by Rabbi Marc Wilson
AKA “Rabbi Rugless”
Dear Folks:
So sorry for this mass request, but it’s for a good cause.
In Jackson Hunsicker’s own words:
I don’t know how we got here or who is to blame. And, I don’t know how to get out of it, but women today are never satisfied with the way they look.
Either we think we’re too tall, too thin, too flabby or fat. If our hair is curly, we want it straight. If it is straight, we want it curly. We’re constantly searching for ways to improve. No one looks in the mirror and says, Wow, you couldn’t be any better looking.
If that’s how we feel about ourselves when we’re well, what happens when we’re sick? What happens when we get cancer and lose our hair while undergoing aggressive treatment?
It can be devastating. Click to continue »
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 »
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.
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 »
Love your Body. Hate its industry.
Empowering Art by LA Crompton
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 »
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.
Green Onions, Yellow Onions, Self-Esteem and Murder
by Lynne Murray
My new motto is Self-Esteem Through Murder, but I should explain that I’m a mystery writer, so the killing is theoretical. In fact, I’m the kind of wimp who keeps a glass jar and cardboard around to rescue bugs that wander into my bathtub.
I do write murder mysteries. (They don’t always get published, but that’s a whole different rant – don’t get me started.) My first mystery, Termination Interview, published in 1988, had a heroine who was, like most fictional female sleuths, very athletic. I modeled her appearance after a Wonder Woman type Aikido practitioner acquaintance (except for the nose ring). I figured a mystery heroine would have to be very muscular in order to fight off bad guys.
There was a fat character in that book and I had a hard time describing her. I spent literally hours on one sentence and never quite said what I wanted to say. What I ended up with was this:
