The Skinny on Fat

Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat

Quoting Erin Matson’s truly beautiful editorial for minnesota.publicradio.org:

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“I remember flipping through fashion magazines disinterestedly as a girl, never realizing the extent to which Photoshop could be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

We have all come to expect that photos of models are airbrushed in advertisements and fashion magazines. It’s a fact—one that’s all too easy to swallow and throw back up.

Recently, Ralph Lauren fired size-four model Filippa Hamilton, allegedly for being too large. This story is an outrage in itself. She is, by the standards of the World Health Organization, underweight.

What made me want to burst into tears was far worse: A dramatically Photoshopped Ralph Lauren ad that surfaced in Japan after she had been fired.

I know all too well that the modeling and fashion industries love to portray women who struggle with eating disorders or have been digitally altered to dangerously unrealistic standards, and they do it with dramatic glamour.

While I was dying of anorexia during my late teens, I was recruited by modeling agencies three times. One of the times I was hospitalized, a fellow patient climbed on stage at the Mall of America to win a modeling contest while on a day pass, her hospital bracelet flopping off her wrist as she waved to an applauding crowd.

Recently, Self magazine ran a “total body confidence” issue and digitally slenderized singer Kelly Clarkson before putting her on the cover, even though she has said that she’s comfortable with herself just the way she is.

Women and girls are watching, and the results aren’t pretty. Eighty-one percent of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat, and an estimated 10 million … CONTINUE READING THIS WONDERFUL ESSAY

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Join the National Organization for Women’s “Love Your Body” campaign

Then…

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Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat, Interviews

Six years ago, Crystal Renn was an unknown size-0 model who moved to New York from Clinton, Mississippi, to make it big. She struggled with her weight for years, however, and finally made the bold decision to switch to plus-size modeling. Now a healthy 165 pounds, she is the highest-paid plus-size model in the world, having graced the covers of American Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and appeared in Dolce & Gabbana ads. The 23-year-old recently talked with TIME Magazine about her new book Hungry, her size-0 modeling days and walking the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier. Here are the highlights:

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Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat

Quoting Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin, writing on their always-engaging Body Impolitic blog:

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“We’ve been thinking about the story of Alex Lange, which was in the news earlier this month . . . [The Rocky Mountain Health Plans insurance company] didn’t change its mind because it thinks it was wrong: it changed its mind because Alex’s dad works in television.”

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*If you’re unfamiliar with the story, here’s a blurb/video that explains the details. And click here to read Laurie and Debbie’s full post.

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Filed under: Regular Contributors, Lynne Murray, Themes, The Skinny on Fat

Quoting regular Irked contributor Lynne Murray, commenting on Laurie Toby Edison’s Body Impolitic blog:

A New Yorker cartoon I liked a lot (and lost so I don’t have the creator’s name) shows a man sitting on the metal table in the paper gown while the doctor looks at his file and says, “I see here you’re 57 years old. We’d like to get that down a bit.”

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Filed under: Irked Audio, Irked Videos, Themes, The Skinny on Fat

Julia Barry is the creator, musician, and director of the experimental advocacy program, “In Her Image:  Producing Womanhood in America.” She works with high schools, colleges, organizations, community centers, and conferences to promote widespread, public media literacy. A “REALLY Hot” awardee in the 2006 REAL Hot 100 list, Barry has been a featured guest at events such as the National Organization for Women’s Love Your Body Day, the Girl Scout National Leadership Institute, and the Alliance for a Media Literate America’s National Media Education Conference. She was also the 2003 recipient of the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry/Women’s Advocacy.

If you like Tori Amos, if you like Sarah McLachlan, if you like Joni Mitchell or Enya or Beth Gibbons or Diana Krall…then you will LOVE Julia Barry.

Her lyrics are substantive. She sings from her soul. She can make a piano shiver-and-then-wail. Her vocals have been described as “simultaneously melancholy and sweet.” Sometimes she’s provocative. Always she’s on key.

Her 2002 debut album, Arrivals, is a “storehouse of good songs,” as they say. It’s a magnificent work of art and a glorious work of heart. In addition to her hectic schedule performing live, Julia has also returned to the studio to begin recording her next CD.

FACT: If Julia Barry’s not on your radar yet, she will be soon.

Listen to the track Song For Us Trying, off Arrivals: Click to continue »

Filed under: Irked Videos, Themes, The Skinny on Fat

Watch a fascinating 20-minute documentary about American photographer Laurie Toby Edison by Kyoto, Japan-based filmmaker John Wells. Edison speaks with Rebecca Jennison about her work in conjunction with the exhibition “Meditations on the Body” at the Osaka National Museum of Art.

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Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat, QuIrked Kids, Irked Videos

Synopsis: GENERATION XXL follows Vincent, Kat, Raya and Greg as they attend a Fit Intervention Program aimed at improving self-esteem and teaching healthy eating. As they confront their pounds and themselves, we learn Click to continue »

Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat, Art Gallery

Love your Body. Hate its industry.

Empowering Art by LA Crompton

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Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat

Please Don’t Count Food Points in Front of the Children

 by LA Crompton

It occurred to me this morning, while absentmindedly eating a discarded bowl of Winnie the Pooh cereal with a child-sized purple plastic spoon, that my eating habits have changed somewhat since becoming a mother. The realization sent me to the cupboard in search of a more respectable breakfast: my own bowl of Pooh cereal with an adult-sized metal teaspoon. While my tastes occasionally run toward the juvenile, I am grateful that deciding what to eat is no longer the super-charged emotional event it once was.

Adolescence marked my initiation into the prison of an eating disorder that morphed into every imaginable form over nearly ten years. I engaged in a war against my body because it began to grow more curves than I deemed attractive. In fact, judging by the fashion magazines I so cherished, my body was growing more curves than the world deemed attractive. And since my adolescent mind could not possibly realize that the world was wrong, and that my body was fine, I began a diet. Click to continue »

Filed under: Themes, The Skinny on Fat, Art Gallery

Women En Large & Familiar Men

Body Image Photography by Laurie Toby Edison  

Says Laurie: Women En Large is my statement on the female nude, at least for now, and Familiar Men is my statement on the male nude. The five years I spent photographing men and talking with them transformed my vision of masculinity in this time and place, as well as how I perceive the body in my work.

“I show the disappeared, I make the invisible visible.”

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