I came across a very interesting article on women’s bodies and body images in Fitness magazine, of all places (the home of remarkably skinny women in tiny little shorts). The article, though, is really cool — it’s called “Body Confidence 2.0,” and as you might guess from the title, it talks about all the real women who post pictures of their honest-to-God bodies to photo accounts like Flickr and post about their non-airbrushed beauty in blogs.
In a society that is bombarded every day with highly altered images of women (have you seen that very odd picture of Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover of Vogue, where her head is too far in front of her body? WTF? Did they do that on purpose?), this movement is heartening. It’s actual human women fighting back against the tyranny of unachievable perfection that is only gained through the knife or the airbrush.
Everyone has seen that split-screen photo of a model with the “before” side showing all her wrinkles and uneven skin tone, and the “after” showing her as a dewy youthful goddess. So intellectually we know that pictures can and are altered. But being bombarded day in and day out with only “after” photos of perfection is hard. It warps your expectations of what you should look like. It makes you ashamed that you have never approached that perfection.
The article mentioned a site called BlogHer.com, and I’ve already bookmarked it. Any woman who blogs can sign up there to have her blog included in the feed. When I actually have free time (AKA after this semester is over), I can see myself doing a lot of reading here. Funny? Observant? Trenchant? Profound? Yes.
There is a site called TheShapeofaMother.com, where women who have had children upload photos of their post-pregnancy bodies. Contrast that to all the lies we are spoonfed when your garden-variety Hollywood star has a baby and magically loses more weight than she gained for the baby and tightens up, but of course (err, C-section and tummy tuck, mebbe?).
These sites are a welcome antidote to the two “women’s” sites I wrote about earlier, Wowowow and Yahoo’s Shine, which are such disappointments. BlogHer and ShapeofaMother are amazing.
