We (or I) do work to vet (nb) our Sunday cats. The boxing cat has presented a problem. The cat clearly deserves support, but not all is at it may seem. Hence, we decided to post the video and then reveal to our readers the fact that this is a professional cat. Thus:
The Olympics are well underway. How refreshing, Kira Cochrane writes here, to see women being celebrated for their hard won acheivements - their strength and grit and skill - rather than just being evaluated on the basis of their appearance.
She writes: ”we have become used to seeing that strange category - celebrity women - pictured constantly, relentlessly, their image before us for no other reason than that they happen to have headed out for a pint of milk with their makeup on skew-whiff. At Beijing we have seen the antithesis of that - we have been treated to the sight of ordinary women reaching extraordinary heights. … They aren’t on screen because they have starved themselves to a size zero - instead, their bodies are a celebration of strength.”
Indeed, she cites statistics showing just how infrequently (in the UK) images of sportswomen otherwise appear in the media:
“just 2% of articles and 1% of images in the sports pages of national newspapers are devoted to female athletes and women’s sports … Just 1.4% of sports photography featured women; and despite the fact our research only looked at the sports’ pages, there were more images of models, footballers’ girlfriends, the French president’s wife and a nun than of sportswomen.”
(these stats from the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation. See also the Women’s Sports Foundation, Both of these organisations campaign to make sport more accessible to girls and women).
Might this Olympic coverage help to change the way women are represented in the media, she asks? We can hope.
Articles like ‘World-class pin ups: olympic contenders for the gold medal in glamour‘, from the Independent’s supplement (shame!) won’t help.
And even Olympians, it seems, can’t avoid the horrible ‘circle of shame’-type treatment - see here (thanks reader Roberta).
You’re competing at the Olympics and your sports gear slips? Honestly, who cares.
so they had a different girl lip-synch at the Olympics opening ceremony. Nice. You really can’t start those pressures early enough. (Thanks, Jender Parents!)
…will make the Moon a cleaner place to live (apparently).
Via the always excellent Boing Boing.
Not sure how this had escaped my notice up until today, but for those of you who have similarly been living in some metaphorical broom cupboard for the past couple of months (and thus been oblivious to the news), it appears computer games are now going round telling our youngsters that they need to lose weight. The Wii Fit by Nintendo calculates players’ BMI and categorises their bodies before setting them various agility tests. Sadly, Nintendo classifies players whose BMI is within a certain range as ‘fat’. It should be noted that children’s BMI cannot be accurately calculated in the same way as it is for adults. Moreover, some researchers also think that the BMI is a bad indicator of health, even for adults as it does not take bodily composition into account. But these worries about the BMI aside, there are enough pressures on children - especially girls - to look a certain way without being told they’re overweight by computers. Shame on you, Nintendo!
Read the Metro article here.
This article by India Knight celebrates the fact that women are no longer considered wholly asexual upon reaching the age of 40, or upon becoming mothers. Hurray! Right? Uh… maybe not so much, as we learn that we can still be sexual in our sixties *if* we have a body like Helen Mirren, and that we should be very grateful that surgery is now available to help us in that pursuit– a feminist victory, according to Knight. She tries to spin her idolisation of Mirren as really about her natural appearance, but it doesn’t last long:
There are no comedy plastic bosoms, or an eerily smooth face, or grotesquely inflated absurdi-lips, no weirdly sinewy body that suggests she lives in the gym. She just looks great.
She has perhaps had a reasonable bit of “work”, but nothing that is outside most people’s league, now that so-called minor surgical procedures are deregulated and your chiropodist can technically give you Botox: we are hardly talking three facelifts and intensive body work.
Knight devotes quite a lot of effort to spin all of this as feminism. Silly me, getting the feminism all wrong, thinking that one could be a sexual being without getting work done so as to have a body like Helen Mirren’s. Ah well, live and learn. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
In Mr Jender’s words:
When men do what she’s done, they’re heroes. When women do it, they’re real life dolls.
And look! Now she’s in a beauty contest, where the trivialisation of her accomplishments can continue.
Call for Papers: Feminism, Fashion and Flair: Confronting Hegemony with Style (8/15/08)
We are soliciting academic papers for an anthology on feminism and fashion. Fashion is a powerful way we express our politics, personalities, and preferences for who and how we love. Yet fashion can also repress freedom and sexual expression. Fashion encourages profound creativity, rebellion, and defiant self-definition while simultaneously controlling and disciplining the body. Fashion signals resistance to sexual morés and it can also promote a problematic consumer culture. Fashion creates collective identity, but also constrains individual voice. In other words, fashion contains the paradoxical potential for pleasure and subjugation, expression and conformity.
This book explores the productive tensions generated by fashion and style. We are interested in essays that take up questions of gender with special attention to race, class, sexuality, age, and ethnicity. This collection blends theory and pop culture analysis in exciting ways, focusing on contemporary trends and controversies.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• Theories of agency, style, and the presentation of self
• Performing identity: race, class, gender and sexuality through style
• Consumerist pleasure and anxiety
• Fashion production in the context of global capital and trade
• Bois, grrls, trannies and styles of queerness
• Hardcore, metro, punk, and khakis: constructing masculinities through fashion
• Body art and ethnic appropriations
• Debates in plastic surgery and re-fashioning the body
• Class identity and decorating domestic space
• Feminist fashion: debates over style and politics
• The ethics of green production and marketing
• Everyday pornography and fashion fetish
• Virtual style and online identities
• Material culture and craft in a postmodern world
• Slumming and radical chic: tensions of authenticity and irony
• Vintage and thrift fashion: nostalgia and class signifiers
• DIY Style: fashion off the corporate grid
Deadline for abstracts is August 15, 2008.
Format for abstracts: Word document, double-spaced, between 300 and 500 words. Include contact information and short bio.
Send to: FashionBook1@yahoo.com
Shira Tarrant
Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies Department
California State University, Long Beach
and
Marjorie Jolles
Assistant Professor, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Roosevelt University
Stoat posted on a beauty pageant in Angola with contestants who were victims of landmines. A similar idea appears to have gotten a lot of attention for BBC3. Let me strongly recommend the post at our friends, What Sorts of People. There’s a video, so one gets an idea of what is happening. I think mine is the only comment so far, and the post certainly deserves more discussion.
As feminists have said for some time, it’s really tough to get breasts that big while keeping everything else skinny.
Thanks, Mr Jender, for sending me this one from the Photoshop Disasters Blog.
Usually we get stories on photoshopping to make women appear thinner (as well as wrinkle-free, etc). Interesting, then, to see this one about Cameron Diaz being made to look less skinny. 
Does this mean that we’ve turned a corner, and that the pressure is no longer on to be thin? Sadly, one suspects not: just that Diaz took the pressure to lose weight a bit too far, which is actually nothing new at all. Indeed, this just demonstrates the difficulty of attaining the “right” body size: “Thinner, thinner, thinner! Nope, too thin!!”
In the afternoon we had a panel session with a representive from Object, and a young woman, Lucy Brown, speaking about her experience of working in a lapdance club. I was surprised to learn that the club she worked in (and apparently many others) works on a ‘pay back’ basis - whereby you start out having to purchase a dress, and pay to perform - so for a while, you’re working to pay back your employres for these per-requisites. Lucy also noted that the ‘no contact’ with customer rule that the clubs operate is frequently violated simply because the competition amongst the strippers (they need the money to pay back for the table and the dress, remember) is so high that they’ll go that bit further to make sure they get the work.
There is a lot that is deeply troubling about all this, and Lucy made a powerful case for concern. The representative from Object then told us about their campaign to get lap-dancing clubs licensed as sex establishments rather than on the same sort of license as coffee shops. (It is clearly absurd to categorise them in with coffee shops!) The ultimate goal of this is to make it easier for citizens to object to lap-dancing clubs in their cities.
However (and again, I feel bad for being critical about what was in general a really really good day!) a couple of points of concern:
i. There was the presumption (not just in this session, but throughout the day) that *all* feminists are against objectification (and likewise with pornography and prostitution). Whilst many feminists *do* object to the coercive and abusive settings in which stripping, prostitution, and porn-making generally occur, some feminists nonetheless maintain that there is nothing intrinsically problematic with these practices. For example, Martha Nussbaum, in her paper ‘objectification’ (from her book Sex and Social Justice) explores the possibility that objectification - being treated as a sex object, a mere body - when chosen, and in certain contexts, can be quite benign and even welcome. And indeed, there are many pro-pornography feminists out there (see the recent post on the feminist porn awards). Also, there was only one brief dismissive comment made about sex worker unionisation efforts. (Roughly: unions protect you against harassment, but these women’s job IS harassment so there’s no point. A claim rather undermined by the observation that the regulations under which these clubs are supposed to operate– which would e.g. disallow contact– are not being enforced. Enforcing regulations is just the sort of thing unions can do.) There’s been a lot of serious work done by sex worker activists, who strongly disagree with the strategies being pursued by organisations like Object, and it would have been good to hear from them.
ii. I’ve already suggested that insufficient attention was at times paid to fundamental problems of women’s economic vulnerability. Again, this session continued without addressing the wider context in which lapdancing seems like a viable option to many women (I don’t know, but i’m supposing its better paid than cleaning). (An aside: I gather that the session on prostitution did look in more detail at the connection between women’s poverty and options, and the context in which women choose (sometimes ‘choose’) prostitution).
iii. I was also concerned that the focus on objectification and pornography at the plenary sessions, rather than education and economic vulnerability, has somewhat exclusionary tendencies. The conference attendees were a fairly homogenous bunch (white females, many students), and I wondered whether a particular perspective was dictating the agenda. Of course, I’m not suggesting that, if objectification is a problem for women, then it is not a problem for all women. Rather I’m (tentatively) suggesting that:
a) How objectification is experienced as a problem won’t be the same for all women
b) For some women, objectification may not be their top priority priority concern - rather financial survival, access to education, avoidance of violence (and not just sexual violence) dictate the agenda. (There was, of course, an excellent panel on rape conviction rates, but much of the discussion there was also about objectification.)
Of course, objectification is an important issue. But it would have been good to see a schedule that reflected some of the other fundamental issues that set the agenda for many women. Being in the plenary session is an indication of importance, and the timetable carried the very clear implication that objectification should be our primary concern.
Many feminists may view beauty pageants with a critical eye. But the BBC here reports on a pageant, in Angola, for survivors of exploding landmines left after decades of civil war (see here for more information).
The project is aims both to raise awareness of the problem of landimes, and to promote a wider range of bodies as beautiful (see here):
THE MISS LANDMINE MANIFESTO
(in no particular order)
* Female pride and empowerment.
* Disabled pride and empowerment.
* Global and local landmine awareness and information.
* Challenge inferiority and/or guilt complexes that hinder creativity-
historical, cultural, social, personal, African, European.
* Question established concepts of physical perfection.
* Challenge old and ingrown concepts of cultural cooperation.
* Celebrate true beauty.
* Replace the passive term ‘Victim’ with the active term ‘Survivor’
Looks like an interesting subversion of the traditional beauty pageant, and there are further plans for a similar project in Cambodia.
Though for an alternative take, see here.
We also learn that the French parliament is taking steps to ban websites that encourage anorexia (the ‘pro ana’ movements):
Might magazines that have pictures of skinny models be deemed to encourage the seeking of excessive thinness? THis aspect of the problem is also being addressed:
‘You can never be too rich or too thin,’ remarked Wallis Simpson. Nor, she might have added, can you be too young or too well-endowed in the breast department. Various bastions of popular culture have taken this message to heart and are seemingly intent on beating it into the heads of the female population at every opportunity. Latest to join the fray is internet website ‘Miss Bimbo’, where players - typically girls aged 9 to 16 - buy dieting pills and plastic surgery for their character so that she can become the next rich It-girl. Apparently, you do have to feed her occasionally, or else she’ll starve to death. (Everything a young lass needs to know for healthy modern living, then.) The site is currently being investigated by a communications watchdog. You can read the Times article here. And here is the Guardian report.
Keynote speaker: Linda Alcoff
May 22nd - 23rd 2008
This conference aims to explore the role the body plays in constituting aspects of our individual and social identity. The claim that biology fixes identity has been hotly contested in recent decades, but its apparent abandonment has led to intense theoretical debate over the role of the body in constituting both individual subjectivity and categories of social identity. We will be focusing particularly on gendered, cultural and racial identity, disability and identity, and identities reached by degrees of bodily modification. In each case attention will be paid to the role of social others in constituting the meaning and recognition bestowed on bodily physiognomies. The common assumption that such categories of identity are required for social participation, political agency and constructions of subjectivity, will be subjected to critical scrutiny.
Conference webpage, including booking form, can be found here.
This interesting article in the New York Times is well worth the read. The author, Kate Zernike, tries to put together the impact of both the mysogynistic attacks on Hillary and the travesty of Spitzler on generational divides among feminists. She suggests many young women have thought that the US was beyond gender discrimination. And it is true that some women seem to have gotten the message that the power and responsibiity is theirs, a belief less for their convenience, surely, than for that of a discriminatory culture that does not want the blame. (I remember uphappily a meeting at which a local young female chamber of commerce administrator insisted that women professors themselves were responsible for the fact that women hold almost no academic leadership positions in our university. “You need to work on yourselves,” she asserted. Ouch!)
Is that changing?
Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia and director of its sexuality and gender law clinic, called the current climate “a perfect storm.”
…
“I’m not such a Mars-Venus person but this is one of those moments where gender is at least a partial explanation, it affects how people hear campaign rhetoric, how people see political downfalls,” Ms. Goldberg said. “Even people who were unwilling to see it before are more likely to acknowledge the pervasiveness of sex stereotypes.”
…
Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.
Why don’t younger women see what Kath Pollitt is described as articulating? That is,
“The hysterical insults flung at Hillary Clinton are just a franker, crazier version of the everyday insults — shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive — that are flung at any vaguely liberal mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence,” she [Pollitt] wrote, “who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn’t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question.”
…
“Every woman I know who calls herself a feminist, or is even just doing well, especially in a field in which men also contend,” Ms. Pollitt wrote, “deals with some version of this.”
We’re offered a dismal explanation:
Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women wrote] “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.”
“During my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest stir are the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men,” she wrote.
Some power.
Interesting case, if alarming linkage, which is indicated by the stress:
Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating were compared across groups of college women from China ( n= 109), South Korea ( n= 137), and the United States ( n= 102). Based on cultural differences in the amount of exposure to Western appearance standards, particularly the thin-body ideal, sociocultural theory ( Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1999 ) would predict that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating would be highest in the U.S. sample and lowest in the Chinese sample. In contrast, based on the speed and pervasiveness of changes in women’s roles, feminist theory ( Bordo, 1993 ; Jeffreys, 2005 ) would predict that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating would be highest in the Korean sample and lowest in the U.S. sample. Multidimensional measures indicated the highest levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in the Korean sample and the lowest levels in the U.S. sample, indicating that predictions derived from feminist theory were a better fit to the data than predictions derived from sociocultural theory. Results indicated that theoretical understandings of body dissatisfaction must recognize not only differences between Western and non-Western cultures, but also differences among non-Western cultures.
Abstract from:
“BODY DISSATISFACTION AND DISORDERED EATING AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN IN CHINA, SOUTH KOREA, AND THE UNITED STATES: CONTRASTING PREDICTIONS FROM SOCIOCULTURAL AND FEMINIST THEORIES.”
Jaehee Jung
Forbes, Gordon B.
Psychology of Women Quarterly; Dec2007, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p381-393, 13p
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