this year’s competition yesterday. Fakih is likely the first Arab American, Muslim or immigrant to win Miss USA. If nothing else this says something about shifting standards of beauty in a culture dominated by representations of white women as attractive. Fakih shows young Muslim and Lebanese girls that they too can be considered beautiful. Yes, part of a fucked up system of beauty, but this is still a meaningful change.

I’m also pretty excited by Fakih’s answer to a question about birth control:

During the interview portion, Fakih was ...