Who’s healthier: women who stay thin at all costs, even if it means crash dieting or working out obsessively, or women who eat a balanced diet and work out but still have a belly? You know, women like the ones pictured above, who were featured in this month’s Glamour magazine.
I’m gonna go with the second group of women, but apparently some people disagree.
Let me explain. In its September issue, Glamour grabbed a lot of attention for publishing a photo of plus-size model Lizzie Miller practically naked in a story about body confidence. I loved it, and so did a lot of other women.
But there were also critics, who said the magazine was adding to the country’s problem with obesity. In a follow up story in Glamour’s November issue, Genevieve Field quoted a reader named Angie as an example: “Putting a young model who is obviously overweight and living an unhealthy lifestyle in your magazine to make some people feel better only serves to propagate that unhealthy lifestyle. Shame on Glamour for thinking this was sexy!” Read the rest of this entry »
Judging from a nude photo found in the possessions of the late Andy Warhol, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wasn’t nearly as formal as her public persona. The image shows JFK’s widow skinny dipping.
People shocked and appalled by the length of Michelle Obama’s shorts are yanking their kids out of public schools as we speak.
According to the Associated Press, Jackie’s post-Camelot husband, Aristotle Onassis, had a paparazzo shoot the photo, and it eventually ended up as a promo for Hustler magazine. The archivists who found Andy’s autographed copy assumed Jackie sent it as a joke. I mean, she has to have had a good sense of humor to have gone along with this plan, right?
To recap: It appears the woman positioned as the anti-Marilyn was actually somewhat of a Marilyn herself. This isn’t really a surprise.
The essential qualities of a Marilyn woman are sex appeal and the confidence to use it. You’ve seen Jackie. She was sexy in a decidedly more delicate, feminine way, but sexy, and with exactly the wispy voice people wanted in their sexpots back then. She was gutsy, too. We saw that when she distanced herself from the life she’d known with JFK after his death, moving her family to New York rather than settling in with the Kennedy family.
My guess is there were several reasons she didn’t flash this side of herself in public. First, she wasn’t raised that way. The Bouviers were old money, the kind of family that raises a daughter to ride horses and study at the Sorbonne in Paris. If they hadn’t been, the Kennedy clan may have rejected her as JFK’s choice for a wife and she probably never would have become the first lady.
Beyond that, Jackie probably compared herself to Marilyn — something we all tend to do when we worry someone, like our husband, prefers another person to us. And there’s nothing like telling yourself the competition more effortlessly oozes sex appeal and fun to make you feel not at all sexy or fun. The times we’re most desperate to project ourselves in a certain way is the time we’re least able to do it, because we’ve psyched ourselves out.
Jackie found this out firsthand when she made her voice especially soft — and a little strange — and forced an awkward smile during the televised tour of the White House she gave to CBS in 1962, just a few months after President Kennedy met Monroe at a party. It could have been she wasn’t used to being on TV, I guess, but I’d bet she thought of how Marilyn looked on screen at some point before the taping.
Who knows? Maybe even the skinny dipping photo was a nod to Marilyn. Just before she died in August 1962, Marilyn famously shot a nude scene in a swimming pool for the unfinished film Something’s Got to Give. Still photos from the shoot have ended up on book covers, posters and more. Maybe Jackie and Ari had a good laugh about how people would react to Jackie doing the same.
The truth, of course, is that as much as the world likes to separate us into a group of Jackies and a group of Marilyns, and as much as we use such categories to measure ourselves, we all have a little of both in us. Jackie was no exception.
As I flipped through this month’s issue of Glamour — I’ve subscribed for years — a photo of a naked woman grabbed my attention. It’s pretty normal for there to be women sans clothes, usually in stories about body image and health.
What was different about this one was that she looked shockingly normal and not at all airbrushed. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
Editor Cindi Leive blogged about receiving messages from lots of women who also loved it. In her post, she wrote that the model in the photo, size 12-14 Lizzie Miller, was thrilled it resonated with readers. (Side note: Am I the only one who adores Leive’s haircut?)
Leive also hinted we can expect more realistic looking women on the magazine’s pages. “Trust me, Glamour’s listening, and this only strengthens our commitment to celebrating all kinds of beauty,” she wrote.
Hmm. Would you be willing to agree to a formal commitment? I’ll extend my subscription for, say, five years in exchange for a guarantee that at least half of the women will look like they’ve indulged in raw chocolate chip cookie dough at least once in their lives. Who’s with me? I’ll go longer, even buying a subscription for my niece who won’t need Glamour for another 15 years, if you promise to use all real-ish women. I say real-ish because Lizzie is so pretty and comfortable with herself she glows. Let’s not pretend the fact her stomach’s not ridiculously flat keeps her from being any less stunning than the other models in the magazine; that only shows how very far we have to go on this issue.
Honestly, Glamour does a better job than any magazine I can think of showing women who are diverse in many ways, including race, body shape, skin tone, and hair color. They have a real opportunity here to position themselves as the magazine that understands real women. I noticed a shift already toward deeper stories about inner happiness and career, and I’m really, really looking forward to the visual aspect catching up.
It’ll be easy to gauge Glamour and other magazines’ progress. We’ll know they’re better reflecting our lives when no one’s compelled to write in about a photo like this; when we can just smile and expect to see more like it when we turn the page.
Find the photo in print on page 194 of the August issue with Jessica Simpson on the cover. If you like Jessica, the Glamour Web site has a photo gallery of her fashion looks over the years.
The new MTV show, 16 and Pregnant, finally gives us an answer to the question of how to teach sex education in schools — tell the truth. Simpy offer accurate information about the consequences of sex, especially unprotected sex.
To me, Beverly Hills, 90210’s Donna Martin got it right in her speech about how you can tell kids to stay out of a pool all you want, but you’d better teach them to swim just in case they don’t listen. (In case you didn’t see it, Donna’s monologue was really about condoms.)
Toss the mostly black cast of VH1’s dating show Real Chance of Love and the all-white (except for a few token members) cast of VH1’s Rock of Love Bus into one show, and you’ve got its latest offering, Charm School with Ricki Lake. It’s the kind of show that makes you wonder “who does that?” several times each week, the kind where you suspect the stars don’t ever think about what they’ll look like to people watching the show. So it was only a matter of time until race became an issue, or at least you can tell that’s what the producers hoped.
You might think it’s Rihanna who’s suffering most after nude photos of her, well, supposedly of her, leaked last week.
Now anyone who wants to see her naked only has to type her name and “nude” into Google, you know, just whenever they feel like it. I feel violated for her.
But no, Rihanna’s not the real victim, and neither are black women or even women in general. (I bet you thought that’s where I was going.)
The real victims are all women out there in an abusive relationship on the verge of getting out of it, smack in the middle of deciding whether they should come forward about what they’re going through. The message they’re getting from Rihanna’s experience, as her every move has been painfully and publicly scrutinized, is clear: the victim becomes the villain in these scenarios.
Posted by raechal 
As I flipped through this month’s issue of Glamour — I’ve subscribed for years — a photo of a naked woman grabbed my attention. It’s pretty normal for there to be women sans clothes, usually in stories about body image and health.