jfvalenzu | Adios Barbie

Impossible Ideals: The Media and Body Image

July 7, 2010 By jfvalenzu 5 Comments

glamour2

By Dominique Shaw, Associated Content

I can’t turn on my television, read a magazine, or surf the net with out being bombarded by the airbrushed images of a perfect body. We inhale the idea that a thin body is normal. We believe that this false notion of

beauty we see is achievable – just as long as you use this make up, buy these clothes reshape this and shape that. My question is this, “Am I the only one that notices the little tiny writing at the bottom of the screen that says results not typical, results may very?” Yet this is how I’m supposed to look and dress. I’m being told that if I use this or that I will get the love, happiness or success I want. I’m told results are not typical. Of course what they mean is that chances are the results I’m looking for can not really be achieved.

The average model is 5’11” and weigh’s 117 pounds (Body Image). The average woman is 5’4” and weigh’s 140 pounds (Body Image) .When I look around, I see average models not Average Women. I see that thin is in, that thin is beautiful, that thin is perfect. What young lady doesn’t want to be beautiful? Where will beauty be found in a world that doesn’t show…

Why Not Being Colorblind is a Good Thing

June 30, 2010 By jfvalenzu 1 Comment

colorblind

By Adriel Luis at Change.org

When I was in fifth grade, my very liberal teacher decided to familiarize our class with the concept of race. Since teaching a roomful of 12-year-olds about things like the cycle of oppression can be somewhat complicated, he turned to some abstract metaphors to help him out.

“A melting pot is the belief that all of the cultures represented in America are fused together to form our singular culture,” he explained. “A salad bowl is the belief that different cultures are mixed together, but are still individually distinguishable.” While both of these examples made me hungry, the following one he invoked made me feel just nauseated.

“A colorblind society,” he continued, “is the belief that we are all equal, and our differences should be overlooked.”

At that moment, had I known just how often I’d come across proponents of this color-blindedness, I would’ve stuck my ears in the pencil sharpener.

Why do I shudder at terms like “colorblind” and “melting pot”?

Read the full story at Change.org

Filed Under: Media Literacy, Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: America, celebration of difference, colorbind society, multiculturalism, post-racial

What Men Really Think of Your Body Before Sex

June 24, 2010 By jfvalenzu 2 Comments

mixedcouple …It’s 1 a.m., and that someone special has decided to walk you all the way to the front door after an incredible date. You already know it’s about to go down, since the two of you have been dancing around the horizontal waltz for far too long.

So far so good, after the first rounds of your short-lived courtship. But holding hands in the park, and canoodling at the movies is a far cry from loving in the buff, and waking up to misplaced eyelashes, crooked lacefronts and girdle free mid-sections.

So there you are, wrestling with your clothing, about to “Set it Off.” And no I’m not talking about robbing banks, but rather gearing up for your first intimate encounter with that new man in your life.

The first thought on your mind: “Does my underwear match my bra?”

Your second: “I wonder what he’s going to think about me without makeup on in the morning.”

Your third: “Wow! This is the first time he’s going to see me naked and I wonder how long I can hold in my pudge before I pass out.”

And your final thought: “Gravity is the number one enemy to every push-up bra.”

Insecurities.

You Don’t Have to Have an Eating Disorder to be Image Obsessed

March 9, 2010 By jfvalenzu 1 Comment

Claire Gould, The Review

The signs on the mirrors in the bathroom said “You are Beautiful.” Even so, girls stood in front of them, applying makeup, fixing their hair and adjusting their clothes to make themselves look different than their natural appearance.

Feb. 21 to Feb. 27 was National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, but it should have been called “National Body Image Week.” Although NEDA focuses on preventing eating disorders and finding help for girls who suffer from them, a big part of this mission is helping women of all ages and sizes be happy in their own skin. But one week in February didn’t seem to do much towards this cause.

In the dining halls, advertisements for the week were inside the napkin dispensers, yet listening to people comment on them, the predominant sound bites were “people with eating disorders wouldn’t come to the dining halls anyway” or “prevent an eating disorder: take that burger away from that fat kid.”

Perceptions Shown to Affect Desire to Lose Weight

February 12, 2010 By jfvalenzu 1 Comment

Her Body: Women and Weight – By Barbara Kantrowitz – Newsweek.com

A few months back Pat accidentally tried on a pair of size 2 jeans at an outlet store and was astounded to discover that they fit. Of course, she bought them; she had never had a pair of size 2 pants in her closet?ever. But she couldn’t resist asking the clerk why a woman who normally wears a size 8 would fit into a pair of size 2 jeans. The saleswoman laughed and said this clothing line’s sizes seemed to fluctuate with the designer’s own weight. “No matter how much she gains or loses,” the saleswoman said, “we think she always wants to wear the same size.”

That story came to mind as we were reading the results of a recent Cornell University study published in the journal Eating Behaviors, which examined how people’s perceptions of their size and shape motivated them to lose weight.

Is “Bo-tax” Unfair to Women Who Want Their Looks to Compete?

December 17, 2009 By jfvalenzu 6 Comments

AP Images

Feminism’s Face-Lift

Alexandra Suich, The Nation

Can a tax on breast enhancements and liposuction be channeled to benefit the public good?

During the Senate’s debates over who should bear the cost of the nearly $900 billion healthcare bill, there emerged a surprising suggestion: plastic surgery patients. A proposed tax, dubbed the “Bo-Tax” after the wrinkle-reducing injections, would add a 5 percent additional charge to elective cosmetic procedures. The tax could help raise $6 billion over the next ten years to offset the cost of health reform. It was included in the original healthcare bill the Senate considered, and it is likely to make it into the modified bill, when the details of the newly brokered Senate compromise are finally announced. Apparently breast enhancements and liposuction can be channeled to benefit the public good.

Plastic surgeons have decried the tax with as much ferocity as Americans once denounced taxation without representation. It is not just Playboy bunnies and Hollywood starlets who get breast enhancements, liposuction and face-lifts, they claim, but also middle-class Americans. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which is lobbying against the proposed tax, nearly 90 percent of people seeking cosmetic surgery are women, and 60 percent of them earn between $30,000 and $90,000 a year. This has led plastic surgeons to brand it the “soccer mom tax.”

That plastic surgeons oppose the Bo-Tax is not surprising. But that the head of one of America’s most stalwart feminist organizations, the National Organization for Women (NOW), has also come forward to oppose the bill certainly is. NOW has railed against silicone breast implants and cosmetic surgery in the past. The group sponsors an annual “Love Your Body Day” to encourage women to appreciate their natural bodies–uncut, unenhanced and un-Botoxed.

These harsh economic times, however, call for a different ideology. Or so says Terry O’Neill, NOW’s new president. Middle-aged women are struggling to compete in the job market, and cosmetic surgery can help them appeal to employers. “They have to find work,” she told the New York Times. “And they are going for Botox or going for eye work, because the fact is we live in a society that punishes women for getting older.”

Barbie’s Ankles Too Fat for Louboutin’s StyleList Fashion Blog

October 13, 2009 By jfvalenzu 2 Comments

Silly us. All these years we thought Barbie was the picture of perfection. Turns out, we were wrong.

Christian Louboutin thinks Ken’s better half is carrying some extra padding in her ankles.

Louboutin — the latest fashion designer to give the plastic icon a makeover (others have included Diane von Furstenberg, Anna Sui and Givenchy) — has revamped three Barbies from “top to toe,” reports WWD.

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (Hardcover)

August 9, 2009 By jfvalenzu 12 Comments

From Publishers Weekly
Whether it’s hip-hop diva Lil’ Kim’s “weave of the week” or activist Angela Davis’s Afro, black hair evinces the power to set trends and define icons. In this entertaining and concise survey, Byrd (a research chief for Vibe) and Tharps (a reporter for Entertainment Weekly) revel in the social, cultural and economic significance of African-American hair from 1400 to the present. The opening chapter chronicles the rise of the slave trade, revealing intriguing facts about the significance of hair in African culture such as that only royalty donned hats or hairpieces, and recently widowed Wolof women stopped maintaining their hair as a sign of their mourning. The authors contextualize issues familiar to African-Americans while explaining black hair culture to the uninformed, so readers who don’t already know what “the kitchen” refers to (hair at the nape of the neck, usually the “nappiest”) will soon find out. Photos and illustrations are put to effective (more…)

Related content:

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

The Hair Up There

The Taming of Blackness

Chris Rock’s New Documentary Gets to the Root of Good Hair

What a Tangled Web Around Hair We Weave

The Politics of Black Hair Can be Snarly

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: America, Black, Hair, Hardcover, Roots, Story, Untangling

Comic-Con and American Born Chinese

July 24, 2009 By jfvalenzu 10 Comments

In honor of Comic-Con this week, we celebrate Gene Yang and his novel American Born Chinese. For a breakdown of sessions at Comic-Con covering race and identity check out Racialicious’ schedule guide to the convention. Also check out the site’s report on the first-ever Asian American Comic-Con in New York City that happened last week. This dispatch covers the boycott of James Cameron’s anticipated ‘Avatar’, the 3-D film that was a highlight at Comic-Con on Thursday.

Amazon.com Review:
Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang’s intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leaving both Jin Wang and the Monkey King satisfied and happy to be who they are. Yang skillfully weaves these affecting, often humorous stories together to create a masterful commentary about race, identity, and self-acceptance (more…)

Hollywood Chinese

When White Goes Wrong…

Of Shame and Pride: Confronting My Culture and Identity

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Representation and Identity Tagged With: American, Avatar movie, Born, boycott of Avatar, Chinese, Comic-Con, Paperback

Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image (Live Girls) (Paperback)

July 15, 2009 By jfvalenzu 11 Comments

Check out our Body Outlaws book (formerly Adios, Barbie)! Edited by our very own Adiosbarbie.com co-founder, Ophi, with handy dandy bodylovin’ exercises from Pia, the site” other co-founder. If you like the blog, you’ll love the book!

Book Description
Pick up a magazine, turn on the TV, and you’ll find few women who haven’t been fried, dyed, plucked, or tucked. In short, you’ll see no body outlaws. The writers in this groundbreaking anthology reveal a world where bodies come in all their many-splendored shapes, sizes, colors, and textures. In doing so, they expand the national dialogue on body image to include race, ethnicity, sexuality, and power-issues that, while often overlooked, are intimately linked to how women feel about their bodies. Body Outlaws offers stories by those who have chosen to ignore, subvert, or redefine the dominant beauty standard in order to feel at home in their bodies. In a culture where plastic surgery has become nearly as routine as a root canal, this expanded and updated edition of fresh and incisive commentary challenges the media’s standard notions of beauty with honesty and humor. Included are several new essays outlining the latest trends in the beauty industry such as botox, plastic surgery, and exercise bulimia, as well as a fascinating analysis of how men are affected by these same rigors, a thorough resource section, and a curriculum guide.

Amazon.com Review
The breezy, irreverent essays in Adios, Barbie (now called Body Outlaws) are a welcome antidote to the narrow cultural consciousness the tiny doll has fostered for more than 40 years. While thousands of little girls worship Barbie’s plasticine perfection, those who wind up dissatisfied with the message she sends–be white, be skinny, be stacked, be pretty, and then you’ll be loved–can tell you how a toy skews body image in the real world. Among whites talking trash about blacks and upwardly mobile black folks, notes Erin J. Aubry, big butts are suspect–”low-class and ghettoish,” the antithesis of Barbie’s tightly tucked derriere. Yet on good days, Aubry applauds her ample proportions, for “unlike hair or skin, the butt is stubborn, immutable–it can’t be hot-combed or straightened or bleached into submission. It does not assimilate; it never took a slave name.” In “Fishnets, Feather Boas, and Fat,” Nomy Lam–a 250-pound, 22-year-old disabled woman–and friends e (more…)

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: Beauty, Body, body image curriculum, body outlaws, bodylovin' exercises, Girls, Image, Outlaws, Paperback, Rewriting, Rules