Ad Feminem

Want to Participate in Updating “Our Bodies, Ourselves”? | Our Bodies Our Blog

I'm reposting this in case people are interested in participating:

Our Bodies Ourselves is seeking up to two dozen women to participate in an online discussion on sexual relationships. Stories and comments may be used anonymously in the next edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which will be published in 2011 by Simon & Schuster. We are seeking the experience and wisdom of heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual and queer women. Perspectives from single women are encouraged, and you may define relationship as it applies to you, from monogamy to multiple partners.

We are committed to including women of color, women with disabilities, trans women and women of many ages and backgrounds. In the words of the brilliant anthology “Yes Means Yes,” how can we consistently engage in more positive experiences? What issues deserve more attention? And how do we address social inequities and violence against women? These are some of the guiding questions that will help us to update the relationships section in “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

The conversation will start Sunday, Feb. 14 (yes, Valentine’s Day) and stay open through Friday, March 12. Participants will be invited to answer relevant questions (see sample below) and build on the responses of other participants. We’ll use a private Google site to post questions and responses. Personal stories and reflections are welcomed, along with updated research and media resources. While we intend to use some of the stories and experiences in the book, names will not be published. We hope the open process* will spark robust discussion. We expect new questions to arise that challenge us to re-work this section even more.

If you would like to participate in this conversation, please e-mail OBOS editorial team member Wendy Sanford: [email protected] In your email, please tell us about yourself and what you would bring to the conversation. We need to hear from you by Feb. 5 and will let you know soon thereafter about participation. Thanks for considering this!

*We have thought a great deal about privacy. If you want to share a story or information, but do not want to participate in the private Google site discussion, please indicate that in your email. We may send you questions that you can answer on your own.

via www.ourbodiesourblog.org

Labial Lipstick

Now you too can have that Playboy look - in shape and in color! That's right, first you can get laser vaginal rejuvenation and labiaplasty to shape things up down there and then, when that's not enough, for a mere $29.95 you can get "My New Pink Button Genital Cosmetic Colorant" - basically, long-wearing lipstick for a woman's "other" lips.

From the product FAQs:

Q. “Help! I've noticed I am turning a more brown color down there on my inside lips, is this normal”? 

A. Yes, it’s perfectly normal and there are many factors that can contribute to this.  Ethnicity is a big factor, also age, hormone change, surgeries, childbirth, sickness, health, diet and medications can all contribute to a change from “Pink” to “Brown” in a woman's genital area.

Q. “I used to be so “Pink” and healthy looking on my inside Labia Lip area.  Now I am losing that fresh look. Is there anything I can do”?

A. Yes, now there is a solution! “My New Pink Button” is a Cosmetic Dye especially for the woman's genital area, to help restore that healthy vibrant Rosy color.  Until now there has never been a solution for restoring natural pigment.  This is a concern with many women and more than you can even imagine, and a frequent question that Physicians are asked.  Check out the blogs on the Internet.  You are not alone!  This is a common problem and we now have a simple and safe solution, restoring sexual confidence to Women everywhere! 

Apparently, this product is selling so well, after being featured on The Doctors, that some of the available colors are out of stock.  It comes in four different shades of pink and has been developed by a woman who says that she works in conjunction with plastic surgeons and dermatologists in developing products specific for the needs of pre- and post-operative patients.  Specifically, her bio says that she’s developed a line of makeup specifically for the needs of post-op breast cancer patients, admittedly an admirable endeavor.   It’s hard to see though how the genital colorant being sold isn’t just one more way to foster and then profit from women’s insecurity.  It creates yet another ideal (i.e. the four “appropriate” shades of labial pink) which women’s bodies are supposed to live up to and then offers the means to attain that ideal (or “restore” it) against which most of us never knew we fell short – until now.   

In addition, the stereotypical Westernizing/Eurocentric nature of this product is obvious.  In the FAQs, the first culprit listed as the source of the problematic brown labia is ethnicity, thus identifying one’s ethnicity as the source of the “problem” from the get-go.   Secondly is the simple fact that “brown” is listed as an unacceptable color, the marker of unattractiveness and ill health, versus the “healthy” pink skin associated with Caucasians; indeed all the available colors are associated with the labia of famous white women – i.e. Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Audrey Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

It should be noted that this product hasn’t been FDA approved; the website FAQs split hairs on this question by noting that the individual ingredients in the product have all been FDA-approved.  However, what’s implicit in that answer is that this particular combination of ingredients for this particular use has not been approved. 

Thanks to The Frisky for posting about this.

Book Review - Flow: The Cultural History of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

Because historically – and contemporarily – so much “ickiness,” embarrassment, shame and mystery have surrounded women’s monthly periods, Elissa Stein and Susan Kim have written a book with an admirable purpose.  Flow:  The Cultural History of Menstruation aims to demystify the one common experience that all women have but few celebrate. The book’s high production values clearly reflect Stein and Kim’s ethos; packed with pin-up girls and examples of feminine product advertising, it’s kitschy, colorful, cute – coffee table material, something to display rather than hide.  All of which is their point – women shouldn’t feel like we have to hide during our periods, nor should reliable information about them be hidden from us.

Stein and Kim’s first chapter, on “Language,” highlights the way that gendered norms regarding feminine passivity versus male activity are embedded in the language we use to describe even the most basic of biological processes, with “depressing, loser-ish” verbs that imply deterioration used to describe menstruation while “sexy, empowered, action-hero verbs” are used to describe ejaculation.  This type of language leaves us, they note, “with the impression that the sad-sack uterus… has once again not been asked to the pregnancy prom, so it just stays home and lets it all go – that menstruation is, essentially, a lame combination of inertia and failure,” even though that’s an inaccurate portrayal of the complex and dynamic menstrual process (8).  (Karen Houppert is cited in this particular section; Emily Martin’s 1991 article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Gender Roles” is an even earlier source of similar material.)  Stein and Kim urge us to question the language of disgust, embarrassment, weakness, sickness, etc. that is taken for granted as the way one describes the menstruation, because not doing so grants those words the power to shape not only our perceptions of that monthly process but our experiences of it.

As narrators, Stein and Kim take on the authorial personas of chatty big sisters or cooler, wiser friends. While this is clearly by design, the gossipy, ingratiating tone does grate on one’s nerves after a while.  Eventually, one wishes they would just present the facts without all the editorializing and exclamation points.  Oddly enough, I found this sentiment also applied to their deep affection for the introductory adverb.   

At the heart of my concern with this rhetorical approach, and more importantly, is an issue that goes beyond simple irritation at its contrived intimacy.  One of the authors’ oft repeated phrases in Flow is some variation of “Take it from us…” or “Trust us…,” which is inevitably followed by some assertion, e.g.:  “While fibroids aren’t caused by the menstrual cycle, their growth is stimulated by estrogen… and take it from us, boy, can they grow!” (208)  This imperious assumption of authority contravenes the authors' message by coming across as another form of the very behavior by the vested interests that they criticize.  Stein and Kim’s salient point is that for years women have been encouraged to trust (often unreliable, dangerous, misinformed, ignorant and/or biased) sources for information regarding their biological processes.  The best way to encourage critical thinking about this information is not then to continually proclaim one’s own trustworthiness, which implies that we can’t interpret the evidence for ourselves.  It’s unfortunate that with every “trust us,” one hears the chatty cheerleader narrators morph into Joe Isuzu.  I found myself wishing that Stein and Kim's editor would have been a bit more heavy-handed with the red pen when it came to the avowals of integrity.  It's a classic case of show vs. tell. Rather than telling the reader how trustworthy they are, the authors would better serve readers by simply demonstrating that integrity - which Stein and Kim do; they simply needn't trumpet it, as that's a rhetorical strategy which undermines their credibility rather than strengthens it.  

While this is a book clearly not written for the academic or the feminist who is already well-versed in women’s studies, at times Stein and Kim curiously omit certain items from their narrative that seem basic to a study of feminine cultural history.  For instance, I was surprised that the section on the lore of destructive female deities omits any mention of the Hebrew demon Lilith, an incubus who also caused harm to infants.  Somewhere between the eighth and the tenth century, Lilith’s legend was augmented to cast her as the first of the Biblical Adam’s wives; because she was made out of clay along with Adam she was equal to him and refused to submit, particularly sexually (as opposed to the later Eve, made of Adam’s rib and thus his subordinate).  Stein and Kim tell us that Adam’s name means “bloody clay,” the connotations of which now survive contemporarily as “red earth.”  Lilith’s role is an important part of the context of this information, yet it remains mentioned. 

Flow’s fourth chapter, “Hysteria,” leads us to an interesting conclusion: that the “discovery” of PMS, first so-called in 1953, closely following the American Pyschiatric Association’s removal of hysteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952, suggests that hysteria has simply been renamed and rebranded as “pre-menstrual syndrome,” a condition as difficult to diagnose and define as hysteria once was.  Certainly, Stein and Kim present compelling evidence to support such an idea, and I think it’s worth considering.  In this chapter my quibbles are not with the conclusion, but again with some of the information left out in the lead up to that conclusion.  Just before presenting the conclusion I’ve noted, Stein and Kim tell us that “The 1950s may not have been a feminist mecca, but women had more rights than ever before in history.”  As Susan Faludi discusses at length in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, what’s also true about the 1950s is that it saw a backlash against the gains in women’s freedoms engendered by the peculiar needs of wartime.  Now that the men had come home from war, they needed to go back to work, and the prevailing thought was that the women who had gone to work in their stead now needed to be gotten out of the way to make room for the returning men.  Thus women were actively encouraged to get back into the home and guilted into becoming the perfect housewives, stereotypical gender roles (re)enforced with a vengeance.  Surely, making the connection between this particular social circumstance and the addition of PMS to the lexicon would be useful in strengthening Stein and Kim’s argument.

 In the lead up to the conclusion of Chapter 4, Stein and Kim ask,

“…can we get both political and conspiracy-theorish for a moment?  Could what was historically called hysteria – widespread instances of clinical depression, unhappiness, anxiety, anger – have been a simple product not so much of sexual or maternal frustration, but of actual systematized oppression?  After all, throughout history, women had no rights or autonomy, and were routinely barred from higher education, property ownership, the right to vote, careers.  Could it be that when anyone is faced with such fundamental obstacles to happiness and self-actualization, even a whiz-bang orgasm isn’t enough to make things all better again?”(62)

Conspiracy theories are associated with paranoia, delusion and a lack of objectivity.  Yet the notion of hysteria as bodily protest against the conscripted feminine gender roles conferred on upper middle-class women of the nineteenth century is well-established. This argument has already been cogently made by a number of feminist scholars over the years, notably by Susan Bordo in her 1993 book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, but whom aren’t cited here. To cast the idea of the sociological origins of hysteria as “conspiracy-theorish,” as the authors do, is to confer hysterical properties upon that idea, thus Stein and Kim unfortunately contradict themselves via the dint of their own rhetoric. 

It may sound as if I mean to be entirely critical of this text; I don’t.  Overall, as I mentioned in the introduction, Stein and Kim have written a book with an admirable purpose; their work addresses a subject far too often left in the dark and does so in a way that’s to be welcomed for its positivity.  Academic criticisms aside, this cheeky book in all its quintessential Third Wave sex-positive girliness is the sort of thing I would gladly give to my (hypothetical) pre-teen or teenaged daughter when she hit puberty.  It provides an attractive and nonthreatening source of information for girls. Points of disagreement with the text could become useful entry points for discussion and teachable moments in critical thinking and encouragement for further research.

*Flow: The Cultural History of Menstruation is published by St. Martin's Griffin, an imprint of Macmillan. The video below features an interview with author Elissa Stein.

Smooth, Pink, Instant... Pudding

As we all know, in an era of keyword-driven advertising, ads and editorial content often end up sharing space in ironic, and sometimes humorous, absurd or counterproductive, juxtapositions. Of course, such juxtapositions aren’t limited to realm of Adsense autobots. While doing research on way the rhetoric of cosmetic surgery has been used in the past, I came across Chatelaine magazine’s guide to cosmetic surgery from 1968.

 

 

On the article’s second page (see above), notice the ad for Royal instant pudding which accompanies the copy.  A perfectly smooth bowl of pink perches on a bed of pocked berries, their shapes analogous to so many faces full of large pores. Instant transformation from mature fruit to seductive dessert; a visual replication of the promise of cosmetic surgery. Brilliant.

On Bodies by Susie Orbach

In Bodies, Susie Orbach theorizes the body as the home in which the self must live.  She asserts that there are authentic bodies and false bodies, the false bodies being the ones that we develop as early as infancy in order to please what we think are the wishes of other people when our own needs aren't being met (thus the infant that learns not to cry even when she’s upset).  Authentic bodies, she posits, are the ones in which our selves can live comfortably, the bodies over which we don’t fret.  Orbach’s theory, as I see it, poses some problems.  When I asked her about the relationship between the body and the self in the authentic body, her answer was that they were the same, that “corporeal embodiment” would entail no difference between the two.  If we reject the Cartesian mind-body duality altogether in favor of an integrated whole, this immediately seems to send us back down the road we have been traveling a long time, in which bodily markers will be “justifiably” read as signs of internal characteristics of the self.  Or does the notion of authentic body require that we see the body as unreadable, unwritable? 

This gets further complicated when we consider the question:  can a body culturally marked (by cosmetic surgery or other body modification techniques) and in which a self now feels comfortable or empowered be an authentic body?  When I posed this very question to Orbach when she presented the book's ideas at the London School of Economics, she pointed out that such cultural marking techniques were sold to women on the basis of their empowering results (which seemed to suggest that such a question accepted the premises of that discourse), but in the end she did not have an answer.  Granted, Orbach had to field the question off the cuff, but the lack of a satisfactory answer to it points to a glaring problem:  what’s the difference between an “authentic” body and an “essential” or “natural” body?  Is Orbach inadvertently taking us back down the path to essentialism by another name? 

Given the effort she makes in Bodies to show that there is no such thing as a “natural” body, using the example of wild children who developed internal regulatory mechanisms and other environmental adaptations from birth, it’s highly doubtful that reviving essentialism is Orbach’s intention.  In her conclusion, she encourages that our bodies not be seen as “sites of labor and commercially-driven production” or “aspirations that need to be achieved” (145).  But this again points out a conflict – she goes to such lengths to prove “that bodies are made rather than born” while enjoining us from participating too consciously in the making process. 

 

Plastic Light District?

Back before the club closed its doors forevermore, I sat on the bleacher-like steps of the Opium Garden in South Beach, Miami, and watched a breakdancer in a strategically torn t-shirt. Her athletic body gyrated; she pop-locked, downrocked and piked and then she sat down next to me, another girl in baggy pants, sneakers and a hat.  We watched the other action on the dance floor for a few minutes as the music kept thumping.  Nearly all of the women pouting to the beat shimmied in miniskirts, break-neck stilettos and band-aid tops, with breasts that should have been bouncing but instead remained firmly bolted in place.  The b-girl leaned over and shouted over the thumps:  “Welcome to Miami, where you’re not allowed to live unless you’ve got fake tits and dick-suckin’ lips.” Of course, that was a vulgar way to put it, the stereotype of body-conscious South Beach, but there it was.  

This year, the closed club a victim of noise complaints and rising rents, I ambled down Lincoln Mall Road in search of a gelato.  Before I got to the gelato, there it was again.

Of course, it’s possible or even probable that these mannequins graced Miami’s shop windows before this year and I just didn’t notice them; I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what to think about these real fake ladies. Suddenly walking down Lincoln Mall Road bore a surreal similarity to traversing yesteryear's gauntlet of sex workers in the storefronts of Amsterdam's Red Light district. 

 

Those Miami mannequins displays say more about the normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture than most anything I can write about it, I think. For women in places like South Beach and Los Angeles, the question of whether or not to go under the knife is moot; the question is no longer “Should I get surgery?”  That we should get surgery is taken for granted. Instead, the fundamental question has become “Where should I get which surgery?” 

The mannequins also beg some questions about the aspirational nature of window shopping.  It could be argued that the mannequins represent the body type of the average South Beach resident more than the traditional clothes-hanger-skinny mannequin, and thus give a more realistic idea of how the merchandise would fit potential customers.  It could also be argued that heroine-chic physiques of traditional mannequins modeled equally unnatural body types, or that they enforced a standard of homogeneity for the female form so the busty new gals provide some welcome variety, at least.  While that’s possible, I also wonder how much these mannequins now commodify the body as the items for sale versus the clothing as the items for sale.  When we’re window shopping, are we supposed to covet the merchandise or the bodies on display? 

There seems to be a sort of chicken and egg element to the issue as well.  Are mannequins like these a result of the body commodification and normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture, or a cause of them?

 

The Indistinguishable Celebrity

In the course of the much derided interview with the French Marie Claire in which Demi Moore characterized rumors that she had ever had any cosmetic surgery as ‘completely false,’ Moore also bemoaned the familiar, age-old double standard by which ageing male actors ‘seem to get classier than us when they age.’  Mature actors in Hollywood, noted Moore, are seen as ‘distinguished.’ 

Men become distinguished as they age, that is to say that age makes them ‘prominent, conspicuous, remarkable, or eminent;’ people whom we ‘notice specially; pay particular attention to’ or ‘honour with special attention.’ To distinguish also means ‘to perceive distinctly or clearly (by sight, hearing, or other bodily sense); to ‘make out’ by looking, listening, etc.; to recognize.’  To be distinguished is to be recognized.  Not only does the process of becoming distinguished become synonymous with being celebrated, it becomes synonymous with being seen at all.   In a spread entitled “Celebrities Who Are Aging Well’ in the Winter-Spring 2009 issue of New Beauty magazine, the faces of several female celebrities are analyzed. The piece opens by noting that the women featured – including Olivia Newton-John and Demi Moore - have successfully ‘tackled common aging concerns, all while looking gracefully age-appropriate’ (40). 

In the analysis of Newton-John’s face, it is noted that ‘“There is a little bit of flattening out of the upper lip and some loss of definition,” which makes her look appropriate for her age’ (44).  Loss of definition.  In this language we have an enactment of the gendered double standard.  It is appropriate that the ageing female should lose definition in her features; that is to say, it is appropriate that her features become undistinguished.

The homogenizing effects of the anti-ageing procedures promoted by New Beauty and widely used by female celebrities are criticized for exactly this, that they efface faces, making those faces indistinguishable from one another.  In these attempts to defy ageing, celebrities may be subverting the very idea of celebrity. The undistinguished is one not recognized as different or distinct; further, the indistinguishable (i.e. the ‘imperceptible’) has not only the preceding quality, but goes unrecognized and unseen altogether. 

*All definitions taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

Bestiality, Anyone?

As of 5 October, 2009, Cadbury’s Chocolates has unveiled a marketing campaign for their new Nibbles bite-size candy which features their longtime brand icon, “Caramel Bunny.”  In the ads, Caramel flaunts a curve-hugging mini-dress.  Slinky and voluptuous as her anthropomorphous doppelganger Jessica Rabbit, she smolders at the reader from under eyelashes the size of batwings and pants with shining pink lips parted in anticipation of nibbling on… her next bite of delicious chocolate, as Cadbury will surely protest, you silly pervert.

 

And in case the image which simultaneously humanizes a rabbit in such a way that the viewer is seriously invited to consider the charms of bestiality and dehumanizes women by representing them as animalian subhumans isn’t quite clear, another version of the ad in which a prone Caramel Bunny presents her rear end to the camera while shooting a sultry look over her shoulder will surely help in pulling one out from under that rock.

Plastic Light District?

Back before the club closed its doors forevermore, I sat on the bleacher-like steps of the Opium Garden in South Beach, Miami, and watched a breakdancer in a strategically torn t-shirt. Her athletic body gyrated; she pop-locked, downrocked and piked and then she sat down next to me, another girl in baggy pants, sneakers and a hat.  We watched the other action on the dance floor for a few minutes as the jacking house music kept thumping.  Nearly all of the women pouting to the beat shimmied in miniskirts and break-neck stilettos, with breasts that should have been bouncing in their band-aid tops but instead remained steadily bolted in place.  The b-girl leaned over and shouted over the thumps:  “Welcome to Miami, where you’re not allowed to live unless you’ve got fake tits and dick-suckin’ lips.” Of course, that was a vulgar way to put it, the stereotype of body-conscious South Beach, but there it was.  

This year, the closed club a victim of noise complaints and rising rents, I ambled down Lincoln Mall Road in search of a gelato.  Before I got to the gelato, there "it" was again.

Of course, it’s possible or even probable that these mannequins graced Miami’s shop windows before this year and I just didn’t notice them; I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what to think about these real fake ladies. Suddenly walking down Lincoln Mall Road bore a surreal similarity to traversing yesteryear's gauntlet of sex workers in the storefronts of Amsterdam's Red Light district. 

 

Those Miami mannequins displays say more about the normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture than most anything I can write about it, I think. For women in places like South Beach and Los Angeles, the question of whether or not to go under the knife is moot; the question is no longer “Should I get surgery?”  That we should get surgery is taken for granted. Instead, the fundamental question has become “Where should I get which surgery?” 

The mannequins also beg some questions about the aspirational nature of window shopping.  It could be argued that the mannequins represent the body type of the average South Beach resident more than the traditional clothes-hanger-skinny mannequin, and thus give a more realistic idea of how the merchandise would fit potential customers.  It could also be argued that heroine-chic physiques of traditional mannequins modeled equally unnatural body types, or that they enforced a standard of homogeneity for the female form so the busty new gals provide some welcome variety, at least.  While that’s possible, I also wonder how much these mannequins now commodify the body as the items for sale versus the clothing as the items for sale.  When we’re window shopping, are we supposed to covet the merchandise or the bodies on display? 

There seems to be a sort of chicken and egg element to the issue as well.  Are mannequins like these a result of the body commodification and normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture, or a cause of them?

 

In China, Job Seekers Are Resorting to Plastic Surgery

The cosmetic surgery business is booming in China as a hyper-competitive labor market has job hunters altering their looks to get an edge with potential employers.

By Don Lee
March 30, 2009

Reporting from Shanghai -- In this crummy job market, Stephanie Yang figures any little advantage will help. Even double eyelids.

So on a cold January morning, the 21-year-old college senior walked into one of dozens of plastic surgery clinics here and plopped down $730, the equivalent of one year's tuition. An hour later she came out with two big bandages over her eyes.

See the LA Times for the rest of this article.