Padaviya

In a link sent in by Anjan G., Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima explains what she does in the months prior to walking the catwalk (source).   Here’s a summary:

• For months before the show, she works out every day with a personal trainer; for the three weeks before, she works out twice a day.
• A nutritionist gives her protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to help her body cope with the work out schedule.
• She drinks a gallon of water a day.
• For the final nine days before the show, she consumes only protein shakes.
• Two days before the show, she begins drinking water at a normal rate; for the final 12 hours, she drinks no water at all.  She loses up to eight pounds during this time.

The result:

Lima’s training and nutrition regimen reveal that the look that is believed by some to be the epitome of feminine accomplishment — the look required to be a Victoria’s Secret Angel — is accompanied by significant physical strain.  Lima looks as she is supposed to on the runway, but she is also dehydrated and hungry.

The story reminded me of this photograph, taken by Zed Nelson.  It shows Ronnie Coleman, immediately after walking off the stage at the Mr. Olympia competition, breathing through an oxygen mask.  He would take first place.  Explaining the photograph, Nelson writes:

Bodybuilders often have extreme and rigid exercise and diet plans in the months preceding a contest.  In those months, a bodybuilder’s goal is to make himself appear as strong as possible. He must balance his body’s functional needs with his aesthetic goals, and sometimes the latter wins over the former.

Bodybuilders and models, then, represent aesthetic extremes of masculinity and femininity, but their bodies aren’t the natural extension of male and female physicalities. Instead, achieving the look require significant sacrifice of one’s body.  In other words, they look fit and strong, but looks can be deceiving.

In the latest re-touching leak, before and after shots of Katy Perry’s Rolling Stone cover were counterposed at Elephant this month and sent in by Dmitriy T.M.   It’s a nice reminder that even incredibly beautiful, thin women — women who, for all intents and purposes, already conform to contemporary standards of beauty — are also being photoshopped to conform even more closely to an impossible ideal. Notice the slimming of her thigh, plumping of her breasts, smoothing of her skin, and re-making of her right hand.

Jacob, a Quebec-based clothing company, has decided to stop retouching both its lingerie and its clothing models. Spokeswoman Cristelle Basmaji explains, “As a socially responsible company, JACOB has always made an effort to promote a healthy image of the female body. By adopting an official policy and broadcasting it publicly, we hope to reverse the trend in digital photo manipulation that has become excessive in our industry.”

British magazine Essentials has announced that there will be no more models or celebrities featured in the magazine. Oh, and airbrushing (you know, the process of taking a perfectly beautiful woman and photoshopping her into oblivion) has been banned from its cover, too. Instead, the women’s magazine is embracing the oh-so-radical philosophy that women would like to look at and read about people other than the rich and famous. It is the first magazine in the U.K. to adopt such a policy.

Back in February Katrin alerted us to the scandal that erupted when designer Mark Fast decided to use four plus-size models (US sizes 8-10) in his catwalk show at London Fashion Week.

(click through for pictures)

Protesting his decision to use these models, his stylist and creative director quit, leaving him just three days to find replacements (source).

The incident is a great example of how even relatively powerful figures (e.g., designers with catwalk shows) often have to pay a price for deviating from cultural rules. Designers are often criticized for only hiring waif-like models, but this shows that they don’t get to do whatever they like without consequences.

Further, while it’s easy to condemn Fast’s stylist and creative director for walking out on him, the truth is that even being associated with deviance can bring consequences.  Sociologist Erving Goffman introduced the idea of the “courtesy stigma” to refer to the stigma that attaches to those who are merely associated with a stigmatized person. A recent Grey’s Anatomy episode dealt with exactly this idea in a story about the reaction to an attractive blonde married to an obese man. Her willingness to stay with such a person was a source of curiosity and disbelief.  Similarly, siblings of the mentally ill or mothers of children with  attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder might suffer courtesy stigma when people wonder if the mental illness is genetic or the parenting is bad, respectively.

So, while it’s tempting to say that Fast’s employees hold reprehensible ideological beliefs (a hatred or intolerance for “plus-size” women), it’s also possible that they thought being associated with the show could hurt their chances of success in a very competitive career.  In an industry that stigmatizes fat so powerfully, I can imagine it might be terrifying indeed to be seen as endorsing it.

Katrin discovered a particularly ironic bit of photoshopping.  The first picture is of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley on a photo shoot, the second is her ad for the Victoria’s Secret “I Love My Body” ad campaign.  Notice that the body she is supposedly loving has significantly less more cleavage than the body we see in the first photo.  Apparently even models’ bodies are unlovable without re-touching (or surgery?).

(click through for pictures)

A company that makes medical display monitors produces a pinup calendar with really, really naked girls

when i trawl around tumblr i find that i am only ever confronted by images of super skinny models, thighs that don’t touch, and collar bones. i’m flooded with retouched images of perfect skin and white teeth on girls who look so sick that i’m suprised that they could even do the photoshoot. more so these photographs advertise these super skinny teenagers surrounded by tables of cupcakes, as if that is how they spend their time. they all smoke cigarettes and have ‘this too shall pass’ tattooed down their exposed ribs.

i admit as a young woman i am concerned daily with the way i look. yeah, i wish i was skinnier, i wish my skin was nicer and my hair longer. but i’m not unrealistic. these young girls reblogging on pages such as ‘gluttony’ idolise women who don’t exist. i too find beauty in a slender figure, a classic audrey hepburn, or a beautiful photograph. but those exist in their own universe. just because i like purple doesn’t mean that i am going to drown myself in the colour.

i know that these girls have a problem. that it is a problem which has been dictated by the media which pries on the already low self esteem of teenage girls and feed on their desires to be the unrealistic ideals that are presented. i feel so angry. i want to get these girls and shake them by their frames, tell them that there is no pride in what they are doing. that they are perpetuating their own depression and self loathing. that being skinny isn’t the end of the world, nor is being overweight, or any weight. that people will only like them for who they are, not the contrived figure they desire to present. that they can change, and feel good about themselves. but i know that their ears are as deaf to those remarks as they are blind to their own image in the mirror.
-cara fox, australia.

ABC, it seems, refused to air the commercial during Dancing with the Stars and limited the number of times the ad could be shown overall. (Though ABC is now claiming it did not reject the ad, other reports say Lane Bryant is right and ABC is just trying to save face.) FOX, on the other hand, demanded edit after edit. The network rejected the ad three times before Lane Bryant threatened to cancel plans to buy ad time altogether. FOX ultimately decided to let it air during the last ten minutes of American Idol.

Even more troubling: You agreed to front the Cover Girl “Dare to Be Beautiful” ad campaign, a rather patronizing new marketing blitz that “defends beauty’s honor,” presumably from sour feminists and environmentalists, like us.