Archive for the 'Body' Category

Men, MILFs, and the Madonna-Whore Complex

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on August 19, 2011
in Body, Marriage, Parenting and Porn
. 2 Comments

Eira and I are home from our trip to Israel (I’ll try to write something about that soon). We’re off to Montana on Sunday, so the summer travels aren’t entirely concluded.

I do have a quick piece up at Good Men Project today: The Real Meaning of MILFs. Excerpt:

Though we had planned to have a home birth, in the end my wife needed a Cesearean in the hospital. (Our daughter was wedged into a breach position, and few obstetricians will support a vaginal breach birth these days.) I was at my wife’s side during the procedure, holding her hand and whispering encouragement, while watching with great interest as the surgeons did their work—blood and viscera galore.

I got to see the amazing moment Heloise was pulled (butt first, of course) from my wife’s body. I was there when our daughter latched on for the first time to Eira’s breast. I was awed and humbled by what I saw. And though I wasn’t turned on by watching the birth and the 15 months of subsequent breastfeeding, witnessing my wife’s transition into motherhood did nothing to reduce my attraction to her. That doesn’t make me unusual or heroic.

Read the whole thing. For an older piece on a similar subject, here’s my 2005 blog post Men, Childbirth, Lust.

Status Updates, Thinspo, Fitspo and bragging about pizza: social media and self-esteem

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Hugo Schwyzer
on August 04, 2011
in Body, Eating disorders and Facebook
. 1 Comment

My Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny looks at the impact of social media on young women’s body image; check out Status Updates and “Thinspo”. Excerpt:

How often do the people you know on Facebook “check in” at the gym? How often do they share how far they ran? Or how they’re doing on their diet, or on their “Insanity” workout plan? When I asked for stories on Facebook, dozens of young people wrote me to share their experiences reading their friends’ food-and-diet updates. Some wrote that seeing other people working out was “inspiring”, while others wrote it was “depressing” or “triggering”. One of my former students wrote “I can’t stand getting on Facebook in the morning and hearing about all the exercise my friends have already done before I’ve even brushed my teeth. It makes me feel like a failure.”

Several wrote of a common phenomenon: the girls who seemed most likely to update about the delicious, fattening foods that they’d eaten or were planning to eat were the girls whose bodies were already close to the idea. “Amber” wrote: “It seems like only skinny and pretty girls get to talk about the burgers and Pizookies they’ve eaten. It’s like they’re showing off that they can pig out and get away with it. They get all these comments that say things like ‘You’re so lucky to be able to eat like that and still look great.’ It’s like they’re fishing for compliments in a weird roundabout way. Amber, who has struggled with bulimia and describes herself as a size 14, remarks, “I’m not angry at the girls who write about food all the time. But it definitely bothers me, as I don’t think I could write about what I’ve eaten and get away with it.”

Others I heard from talked about the way in which positive reinforcement on photos or status updates could be triggering. “Mandy” said that when she lost a lot of weight and put up new, flattering photos, she got a huge outpouring of compliments. “Everytime someone told me how great I looked, it made me more fearful of gaining the weight back. Instead of making me feel good, the compliments pushed me to diet more to make sure I stayed skinny.” Mandy, like most young people, carefully chose flattering photos for Facebook. She got the praise she wanted, but instead of providing reassurance it just pushed her to more unhealthy dieting.

Read the whole thing.

And check out a similar take from Rachel Simmons, author of “Odd Girl Out”.

From Stout to Plus

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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 07, 2011
in Body, Links and Modeling
. 3 Comments

Today’s short post at Healthy is the New Skinny offers a thumbnail sketch of the origins of the plus-size fashion and modeling industries: From Stout to Plus.

Here’s a photo that goes with the story, from the July 1913 issue of McCall’s Magazine. Click to enlarge.

“Let Me Show You What I Like”: Sex, Perfection, Reassurance

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Hugo Schwyzer
on June 29, 2011
in Body, Links, Memories and Sexuality
. 0 Comments

My latest is up at Sir Richard’s Condom Company. Revisiting some of what I wrote about in my old “bowflex boy” posts, the piece talks about body image, making love with the lights on, and how to reassure an insecure lover that you think his (or her) body’s hot.

Mama, you’ll want to give this one a miss.

Excerpt:

I got an email from a woman named Clara*, who has a great new guy in her life. Things are awesome, including in the bedroom – except for one thing. Reggie, Clara’s boyfriend, only wants to get naked when the lights are off. Clara writes:

“It took me until I was 25 or so to get over my own anxieties so that I could be comfortable having sex in daylight. When I was a teen, even in my first serious relationship, I always wanted to keep some clothes on or do it in the darkness. I was so embarrassed about my body, thinking I was too fat and too pale. I thought a guy wouldn’t want me if he could actually see all of me.So I finally get to the place where I can accept my body. And I end up falling for a dude who feels the same way I used to feel. Do other straight men have this problem? How can I help him see that I want to see him?”

The first part of Clara’s question is easy to answer. Statistics show that poor body image is on the rise among young heterosexual men. Our stereotype is that young women and gay men are the ones most likely to be concerned with appearance. While that’s still true, the pressure on all guys to be toned and hard (with, of course, a six-pack) is growing rapidly, thanks to a media that increasingly features images of male perfection.

The insecurity that these images foster does often manifest in the bedroom. A student in my interdisciplinary “Beauty and the Body” course told me last year that he has a hard time believing a woman can be attracted to any body type other than the slender, lightly muscled ideal he sees on the cover of men’s fitness magazines. As a result, he’s scared to be naked with a girlfriend – just like Clara’s Reggie. As with any body image issue, there’s no magic quick fix. Talking about it openly and offering a partner reassurance is important. But as they say, talk is cheap. Putting actions to your words can help, I told Clara. And I shared with her something a friend of mine did to help me with a very similar issue.

Read the whole thing.

Why must models be so tall?

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on June 23, 2011
in Body, Modeling and Perfectly Unperfected
. 1 Comment

The Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny looks at a century-old question: Why Do Models Have to Be So Tall? Excerpt:

The modern modeling industry as we know it goes back just about 100 years. One of the first fashion designers to recognize the power of the model was the great French innovator, Paul Poiret, inventor of the “sheath dress.” In 1913, when he was at the height of his fame, Poiret toured America to showcase his designs. He brought with him five models, each of whom was strikingly tall and very slender. Most Americans had never seen anything like these women.

Poiret preferred tall models because they were easier to see from the back of the room at a fashion show. He also preferred them because their longer bodies allowed him to showcase his work more effectively – there was simply more material to display. Poiret liked his models with broad shoulders, narrow hips and small busts for the same reason; he was the first designer to want the “hanger effect” where the buyer’s eye wouldn’t be distracted by the model’s curves.

While many of us complain that the standard model body is unrealistic and nearly impossible to attain, it’s worth remembering that Poiret had another, surprising motivation for his preference for tall models. Late 19th-century European fashion had been very concealing, but it had also emphasized the bust and the hips. For Poiret, that meant focusing on women as mother figures. Poiret wanted his models to symbolize independence and freedom. And what could be more liberating than a body type that seemed almost masculine: tall, a nearly flat chest, broad shoulders, and narrow hips?

Read the whole thing.

I also ought to recommend a really wonderful source on early 20th century fashion and its relationship to feminism and body image, Nancy Troy’s magisterial Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, now regrettably out of print.

Love Hurts, Beauty Hurts: waxing, pain, and the pursuit of perfection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 16, 2011
in Body, Clothing and Fashion, Hygiene, Perfectly Unperfected, Teens and Vanity
. 36 Comments

My Thursday short column is up at Healthy is the New Skinny: Bare Down There: Waxing, Beauty, and Pain. It’s a brief look at teens and bikini waxing, and the growing popularity of the Brazilian wax among very young girls (including, as the article notes, among those who have not yet hit puberty and begun to grow pubic hair.)

Lots has been written about pubic hair and what its removal means. Count me among those troubled by what seems the almost pedophilic fetishization of hairless vulvas in pornography. (To put it simply, I find it sexually and aesthetically unappealing as well as politically problematic.)

But the larger point is that waxing, like so many other beauty rituals, hurts. (That’s true whatever’s being waxed, whether it’s the pubis or the lip or the space between the eyebrows.) As older sisters and mothers and the media instruct young women about how they should best pursue beauty, they teach girls that pain is not only a rite of passage into womanhood, but a necessary (and continuous) aspect of maintaining femininity.

Pain happens on a spectrum, from the merely itchy (pantyhose) to the permanently body-altering (major cosmetic surgery.) High heels, piercings, and hair dye all exact both a financial and a physical price. “Beauty hurts”, older women say to younger women. And it’s not just beauty, but love that hurts: think of what we expect girls to go through with first intercourse — or with childbirth.

For much of history — and in many other parts of the world — this pain has been and remains mandatory. Girls have their genitals mutilated against their will in Mali and suffer fistulas from giving birth too soon and too young in Afghanistan. There’s nothing quite comparable in America, where we at least claim to give girls and women a choice to avoid these agonies. We don’t cut off little girls’ clitorises, we generally don’t force 15 year-olds into marriages, and we certainly don’t mandate Brazilian waxes for high schoolers.

But as most women and some men know, the cost of saying “no” to pain is very high. If a teen girl wants to feel confident at the beach in her bikini, making sure she’s bare down there (or damn near) is a price she must pay. Young women are raised to fear ridicule and social exclusion far more than physical pain. Watch what most young women do when they trip and fall: they leap back up, more worried about what others have seen than about any injury they’ve sustained.

The law doesn’t mandate you wax your vulva or straighten your hair or put on hose and heels. The state doesn’t force you to give up carbs and dessert to fit into a bikini. But the fact that certain behaviors aren’t genuinely compulsory doesn’t mean that they can’t feel obligatory. And for so many women, the pain that comes with meeting those obligations is less than the social cost of refusing to pursue beauty.

Any solution to this problem of pain has to meet girls where they are. Parents can refuse to let their daughters get waxed or get their ears pierced, but in most cases that only delays the inevitable. The solution, whatever it is, depends on opening up a conversation with our sisters, our daughters, our mothers, our friends and lovers. And in that conversation, we need to look at the ways we consciously and unconsciously valorize physical and emotional pain as the price of beauty and true womanhood.

Weinergate, penis pics, and the longing to be hot

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 07, 2011
in Body, Infidelity, Narcissism and Borderline Personality, Penis, Politics and Sexuality
. 40 Comments

In response to Anthony Weiner’s press conference yesterday in which he admitted using the internet to send semi-nude pictures of himself to young women, Irin Carmon suggests at Jezebel that this latest scandal is — like many others before it — rooted in male narcissism.

All over the Internet, men are photographing their own bodies and sending the shots to women who are maybe not their wives and girlfriends. It’s a risk for most any non-professional, but it’s one that predictably costs male politicians like Anthony Weiner — and the men before him — so much more. So why do they do it?

“Hottttt.” That’s the Facebook comment on a video of Weiner speech that launched Meagan Broussard’s Internet flirtation with the Congressman, complete with cockshots clothed and maybe less so. “You’re so hot,” was Rielle Hunter’s opening line to John Edwards; eventually, he thought it was a good idea to make a sex tape with her.

In the Venn diagram of narcissism, the overlap of men in political office and men whose sexual narcissism verges on self destruction is increasingly visible. If you want to blame the Internet for anything, blame it for manifesting — and giving an outlet to — what surely must have always been present: Men (and they are still overwhelmingly men) who not only want your votes but for you to adore their waxed pecs. And they think they can get away with it.

Carmon isn’t entirely off base. But she misses the key point, though it’s one she hints at. “Hot” has such extraordinary power in these men’s lives not because they are all narcissists (though some may meet the clinical definition of that term) but because they so rarely hear the word. Powerful men who risk everything to send pictures of their penises or pecs to strange women aren’t filled with cocky self-regard. They’re filled with a desperate hunger for a very specific kind of validation.

In a piece I wrote for the Good Men Project in March, I suggested:

So many straight men have no experience of being wanted. So many straight men have no experience of sensing a gaze of outright longing. Even many men who are wise in the world and in relationships, who know that their wives or girlfriends love them, do not know what it is to be admired for their bodies and their looks. They may know what it is to be relied upon, they may know what it is to bring another to ecstasy with their touch, but they don’t know what it is to be found not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but worthy of longing.

I’ll bet Anthony Weiner doesn’t doubt his own intellectual or political abilities. Like many men who are good at what they do (and Weiner has been one of the most able members of the Democratic caucus for years), he exudes a confidence that borders on arrogance. I don’t think that’s feigned. But like so many men sliding towards middle age, there’s an unmet hunger for sexual validation. Men like Weiner know women may be attracted to their power or their status, but they want more — they long for validation that their bodies aren’t gross and disgusting. They want to be “hot.” Continue reading ‘Weinergate, penis pics, and the longing to be hot’

SlutWalk and Jack Kevorkian: the symmetry of bodily sovereignty

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on June 03, 2011
in Body and SlutWalk
. 20 Comments

SlutWalk LA is now less than 24 hours away. Though Facebook is notoriously unreliable in this regard, we have more than 4000 RSVPs. (I’m guessing we’ll get half that, but would like to be pleasantly surprised with something much bigger.) The weather appears to be cooperating (some morning clouds likely, then highs in the low 70s with sunshine during our rally and march.) I’ve touched base with the City of West Hollywood again, done a brief radio interview, and done something else I hardly ever do: write out my speech. I tend to wing it in most settings, liking the adrenaline rush of extemporaneity and panic. (Once an addict, always an addict, eh?) But to ensure that I’m brief and to the point, I typed up a three-minute piece. I’ll post it here after the event.

This morning, I saw the news of Jack Kevorkian’s death. Though his penchant for self-promotion and risk-taking seemed at times to do more harm than good to the movement for death with dignity, on the balance I was and am a fan. I honor his passing and his tremendous work to give dying people the best and most peaceful transition possible.

In several obits, including this one in the LA Times, one can find a famous quote from Derek Humphry of the Hemlock Society: “If we are free people at all, then we must be free to choose the manner of our death.” Jack Kevorkian believed in that definition and struggled hard to make it possible. I’m grateful for that.

Thinking of what Humphry said, it strikes me that there’s a parallel with SlutWalk. We’re fighting for the freedom of women to choose the manner of their dress, to choose how they present themselves in public, and to do so in confidence that they will be safe. We’re marching for the right to be sovereign over one’s body, a right to which Jack Kevorkian dedicated his life. We’re marching for sexual justice, which is rooted in the sacred principle of personal autonomy.

In the end, our bodies belong to us and us alone. They do not belong to our spouses or our children, to our parents or our presidents. We can use our bodies to love and serve others, of course. We can give hugs and orgasms, invite others to find refuge and comfort and ecstasy in our embraces. But in the end, our bodies are always ours. Sexual justice is about giving all of us the right to say “yes” to pleasure without shame or fear; it’s also about giving all of us the right to say “no” in the certainty that that no will be respected regardless of who we are, whom we’ve touched, what we’re wearing.

And just as we should always be free to choose who touches us, we should also be free, within the obvious limits imposed by our own human frailty, to choose how and when we give up our bodies to death. Women’s bodies don’t belong to men, whether those men are their husbands or the leering strangers on the streetcorner. That’s a basic principle of SlutWalk. In the same way, our bodies don’t belong to our families or to our communities. When we are terminally ill, there’s no point in dutifully prolonging the body’s pain out of a sense of obligation to those who will grieve our inevitable death.

I am faithful to my wife. I am sexual with her alone. My arms are always open for my daughter. In different ways, they each have a kind of moral and emotional claim on my body, one I honor as best I can. But my body has never ceased to be mine. The fact that I direct all my sexuality towards my wife doesn’t mean my flesh is her property, or hers mine. Our bodies are gifts we share, but never give away.

Many rely on my body, a few love it. But it is mine, and yours is yours. And if our dying is slow and painful, our bodies are ours to relinquish just as they were once ours to delight in.

That principle of bodily sovereignty is clearest around sex and death. For me, at least, there is some parallel between our work in the streets of West Hollywood (and in the streets of many other cities around the world) tomorrow, and the work of the brave, impetuous, exasperating, and lion-hearted Jack Kevorkian.

Strong is Beautiful: a note on the WTA campaign

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 25, 2011
in Body, Modeling, Perfectly Unperfected and Sports
. 8 Comments

A few people have written me about the Women’s Tennis Association Strong is Beautiful campaign. Featuring stylized action images of a variety of current and rising tennis stars, the Strong is Beautiful initiative both reinforces and challenges our stereotypes about women’s bodies.

On the one hand, these are athletes photographed in motion, doing what they do best, often drenched in sweat with faces fixed in concentration. These are powerful women; there isn’t a passive pose to be found. On the other hand, the players chosen are perhaps less than fully representative of the upper echelons of the WTA. The Williams sisters are conspicuous by their absence, and the Strong is Beautiful campaign seems heavy on long-limbed, high cheek-boned Eastern Europeans. (Then again, the Russian invasion of women’s tennis shows no sign of losing steam. This may not be as unrepresentative a group as first appears.)

In a post on Monday, Jeff at Feminist Allies admits to some ambivalence about the ads.

All of (this) could be a small step in the right direction. There is a stereotyped idea of what a beautiful woman should be, and “strong” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind–wouldn’t it be cool if we lived in a world where “strong woman” and “beautiful woman” were more intertwined conceptually? And yet: Why the emphasis on beauty at all?

The answer, of course, is that beauty matters. While culture shapes what it is we find beautiful, the fascination with beauty (in all sexes) is a human universal — there is no civilization that hasn’t valued physical appearance in one way or another. Telling young women not to care about their appearance (and suggesting that if they do, they are either “shallow” or “victims of a misogynistic cultural discourse”) isn’t helpful. Rather, we should be working to expand the spectrum of what is considered beautiful while making sure that beauty, for all its importance, is joined by other equally important priorities in young women’s lives.

Jeff briefly mentions my work with Healthy is the New Skinny and Natural Models LA. (Thanks, Jeff!) He’s right about what we’re trying to do, which is to create a more diverse understanding of beauty. That means producing new images and new sources of inspiration. It means rejecting the suggestion that the search for beauty is invariably a source of misery in women’s lives. The misery, we argue is linked not to the longing to be beautiful itself but to the particularly unattainable ideal that dominates our culture.

Obviously, being a world-class tennis player is also an unattainable ideal. But the glamorizing of strength, the celebration of sweat that has nothing particular to do with sex — that’s tangible progress. These were not images we had a generation ago. And it is an unmistakably good thing that we (and the young women we love) have them now.

“I can’t see you with a fat chick”: shame, homosociality, and desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 04, 2011
in Body, Desire and objectification, Fat Politics, Memories and Sexuality
. 58 Comments

The title is godawful, but this Village Voice article is both interesting and important: Guys Who Like Fat Chicks.

Men who are sexually attracted to heavy women are more numerous than we’re led to believe, Camile Dodero writes, and that has important implications both for our understanding of male sexuality and for our ongoing conversation about weight and desire. The title of the piece, however, frames the attraction to fat women as an unusual fetish, an odd quirk that only a few men share. That’s unfortunate, because the article is more nuanced than that, exploring the ways in which fat has been stigmatized and heavier women have been both exploited and desexualized. The familiar myths (such as fat women’s much-hyped desperation for a relationship) are debunked. And though the article still centers men’s attraction to heavier women rather than women themselves, it’s a useful conversation starter.

In 2006, I wrote a post called Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. So much of men’s focus on thin women, I pointed out, is wrapped up in the desire to gain status in the eyes of other men. One of the most basic tasks for heterosexual men is a simple one: learning to separate what it is that they personally find desirable from their desire to impress others. Our ruthlessly fat-phobic culture doesn’t give fat people “trophy” status, even if (as the article suggests) many men are sexually drawn to heavier women. I wrote five years ago:

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

When I linked to the Village Voice piece on my Facebook yesterday, a friend asked if I had ever dated a “fat chick.” It reminded me that when my 2006 post appeared, one of my colleagues, a very heavy woman with whom I am very close, remarked “I could never see you with a fat girlfriend.”

I wasn’t surprised by the comment. When it comes to relationships, we expect a disconnect between what people say and what they do. Many heavy women do have painful stories of men who were quite happy to fuck them in private but refuse to date them in public. Continue reading ‘“I can’t see you with a fat chick”: shame, homosociality, and desire’

Healthy (role) models

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 21, 2011
in Body, Links and Modeling
. 3 Comments

I have two posts up today at Healthy is the New Skinny. The first deals with the impact of Title IX on women’s body image, and the way in which the opportunity to play sports quickly became the obligation not only to be thin, but “toned” and “defined.” Obviously, as I point out, the problem isn’t with Title IX or athletic opportunities for women; it’s with the culture of perfectionism.

The second post was a rapid response to this infuriating story that ran in the UK media today, reporting on an effort to encourage “size zero” models: Forget chubby, keep it slim!.

With the exception of the last paragraph, I penned the editorial response on behalf of the entire team at Natural Models Los Angeles, Healthy is the New Skinny, and the Perfectly Unperfected Project. The images are of my colleagues and teammates, all of whom are healthy, fit, working models and activists.

An excerpt:

Clinical obesity has medical consequences. But we need to remember that one of the many causes of unhealthy weight gain is low self-esteem of the kind that comes with living in a culture where only the skinniest of women are celebrated as beautiful. The obsession with thinness does colossal damage to girls’ self-esteem. And while some diet compulsively to pursue an unattainable ideal, others respond by developing destructive overeating habits. Food becomes a drug to soothe pain – a pain made worse by the fashion industry’s relentless focus on skeletal models.

Common sense and research tell us that people develop healthy habits when they’re provided with the tools to eat right. While many girls and young women deprive themselves and suffer enormously to imitate the waif look, many more turn away from the fashion industry altogether. Many women find no inspiration in what they see in the magazines because those models don’t look anything like what they themselves see when they look in the mirror.

Dragone and Savorelli either don’t understand or have chosen to ignore the tremendous harm that the fashion industry’s fixation on thinness has done to women around the world. As a result, they’ve given us a false choice between anorexia and reckless overeating. But they’ve missed the real solution.

The solution is simple: promoting health means promoting images of healthy models. It means using models committed to living a balanced lifestyle. It means recognizing that beauty and health happen on a size spectrum between the destructive extremes of emaciation and morbid obesity…

Women are hungry for images of models that are happy and fit as well as beautiful. Give them those images, and we’ll not only change the fashion industry, we’ll change how women see themselves. That’s the transformation that will be the most effective weapon against unhealthy eating — and the misery that causes it.

Real Women Have… Bodies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 07, 2011
in Body and Clothing and Fashion
. 5 Comments

My Thursday post at Healthy is the New Skinny is up: Are You In, Or Are You Out?

Excerpt:

I loved the movie “Real Women Have Curves” that came out a few years ago. Starring America Ferrera of “Ugly Betty”, it was a terrific reminder that beauty and health are found across an entire spectrum, not just at one narrow size. But as much as I liked the movie, I hated the title. The implication was obvious: if “real women have curves”, then women who don’t have curves aren’t “real.” And that’s a very damaging message.

Curvy women are real women. Skinny women are real women. Women who have had boob jobs or lip enhancements or liposuction are still real women. Size 0 may make no sense mathematically, but a woman who wears that size is as real as the one who wears a size 16. What makes us “real” people is not the shape of our flesh but our basic humanity. And we lose our humanity when we judge – not when we lose weight, gain weight, or make the intensely personal decision to undergo cosmetic surgery….

Women who diet are still real women. Women who gain weight are still real women. Women who can barely fill an A cup are “real” women – and women who’ve had breast enlargements are still “real”. If we want to change the way girls feel about their bodies, we need to stop using the divisive language of “real” versus“fake.”

The girls and women you know in your life, whether you envy them or pity them, love them or hate them, are all real. The images in the magazines may be fake, but behind those images are women with real bodies, real hearts, real emotion. And even the most beautiful women can be hurt by cruel words.

For more on the infuriating habit of excluding countless women from the right to be real, see this Cathy Reif piece that ran in the Guardian last month.

Perfectionism, Libido, and Older Men/Younger Women links, plus a conference

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 01, 2011
in Academia, Body, Desire and objectification, Eating disorders, Links and Older Men & Younger Women
. 16 Comments

Different websites have radically different commenting communities. This has been driven home to me in recent months as my pieces have been republished at other places. It’s not that various blogs and magazines have widely divergent rules for commenting; it’s that they often seem to have completely different readers.

For example, my post on the problem of older men sexualizing younger women attracted a storm of male criticism at the Good Men Project. What runs on Tuesday at GMP runs on Thursdays at The Frisky. Though you need to be logged in to read responses at the latter site, the largely female readership at The Frisky offered a starkly different take. Though the responses were more positive, as one might expect, many young women who are in relationships with older men were strongly critical of what they saw as my refusal to differentiate between teens and early twenty-somethings.

Jezebel kindly reprints my post on the Damaging Expectation of Higher Male Desire. It got only a handful of responses here, but about 80 so far (and counting) at their place.

And I’m very grateful to Chloe at Feministing for driving some Friday traffic to yesterday’s post “If I Were Thinner, I’d Have the Right to Expect More”: on perfectionism and the scarcity model.

And I’ll be speaking (and moderating) at the Applied Women’s Studies Conference at Claremont Graduate University tomorrow morning. The panel I’m chairing is on Feminist Masculinities, and I’ll be sharing the dais with some terrific activist men. Here’s a link to the program; come on out today (or tomorrow)!

You’re not vain — or if you are, that needs to be okay

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2011
in Body, Perfectly Unperfected and Vanity
. 5 Comments

My Thursday post is up at Healthy is the New Skinny: You’re Not Vain. Excerpt:

In more than twenty years of teaching and mentoring teens around issues of self-image, I’ve seen that sometimes the biggest battle young people fight isn’t just to love and appreciate their bodies. Often, the biggest battle is to accept that we care so intensely about our appearance in the first place. We imagine, wrongly, that if we were “better” people we wouldn’t be concerned about what we look like. We imagine that we should somehow be magically immune from all the pressure from peers, parents, pop culture, and the fashion industry.

It’s an understatement to say that’s an unrealistic expectation!

Here’s the bottom line: part of loving yourself for who you are is accepting your feelings. And if sometimes you spend more time thinking about your weight and your looks than you do about the starving children in Africa, or about your faith, or about your English homework, that needs to be okay. Feeling guilty for how you feel is part of the problem we’re fighting against.

Yes, we all want to create a world where young people love themselves and love their bodies. We want to create a culture in which young people feel empowered to live out their dreams. We all want teens to be able to spend less time worrying about their bodies and how they look to others. But we’re not going to get there by dismissing the very real, very powerful desires so many of us have to be beautiful, to be desirable, or just to be accepted.

Talking beauty on Hay House Radio

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 07, 2011
in Body and Mass media
. 0 Comments

I’ll be on Hay House Radio today between 9:30-9:55AM PST talking with Michelle Phillips about beauty, perfectionism (and the Perfectly Unperfected Project) and ways we can begin to offer counter-stories about what is desirable to teens of both sexes. Click here and then look for the “listen now” link in the upper right hand corner. If you miss it, the archived show will be up next week.