Crystal Renn is a model who wrote a book about how the industry damaged her through twisting her body image, leading her into eating disorders and unhealthy dieting to maintain a body weight more appropriate to a refugee than an example of feminine beauty. She managed to cast off her chains and eat something.
She became a full sized woman, very curvy, perhaps even well described as zaftig, yet very beautiful and graceful. And she still got work. She had managed to get away from the idea that what we looklike, what we are shaped like is a determiner of our worth, and can be dictated to us wordlessly by the images those with money and power in the apparel industry choose to present. She broke away, it seemed, from the related industries of weight loss, diet, faddish exercise programs. I was proud of her, for she seemed like a young woman who had managed to free her mind and body from the Mordor like servitude that the fashion and entertainment industry attempts to shackle women.
So imagine my disappointment when I read the news sights this morning. They were full of breathless anticipation of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition--the best selling issue of each year, and sure proof that guys like girls better than they like sports--with pictures plastered up where I had hoped to find some tidbits of real news. Some of those pictures were of Miss Renn.
Except she is all dieted down, her curves and individual, unique beauty gone, replaced by "tit model, generic, one each (brunette, token)". It seems the industry, the anti-woman objectification of an ideal based in the build of young teens and our cultures latent descent into both immaturity and ephebophilia has won again. I can't help but wonder if she has done herself any physical harm in the dieting process she used to get the approved shape for the magazine. I do not wonder at what sort of psychological harm she has done, because in the absence of a threat to health, the motive to change ones shape to match an unreal ideal is based always in some sort of self disapproval, often, I have seen in self loathing.
So young women--all women--have lost a role model that says you don't have to look like like the women in the ads for Vicky's to be beautiful . And to that extent, my grand daughters are impoverished, and their ability to choose for themselves is restricted.
America, especially American Media, hate women. Sometimes it even hates them to death.
She became a full sized woman, very curvy, perhaps even well described as zaftig, yet very beautiful and graceful. And she still got work. She had managed to get away from the idea that what we looklike, what we are shaped like is a determiner of our worth, and can be dictated to us wordlessly by the images those with money and power in the apparel industry choose to present. She broke away, it seemed, from the related industries of weight loss, diet, faddish exercise programs. I was proud of her, for she seemed like a young woman who had managed to free her mind and body from the Mordor like servitude that the fashion and entertainment industry attempts to shackle women.
So imagine my disappointment when I read the news sights this morning. They were full of breathless anticipation of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition--the best selling issue of each year, and sure proof that guys like girls better than they like sports--with pictures plastered up where I had hoped to find some tidbits of real news. Some of those pictures were of Miss Renn.
Except she is all dieted down, her curves and individual, unique beauty gone, replaced by "tit model, generic, one each (brunette, token)". It seems the industry, the anti-woman objectification of an ideal based in the build of young teens and our cultures latent descent into both immaturity and ephebophilia has won again. I can't help but wonder if she has done herself any physical harm in the dieting process she used to get the approved shape for the magazine. I do not wonder at what sort of psychological harm she has done, because in the absence of a threat to health, the motive to change ones shape to match an unreal ideal is based always in some sort of self disapproval, often, I have seen in self loathing.
So young women--all women--have lost a role model that says you don't have to look like like the women in the ads for Vicky's to be beautiful . And to that extent, my grand daughters are impoverished, and their ability to choose for themselves is restricted.
America, especially American Media, hate women. Sometimes it even hates them to death.
1 comment:
Zaftig iz sheyn!!
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