Blog: Hoyden-About-Town
Author: TigTog
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There’s been a moderate amount of eyerolling ennui in the feminist blogosphere over yet another magazine cover with supposedly edgy cheesecake shots of nude starlets. Annie Leibowitz took some shots supposedly inspired by Hollywood glamour for Vanity Fair as directed by the designer Tom Ford, and surprise, surprise the shots of the nude teenagers got the cover (Dakota Fanning inside the mag is thankfully reported as fully clothed in her homage to Chanel’s Hollywood). In purely business terms I applaud Vanity Fair’s marketing savvy, I just wish those downplaying the cynical pandering to the male gaze could distinguish weary disgust from genuine outrage, let alone actual feminist concerns.
Lance Mannion, generally one of my favourite reads, posted a long post where it seems he just doesn’t get it (’cos actors have much harder challenges to face in their profession than nudity, like playing murderers, what’s the big deal?). Lance defends the charge that female actors are so much more imposed upon than men with the argument that now that the use of curvaceous body doubles is so widespread due to actual talented actors being skin-and-bones, that female actors are no longer imposed on so much regarding film nudity now (!).
While Lance acknowledges the pernicious pressure regarding Hollywood thinness, he presents the servant class of body doubles as if it is a genuine solution for to the film nudity pressures for women but much less so for men. I posted a brief primer on radfem sex class theory regarding the gender imbalance in marketed skin and why it’s disturbing, but due to length limits never even got around to addressing the idea that body doubles for bashful underweight actresses aren’t a solution, they’re an egregious exacerbation of the problem.
Lance mailed me back with a response that he attempted a reply in the comments thread, but found it getting too long and involved so now intends to work an answer up into a full post, which I’m greatly looking forward to as he is a genuinely thoughtful writer.
Please don’t dump a whole load of radfem disdain on his comments threads - he has his own community there that it would be rude to blatantly disrupt.
49 Responses to “Modesty? That’s what body doubles are for!”
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Cuz, you know, those body doubles aren’t really WOMEN.
FWIW, Scarlett Johannson is 22 and Keira Knightley is 21. At least according to IMDB. Tom Ford is 43. And clothed.
Hey, my commenters are grown ups. They can take it.
And body doubles are not a servant class as far as I know. Unless you consider stunt doubles a servant class too.
And nope, I don’t get it. I don’t get how decisions made by grown ups regarding their own careers and bodies is a bad thing. I do get that their being asked to make those decisions usually results in bad or lazy art.
And, yep, I’m still working on my response, now that the SI Swimsuit edition is out, which depresses me terribly, because it is nothing but pornography in the service of advertising.
PS.
I think you should have linked to both my posts on the subject . Here’s the link to Part 2: More naked actresses—because February is sweeps month.
So….
Anorexia = Liberation?
Another “ya can’t win for losin’” thing, no?
We are dealing with a sequence here.
Vanity Fair first whores itself out to celebrities.
Vanity Fair then celebrated celebrity whores (Miss Hilton).
Vanity Fair is now doing its best to whore celebrities.
Why is anybody surprised at this? It is a perniciously vile magazine, a utterly polished piece of the media’s prostitution to, by and for celebrity “news”. The knock is not that these actresses posed nude. It’s that they were even involved with VF in the first place; it’s like voluntarily sitting next to your scummy, drooling, semi-pedo next door neighbour and then being shocked, shocked! when he grabs your thigh.
Lookie! Lookie!
Lance resurrected those now famous straw feminists just so he could knock ‘em down!
“What there is is the unfortunate habit some feminists have of treating women who do things they themselves don’t approve of—taking jobs as strippers, marrying men and bearing their children, voting Republican, being born beautiful and talented enough that glossies with huge circulations want them to pose for their covers and European nations addicted to wine and cheese and having a reputation for producing the most beautiful women in the world decide to honor them as if they are one of their own—as hapless victims and mindless accomplices in their own oppression and exploitation.”
I guess because he qualifies these beautiful actress/mommy hatin’ and stripper hatin’ (GOD FORBID!) women as “some” feminists, we should relax in the notion that the “some” feminists he writes about are not us.
Or maybe that’s just his way of covering his own lying ass. You decide!
Anyone remember all the snickering about Kevin Costner having a “stunt butt” in some movie he was in ? Why do feminists get called “man haters” when the mass media treats any glimpse of the naked male as a huge joke ? It’s not like we run the media, with a few token studio heads being the exception…
It’s the same old, same old, of “Victorian chivalry.” The objectifying Gaze is only for men to employ against the female body. Decent women are deserving of respect, trash women - aren’t. Women are irreversibly contaminated by the hint of sex, as much as in the 1890s, although men aren’t by any amount of unchastity. So we keep the madonnas pure by sacrificing the whores to the male needs for sex and titillation. And we should be grateful that there *are* trash women who can be sacrificed to keep the upper-crust femmes from having to yield to that contaminating male “need.”
Yeah, really liberal of Lance. Privilege is blind, be it race, class, or gender.
Which is worse: “Stars are expected to be super-underfed so they will look good in clothing, to the point they don’t look good naked, so we hire body doubles for them. And it’s all good.”
Or: “Women with lovely bodies go to Hollywood hoping to become one of those big name stars, but in spite of having been in loads of school plays, memorizing lines quickly, and keeping fit, they can’t get taken seriously as an actress and resort to being a body double to supplement their waitressing incomes. They are treated as dirt in a city that worships fame. And it’s all good, because, it’s their choice to do it, after being fed a steady diet of celebrity glorification all their lives.”
One way of looking at it is kind of disgusting because of unrealistic standards, but then the second way of looking at it show one of the results of the unrealistic standards– and classism, too.
The most offensive thing about that cover is Keira Keightly’s concentration-camp- survivor dimensions. Am I the only one saying, “…but…that’s not even attractive!”
“am I the only one …”
No. These women who look as if their bones would snap if you gave them a hug (see also Desperate Housewives) make me shudder.
Indeed, Samantha - it’s Reacher Gilt’s world we live in, and his spirit of “Liberty” which animates all the comfy bourgeoisie who don’t [think they will] ever have to worry about being between the devil and the deep blue sea themselves.
Not so long ago someone posted on a liberal blog (I don’t recall which, it could have been any of the big ones) as to how increased poverty would be a good thing, since it would make more women take up stripping, increasing the pool of beautiful strippers, and they’d make money, so it would be a triumph for the Free Market *and* an aesthetic one for America.
The extent to which we XX’s have accepted ourselves as Other than human is something we are barely prepared to face up to, even yet. Just look at Amanda worrying that we might be too “mean” and rude and piss-off the poor male blogger who doesn’t even see us as people, if we go all rad-fem on his ass…
Sorry, I see that wasn’t Amanda’s words, it was guest-blogger Tig-Tog of Hoyden-About-Town. But the point still stands - be rad-fem, only not *too* rad-fem, not so rad-fem that the boys won’t like us!
So let me get the straight: in order to look (to some subset of male gazes) as if they would look good naked, young actresses end up taking measures that make them not really look good naked (to some larger subset of male or female gaze), and as a result a market is created for women who do look good naked (to someone, we’re not exactly sure who) to make people think they’re seeing the young actresses’ naked bodies when they’re not. And some loon somewhere is touting this as a victory for the modesty of the young actresses, who have just been told that, regardless of their talent or how good they look clothed, their naked bodies aren’t fit to be shown to the public.
And meanwhile we get to see parts of — but only parts of — the bodies of middle-aged and older male actors warts and all, and ditto for younger male actors, except that piles of exercise and steroids and unnatural selection get used to make sure the parts we see meet someone’s standard of acceptable buffness. And that’s a victory for gosh knows who.
Didja ever notice how Errol Flynn looks kinda doughy?
Bellatrys, I’ve known TigTog for some time online, in a variety of venues, and for what it’s worth asking people to soft-pedal their radical feminism so as not to offend men isn’t generally her schtick, to put it mildly.
Of course, this is being said by me, and I have a Y chromosome in every single one of my brain cells, so whatever amount of grains of salt with which you choose to take my comment is fine by me.
Bugger, Bellatrys. I mailed Amanda a version of this where I’d edited that last line out entirely because I realised I was being weak. I do like Lance’s writing a lot, but when he fucks up this badly with the sexism go kick his luvvie arse.
My revised article was a lot longer, addressed Lance’s second post on this and contained much tastier snark. I’ll put it up in full at my blog. (Whee, blogwhoring on a blogwhore post!)
Although I’m highly embarassed by that last paragraph up there now, and really wish none of you had ever seen it, I’m curious as to my own impulse to put that in there in the first place. Bellatrys is obviously right to mock the “don’t be so radfem that the boys won’t like us” aspect of it.
I’ve been married for 15 years nearly, and while my husband is one of the good guys in terms of being a nice bloke who genuinely likes and respects women and feels that they should be valued by society as men’s equals, his feminism is rather like the theology of the unchurched Christian - professed and believed but not particularly well-informed let alone deeply examined. So I tend to snipe at the Patriarchy in short bursts rather than launch into full feminist critique mode simply just so he doesn’t get too startled all at once. But I want him to get more attuned so he can do as much to raise our daughter feminist as I am doing.
My own feminism is not so well informed as it could be, as I’ve only read a handful of the feminist classics, which is more than enough to get the outrage stirring but not quite enough to get a proper philosophical grounding methinks. I learn a lot from the web but it’s scattered rather than structured. I’m slowly introducing concepts such as the Male Gaze and the Sex Class to my husband, but it’s hardly the best pedagogical situation to be barely more familiar with the concepts than the student.
So have any of you successfully led a feminist-friendly chap further along the path to fully fledged male feminism? How about you male feminists out there - what points/books/events did you find most influenced you toward your current position?
Isn’t having body doubles just more of the same hiring a maid when the hubbie won’t do the work? I mean, you hear the same excuses—”She’s just more neat than I am, I don’t care.” If a guy won’t do his share of the housework, the woman has to hire a maid. If a woman gets so bony she stops being sexy, hire another woman to avoid dealing with the whole sexist system.
Open question for both genders:
Amongst your immediate circle of family friends and acquaintances, how many men are or profess to be attracted to the stick figure look? Let’s have an anecdotal look at just how widespread - or not - this fixation is. Straw poll time, pandagonians.
tigtog, questioning ourselves is always process, never attained! It doesn’t happen *so* often any more, but I still find myself hitting a pothole of assumption or privilege or unquestioned bit of Status Quo and going whoa, I didn’t even realize that XYZ. But the whole problem of pseudo-or-quasi feminist liberal males, and the matching problem of homophobic liberals, or worse yet, people apathetic to the problems of anyone but straight white males who call themselves liberals nonetheless (for whatever reason!) is one of the biggest.
It came up a lot last year/year before, and revealed some thinly-plastered over schisms and assumptions (that because guys said they were liberals, this automatically meant they *didn’t* think women should be chaste little doormats) most notably at Daily Kos, but all over the place (Kevin D[r]um[b] offending more than once) and a *lot* of anger at us uppity women who wouldn’t just go away and pretend everything was fine and laugh “with” the guys when they called the bad guys “cunts” and “pussies” with no “balls” - and even angrier at us for pointing out how little difference there was between them and the bad guys when it came to gender equality. I personally was not exactly shocked, because being raised a conservative I’d always been led to believe that *all* men were inherently, incorrigibly sexist, this was The Way Nature Intended, and any liberal men claiming to be feminist were simply lying to get into our pants. So the “shut up and get to the back of the bus, you feminazis & fags” talk coming from Democrats was not as disillusioning to me as to some.
But the extent to which we internalize patriarchalism is second only to the amount to which most of us have internalized at least *some* amount of jingoism - frex, last month or so Amanda was talking about how it was just easier to go along with the gender divides in her own family, where the women cook and clean and the men loaf about watching tv and snicker over getting out of the housework.
I’m single, having resolved a very long time ago that I would never be a slave, legal or otherwise, so I’m afraid I can’t offer any practical advice on how to make a man be less than sexist. I only know/have known a tiny handful in real life, and one of them I had a hand in the raising of from childhood. But pointing out and calling out the idiocy of sexist stereotypes when they present themselves, rather than genteelly looking away from them, helps. Also presenting the opposite case: what if? all men went in fear of being raped by strangers physically larger or more muscular than them? What if? you started talking, and nobody paid any attention to you, but only the woman you’re with? What if you went to get a car loan, and they wouldn’t talk to you without your wife or mother present? What if you walked into the office, and everyone felt free to comment on how unsexy you looked, and how you ought to wear tighter shirts and do your hair differently? What if you were insulted that way, and felt you had to “grin & bear it”, eating shit with a smile, every day…?
The problem is, most guys - even Deaniacs! - don’t want to hear it. Because if they were to appreciate how bad it was for us, then they’d have to *do* something about it.
Amongst your immediate circle of family friends and acquaintances, how many men are or profess to be attracted to the stick figure look?
I’ve yet to meet a guy who was attracted to women likely to fly away in a stiff breeze, myself.
no, seeker, I don’t think we need to be discussing attractiveness of random female bodies on a feminist blog. Some people are naturally slim, some aren’t; it’s starving oneself to achieve a goal a body isn’t meant for that’s scary. Not the fact that some people (men and women) are very, very small.
Nor does it matter how many men are attracted to which body type. That’s just more objectification.
Some people are naturally slim, some aren’t; it’s starving oneself to achieve a goal a body isn’t meant for that’s scary.
Which is what Seeker is talking about. Nobody ‘naturally’ looks like Callista Flockheart or Twiggy or Kiera Knightley or Courteney Cox; you have to starve yourself to make your body look like that, and these women are starving themselves because the Patriarchy is telling them that this is what is attractive. It’s a perfectly valid point to raise in rebuttal, then, the fact that guys don’t, generally, think that heroin chic is a great look, and that most men would, really, prefer a woman who is healthy, even if her thighs jiggle and she can’t fit into a negative dress size.
Actually, flyinfur, I was approaching it from the Emperor’s New Clothes angle.
Garnet: spot on. I don’t know of anybody who buys into this, but given that my own life experiences are generally out of whack with everybody else’s I simply stated my bafflement and wondered if it was general.
Garnet: How do we examine the notion that the Patriarchy is telling them to be this way? By realizing that the patriarchy can be said to have two distinct Wings: sexual domination and financial domination. The latter doesn’t govern this situation if “guys don’t, generally, think that heroin chic is a great look, and that most men would, really, prefer a woman who is healthy”: the patriarchy is selling something that the guys don’t want. Which is where the money wing comes in: they are selling such a peverse and unrealistic expectation that the cash flows in as people desperately try to adapt.
Seeker, no one in mine. Not even the most sexist males. They still sometimes nag about women’s weight, but they want 50s-curvy, zaftig, not Twiggy.
The current media glorification of stick-thin models is part of the whole consumerism/classism package.
It costs a lot of time, effort and money to stay as thin as a starlet, and looking like a starlet has always been the goal of the trophy sexbot. Men who buy into the consumerist dress-for-success mantra view the trophy sexbot as just one of the accessories along with the German sports car and the designer condo. If the woman one parades around is not up to current sexstickbot standards, she just “ruins the whole look”.
The corporate arm of the patriarchy has had astonishing success using self-loathing to market Stuff to women, and just as we started to see through it and believe the men who were telling us we were fine as we were, they switched to brainwashing young men that sexstickbots were the ultimate woman, and by the way if you want one dude you could stand to look better yourself, so you better buy some DudeStuff.
So the wannaberich guys look around for a woman who shows evidence of spending her resources on completing the corporate success package, and that’s the lollipop-women. I’m not sure how many of these guys let sexual attraction even enter their picture of the wife they want to have beside them as they climb the greasy pole, as I’m sure they all intend to have as many pole-dancing hookers on the side as they can. Just so long as wifey looks immaculate in Versace at the CEO’s cocktail party they’re happy.
Those who don’t buy into the anorexic adulation? We’re automatically relegated to the lower class of non-high-flyers, because we’re obviously just not willing to put in the effort. The fact that the majority of non-starving workers are actually more healthy and likely to do more productive work than the glamourously starving group higher up the ladder is just how they want it to be as well.
Point one:
“Nor does it matter how many men are attracted to which body type. That’s just more objectification.” - flyinfur
Nor does it matter how many women are attracted to which body type. That’s just more objectification.
Nor does it matter how many consumers are attraced to which car body type. That’s just more objectification.
Point two:
actually, I know many women who have preferred body types in men. And I myself have preferred body types.
What a surprise that people have preferences. And what a surprise that people who are selling something try to pander to what they believe are the preferences of the largest segment of their audience.
When women stop sighing over men like Sean Connery when he was in his sixties, when they go “ooh, that’s awful” Hollywood won’t use them as leading men. In the meantime, you get what many women want and are willing to pay for.
Now go out and objectify a man. Odds are he won’t mind.
Modesty? That’s what body doubles are for!…
This is the post that was meant to go up at Pandagon, although obviously Amanda didn’t get my revision in time so the crappy first draft went up instead. Fuckfuckittyfuck.
[..]
although surely LanceÂ’s argument about body doubles on film could be …
Amongst your immediate circle of family friends and acquaintances, how many men are or profess to be attracted to the stick figure look? Let’s have an anecdotal look at just how widespread - or not - this fixation is. Straw poll time, pandagonians.
I find that photos of stick-figure models a la Cosmopolitan can be attractive at first glance but not on closer examination, and I don’t find women with those proportions attractive in person. The same thing goes for the silicone-injected look, come to think.
During an art class discussion, the teacher told us that humans aren’t as good at recognizing detail in pictoral representation as they are in reality, so, if we wanted to call attention to a detail of a model, we needed to “subtly exaggerate” the detail in question so that the viewer would see in the picture what we saw in person.
If that’s true (it may well not be; despite my best efforts I was terrible in art class), that may explain the media appeal of these extreme looks. The emaciated look calls attention to certain details — eyes, cheekbones, calves — that can look good as discrete elements of a picture. It’s not until you take a step back that you realize the overall effect is freakish.
Nobody ‘naturally’ looks like Callista Flockheart or Twiggy or Kiera Knightley or Courteney Cox
Excuse me? *I* do (I’m that skinny, that is). I’m so sorry I’m not bodacious enough, but my metabolism is what it is.
Yes, women who are “anorexic” and “too skinny” get shit too, although not as much as “fat” women do (and yes, I’m aware of thin privilege — I’m not whining here).
You can’t win, really.
I’m also curious as to whether commenters who’ve called thin women “emaciated,” “anorexic,” unwanted, “perverse,” “starving,” “unhealthy,” and “freakish” would say equivalent things so quickly about overweight women (I say this here because this is a liberal blog and most likely the answer is “no”). I realize that could be read as a resentful whine, so let me make it clear that I just want people to think about what they’re saying. Of course it’s fine to find attractive the people you find attractive, but try to consider people who can’t help what they look like (women purposefully starving themselves is another issue, but accurately diagnosing a random woman as starving herself is dicey at best). Let’s not turn this into a looks-bashing thread.
Nobody ‘naturally’ looks like Callista Flockheart or Twiggy or Kiera Knightley or Courteney Cox
What Ann said. In addition, Twiggy naturally looked like that because the UK continued rationing long after WWII, so she didn’t get a whole lot to eat when she was growing up (or so I’ve heard).
There’s a big difference between someone who’s naturally thin and someone who’s unhealthily underweight. I grew up in a city with a large Asian population, and most of the very slim Asian women I know look perfectly healthy with it.
When someone’s underweight as opposed to naturally thin, they tend to have a very prominent collar-bone and very prominent ribs. Also, frequently their hip-bones jut out sharply. So it is possible to look at a photo and make an educated guess as to whether someone is just thin, or whether they’re unhealthily thin. I’ve seen pictures of scantily clad starlets and fashion models whose bodies look exactly like my cousin’s did when she recovering from cancer treatment. She wore a bikini when we went to the beach, and her body didn’t look too different from what one sees in glossy magazines, except she wasn’t wearing make-up.
Ian Welsh: What a surprise that people have preferences. And what a surprise that people who are selling something try to pander to what they believe are the preferences of the largest segment of their audience.
The question being asked is whether the image they are peddling truly is the natural preference of the audience generally, or whether they are attempting to shape that preference to a physicality which for most cannot be easily realised without spending lots of money. Self-loathing, unfortunately, sells.
When women stop sighing over men like Sean Connery when he was in his sixties, when they go “ooh, that’s awful� Hollywood won’t use them as leading men. In the meantime, you get what many women want and are willing to pay for.
There’s nothing wrong with 60-something leading men romancing 45-plus leading ladies. But Hollywood wants us to believe in 60-plus characters routinely romancing 30ish leading ladies, which is bullshit. That sort of crossing the age-gap is rare, not common, except in gold-digging cases, which is not how Hollywood attempts to represent these characters.
Now go out and objectify a man. Odds are he won’t mind.
Asked a beach-boy gigolo in Ghana about that lately?
In one of my jobs I did research studies in metabolism. I saw a very wide range of body types.
Some few people are very, very thin naturally, to the point of looking emaciated. They are *NOT* anorexic.
There are more men than women like this, actually, but no one ever says anything about the men.
People with anorexia have a very definite disorder. But there are people whose body types do look as though they have it, jutting collar bones and all.
No one likes their body type discussed as though it were somehow inferior, and I imagine that there are people of all body types who read this blog.
One of the problems are society has is the very narrow definition of female beauty.
Men’s looks and bodies don’t seem to matter; no one discusses what they wear or whether or not they have muscle definition or beer guts.
We all have body preferences. But unless you are really unusual, you probably don’t/didn’t date only those people who fit your preferences (I know I didn’t). And many people may have preferred blond hair or blue eyes but married someone with black hair or green eyes. It’s the person inside that matters, not the outside.
sorry — *our* society
Anne:
I’m also curious as to whether commenters who’ve called thin women “emaciated,� “anorexic,� unwanted, “perverse,� “starving,� “unhealthy,� and “freakish� would say equivalent things so quickly about overweight women (I say this here because this is a liberal blog and most likely the answer is “no�).
Good question. After some thought, no, I wouldn’t say it as quickly. However, if I were confronted with someone — male or female — as far to one end of the weight distribution chart as Kate Moss (who was the model I had in mind) is to the other, “unwanted” and “unhealthy” and “freakish” would probably come to mind just as quickly. But I wouldn’t say it as quickly, partly because I have no business telling anyone they should weigh less and partly because “fat” seems to be a nastier insult than “skinny,” “bony,” “anorexic” or even “skeletal.”
flyinfur:
Men’s looks and bodies don’t seem to matter; no one discusses what they wear or whether or not they have muscle definition or beer guts.
While it’s true that men’s looks and bodies get less discussion, that doesn’t mean there’s no discussion at all. Trust me on this one. Women I don’t even know have offered “well-meaning” advice beginning “you know, you could be attractive if only…” and ending with a suggestion to spend over a thousand dollars on expensive suits and/or to lose so much weight that, based upon my most recent physical, I’d have to lose every ounce of fat on my body plus ten pounds. Those are the nice ones; I leave to your imagination what the mean-spirited ones say — or what people say to the guys who are really overweight.
cminus, anyone who gives you (or anyone) unsolicited advice about your appearance is rude. I’m sorry that happened to you.
But I wouldn’t say it as quickly, partly because I have no business telling anyone they should weigh less
Wait — are you saying something self-deprecating, like “Hey, I have no room to talk” or are you saying that it IS okay to tell people they should weigh more? After reading your whole comment I think you are saying the former, but at first I thought it was the latter.
and partly because “fat� seems to be a nastier insult than “skinny,� “bony,� “anorexic� or even “skeletal.�
I believe it has more of an impact, yes. But as your comment and flyinfur’s comment demonstrate, insults based on personal appearance are insults, period.
Anne,
as one of the women who called some thin women “starving” and “lollipop women” I apologise to you for not making it clearer that I know some people are naturally skinny and healthy - my niece and nephew are small, sinewy, smart as a whip and energetic as hell.
I’ll make a clear distinction between seeing someone who is thin but “bright-eyed and bushy tailed” with a natural healthy glow like my niece and nephew, and someone who is thin but listless with dull skin, eyes and hair - that’s what I classify as starving. It’s minimised somewhat by being compulsive about adequate hydration, but it’s still there.
Makeup and hair products can give the skin and hair a faux glow, but the dullness in the eyes cannot entirely be disguised, and that’s what gets seen with starving women on red carpets and fashion shows all over the world. My sister often gets drive-by parenting remarks about my niece’s thinness, but no-one who’s seen her scurry to the top of a tree could doubt her excellent state of health. Most of the thin starlets look like they struggle to climb a few stairs.
I’m sorry, Raincitygirl, but that was a pretty ignorant statement you made. Where are you getting your information? Do you have anything to back up your claim?
As someone who eats like a pig and looks like a twig, I am tired of having to justify my body to sexist arseholes. I have a “very prominent collar-bone and very prominent ribs.” My “hip-bones jut out sharply.” So fracking what? My body does not exist to please *you*.
You can go ahead and waste your time making “educated guesses” about which women are naturally thin and which ones aren’t. I, however, have better things to do with my life than obsess over women’s bodies.
But please, continue with the poll. I am soooo interested in knowing how many of you find my body disgusting.
Wait � are you saying something self-deprecating, like “Hey, I have no room to talk� or are you saying that it IS okay to tell people they should weigh more? After reading your whole comment I think you are saying the former, but at first I thought it was the latter.
It is indeed the former.
This makes me think, written by this sexist guy, about how sad it is when young women starve themselves beyond being hot. I forget the title, and the Onion archives are evil.
Has anyone seen pics of what the *Friends* women looked like in their first season vs. what they looked like in their last season ? Is it too much of a stretch to believe that in that case, women are starving themselves ?
alsis39.5, of course some women are starving themselves. I don’t think anyone’s said that no women starve themselves, or if they did, I missed it. I’m not sure what your point is.
None really, Anne. Unless it’s the point that when we’re talking starlets –as opposed to the woman on the street– it’s tough not to obsess when that’s what everyone else is already doing.
Garnet: I’ve yet to meet a guy who was attracted to women likely to fly away in a stiff breeze, myself.
Me! Over here, me, me! When I look at, say, a picture of Guinevere Van Seenus my pulse involuntarily goes faster. of course the same thing happens when I look at a picture of Jean Angelou’s postcard model Fernande.
<grunt>me like pretty gurls!</grunt>
anorexia is serious. some people who are anorexic want to look skinner to feel skinnier while others go for the whole emaciated look for fashion or becuase a serious ED is “in” i think calling ppl lolipop head isnt very nice tho