Tag Archives: body image

Random Randomness

I confess the reason why I took to Twitter so passionately was because I am the ultimate “idea man”. You know, like those people that go in front of movie studios execs to pitch movie ideas? (I learned of the movie industry from TV shows so YMMV) I have lots of one-liner ideas but that is the extent of my “genius”. Every day I walk through life making running commentaries on people I see, things I observe, news I hear, and [invisible] thought bubbles that pop up over my head. Not to mention the memes and quotes that make me laugh as I rapidly scroll through Facebook streams on my phone.

Oh, I should write about THAT.

I’d open my laptop, jotting a couple of lines down, and immediately running out of steam.

Dead. Nothing. Void. Hollow caverns echoing with the witty one-liners.

“There should never be a BUT following a true apology. Lance Armstrong apologizes like my husband.”

“Manti Te’o would have stood out like a sore thumb in NFL since he’d probably be the most faithful and gentlemanly boyfriend amongst all the NFL players.”

“Frankly I could care less that he lied. I am more concerned about the culture that forced Manti Te’o to fabricate a girlfriend who died of a [fake] tragic death.”

Echo. Echo. Echo.

I hope you will forgive me for the mental purge here. My brains are hurting with all the echo. Ok, smart ass. I know you can’t really get rid of echo by “purging” them. It’s just a figure of speech though I am definitely mixing analogies here.

I am sitting inside the train station again on a Saturday morning, waiting for Mr. Monk, my 10-year-old boy, to get out of the weekly religious class run by a Catholic Church that more than one Catholics have told me is TOO conservative even for them. There are reasons we are keeping him there and I will not get into them. Suffice it to say that my sons and I have had a lot of great discussions and I hope, we are “training” them to be critical thinkers.

What don’t kill you will only make you stronger.

What does it say about me that I love being in a crowd of strangers and feeling alive amongst the hustle and bustle? Invisible yet alive. This is the kind of crowd different from say, going to a conference or a party. There is no pressure, no obligation, no anticipation to socialize with each other. And absolutely no networking. I ABHOR the concept of “networking” by the way. I’d rather die. There I said it. Probably why I will never get ahead on the career ladder. I wish for my kids super-duper Google-Fiber-grade networking capability (ha ha I slay me). That’s all that matters nowadays isn’t it no matter what kind of job you are holding?

Got my new Kindle Paperwhite this week. I could not shut up about it, I know. I am sorry, ok? Leading to the moment before Marvin arrived (yes, I named my Kindle Marvin. 2 points if you guess Marvin who?) I had been restless, full of anticipation. I have never felt such excitement since… I can’t remember really. I lead a pathetic existence, yes. Now I curl up with Marvin in bed in the dark, caressing his comfortingly textured, paradoxically smooth skin (and promptly fall asleep. I like the concept of reading though). In the recess of my consciousness however I cry, “Traitor!” indignant for my deep love of rubbing my fingers with a book page in between, feeling the heft of somebody else’s words and thoughts in my palm.

Mr. Monk inherited the ex-Marvin now named Tardis. “Bigger on the inside”, get it? 10% into The Hobbit, he exclaimed, “I love Kindle!” he who previously had adamantly been on an anti-electronic-book tirade. “It is just so amazing. It’s like a book but more awe…” I held my tongue that wanted to argue as he curled up in bed with Tardis, so absorbed by what was happening in The Hobbit that he did not even bother to finish his sentence.

Facebook introduced GRAPH SEARCH this week. To me it boiled down to one thing: Discoverability. They are not changing their privacy policies per se and you continue to keep your privacy settings. The biggest (only?) difference now is that we can no longer afford to mindlessly LIKE or comment. Your friends will now see what you are liking and commenting on on their streams. We need to watch for WHAT we are liking, and if you are Interneting at work, WHEN you are liking because obviously when you are LIKING you are not WORKING.

I am not liking this.

A friend of mine noticed that I LIKED this article:

I Can’t Stop Looking at These South Korean Women Who’ve Had Plastic Surgery (thank goodness it is not something I’d be ashamed of when caught liking) and shared a piece of wisdom from Tina Fey with me. Of course a long tirade swirled inside my head that would have become an awesome blog post were I able to form cohesive sentences and string them together logically into paragraphs. Instead, Imma taking the easy way out. Ctrl C. Ctrl V. SHARE.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

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Alas nowadays it seems that the eye of the beholder is an one-eye monster, (ok, NOT that one-eye monster), with its narrow, single-minded vision towards “What sells”, deciding what men want, and therefore dictating what women want (because we all want to become what men want, and yes, the assumption/implicit acceptance of heterosexual hegemony is with us. We cannot deny it)

The eye of the beholder is also imbued with the ruthless power of PhotoShop…

Behold this:

I don’t even…

Ugh.

Every once in a while someone would say something extremely stupid (MORE stupid than what is deemed as “the way the world works”, I should add), and it would rile us up. We’d rally around the targeted, start a movement, hug each other, decide that we should support one another because we are all in this together.

The latest is the brouhaha over a pro-anorexia (I paused when I saw the term “Pro-anorexia”. Anorexia is a life style choice now?!) blog’s scathing, mean-spirited attack on Kate Upton. As a result, the Internet (aka the world) came together showering Ms. Upton with encouragement and support, and by extension, the entire super model community. It’s been getting so much attention that finally when you type in “kate” in Google Search, the first suggested search term is not Kate Middleton. (Speaking of HRH, the news media is now obsessed with her being too thin, even too thin to have a baby. Thought you may appreciate the Schizophrenia here).

I was going to end on a cynical, pessimistic note per my MO, waiting for this particular cycle to end and we all go back to our merry old ways. Everything’s the same. Always. But this time around there seems to be something different in the air… A group of teens started petitions, staged protests and mock runway shows outside the offices of popular teen magazines, Seventeen and Teen Vogue. Since telling their peers to simply not read the garbage is not an option, these awesome young feminists started a movement to demand that these magazines stop The PhotoShopping Epidemic. (Of course, initially, both magazines staunchly denied the practice of altering the photographs.) They confronted the modern-day taste makers publicly and asked them to “stop altering natural bodies and faces so that real girls can be the new standard of beauty.”

Just say no to Photoshop.

How hard could it be, Madison Avenue?

Perhaps it is time (and I know we’ve said this many times in the past, but we need to repeat it over and over because people are forgetful) that we take the gaze back. Forget about the stupid beholder.

You be the judge. You.

ETA: This is the reason why I write less and less here – I can never finish what I start. As I was brushing my hair this morning – it is a new thing for me nowadays now that I have “long” hair, it hit me that what I said as a conclusion above was kind of bullshit. Beauty exists because there is someone else other than ourselves that would be seeing us, no? If I truly, honestly do not care about the gaze, then the concept of beauty has no meaning. It is the “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it” thing, isn’t it?

The Curious Case of Ruby, the Anti-Barbie

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I suspect that you have been seeing this picture popping up on your Facebook and/or Twitter stream this week. I did. Like you, I had a visceral response to it.

FUCK YEAH!

Was exactly what I said to the monitor as I responded to the plea on Facebook “This was an ad made by bodyshop. But Barbie INC. found out about it and now it’s banned. Repost if you think this ad deserves to be seen,” and hit the SHARE button before I could say “Happy National Donut Day!”

Then my inner Cyber Sleuth / Internet Meme Historian took over. “I wonder whether this is yet another hoax?” Ok. Fine. It was also my inner cynic’s doing. I googled it.

Good news (or is it in fact bad news?) : This is for realz. The Body Shop did wage such a brilliant war against The Barbie.

Bad news (or does it really matter?) : It was from 1998.

The late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, wrote in 2001:

In 1998, The Body Shop debuted its self-esteem campaign, featuring the generously proportioned doll we dubbed “Ruby.” … …

Ruby was a fun idea, but she carried a serious message. She was intended to challenge stereotypes of beauty and counter the pervasive influence of the cosmetics industry, of which we understood we were a part. Perhaps more than we had even hoped, Ruby kick-started a worldwide debate about body image and self-esteem.

But Ruby was not universally loved. In the United States, the toy company Mattel sent us a cease-and-desist order, demanding we pull the images of Ruby from American shop windows. Their reason: Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller (Barbie dolls sell at a rate of two per second; it’s hard to see how our Ruby could have done any meaningful damage.) I was ecstatic that Mattel thought Ruby was insulting to Barbie — the idea of one inanimate piece of molded plastic hurting another’s feelings was absolutely mind-blowing.

In 2002, Ms. Roddick again wrote about Ruby when the Danish pop band Aqua was sued by Mattel for their song “Barbie Girl”. In the same post, she also mentioned how an American artist, Tom Forsythe, had been engaged in lengthy legal battle against Mattel when Mattel sued him for his photographic project “Food Chain Barbie“. (You’d be happy to know that in 2004, after five years and millions of dollars in legal expenses, Mattel was ordered by court to pay $1.8 million in legal fees for Mr. Forsythe.)

Googling also led me to believe that every year or so, this poster of daring and clever protest by The Body Shop would resurface to the Internet’s attention but then the buzz would die down as fast as it started. For example, this article in Mother Jones from 2007.

It seems that more and more people are being outraged on Twitter and Facebook asking people, “It is banned by Mattel. OMG! RETWEET IF YOU WANT THIS POSTER TO BE SEEN!” It has caught on like a bad rumor. (It has now appeared on BuzzFeed with no historical context).

At first I wanted to “set the record straight” by shouting from the mountain top: This was from 1998, people. Case closed!

Then I thought about what Ms. Roddick wrote:

It makes me angry, not only because it is a male-dominated industry built on creating needs that don’t exist, but because it seems to have decided that it needs to make women unhappy about their appearances. It plays on self-doubt and insecurity about image and ageing by projecting impossible ideals of youth and beauty.

Things have not changed much since 1998 when the world first met Ruby. And yes, the world needs to be reminded of Ruby once in a while. We are a forgetful people with short attention spans which seem to get shorter with each new generation.

Ruby, who still watches us from posters throughout The Body Shop’s offices, won’t let us forget. — Dame Anita Roddick

I just have one question…

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I went out for emergency shopping for Mr. Monk, my second grader. The school field trip next week requires in addition to everything else, RAIN FUCKING BOOTS. Rain boots. Seriously, where the fuck could I find rain boots on a random day?

So I ran to Target.

I also discovered that Targets carry clothes. (Ok, I have known this fact for a long time but they used to strike me as “For High School Girls Only”) Nice ones for $25 on average. So I spent almost an hour in the empty dressing room past 9 pm trying on spring and summer dresses. This is quite a big change from my usual ensemble of t-shirt and jeans. Now that I have to go to this new office with younger and hipper people, I have begun to wear jeans and blouses. And shoes with heels. I have figured this out: As a woman, you can wear almost anything and still look put-together as long as you are sporting a pair of envy-inducing shoes.

(With regarding the topic of the importance of possessing kickass heels, I will have to defer to the two sexy goddesses, Vapid Blonde and Wicked Shawn…)

Hey, a little bit of Retail Therapy, especially the French kind, would not hurt anybody, right?

Now I really just have one question…

Where the fuck did my waist go?

Why I have nothing to write about on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day?

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Because Hallmark does not make a card for this.

When I opened the newspaper this Sunday, ads with BIG SALES for International Women’s Day did not tumble out of the newspaper bundle. Well, because there was none.

It was not even an after thought here in the U.S. if it were not for the Interwebz, the Blogosphere and the Twitterverse. And for online magazines to come up with LISTS of Most Influential Women, Most Powerful Women, Women Who Inspired Us, yada yada yada, you know, just so all the frantic google searches by people who are trying to find something that they can blog, tweet and Facebook about today will lead to their websites. Traffic-generating content.

I guess the Google Doodle for the day also helped bring attention to the existence of an International Women’s Day to a lot of people.

But, seriously, if it were not for Daniel Craig, who as you would notice is a man, dressed up in a drag, the Interwebz would not have been buzzing about the 100th Anniversary of IWD as much. So men in drag sell. Got it.*

Women have a half day off in China every year on March 8. Just sayin’

I am still reeling from my vehement agreement with Stephanie Coontz who said in her interview on NPR that though women have undoubtedly made great progress since when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963), there seems to be, instead of “the Feminine Mystique” (or, as a cynic would argue, in addition to), “the HOT Mystique” nowadays:

Women are told, “Yes, indeed you can be anything you want, but, you also have to be hot while you are doing it!” And there is this tremendous pressure on young women… This can be very destructive to young girls when they are channeled into this sense. That, the way to empowerment is to display your sexuality.

What else? … Oh, of course, Texas. Can’t forget Texas. In honor of Internati0nal Women’s Day… Ok. I jest. Texas probably does not know nor care. Texas… sigh. I’ll let CNN tell you:

The state house approved the anti-abortion measure [that requires mothers seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound examination and listen to a description of what it shows] in a 107-42 vote Monday. And state senators backed a similar proposal last month. After a conference committee hashes out the details, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will have the final say.

To put everything else in perspective, here are some latest breaking news around the world:

Ivory Coast marches on International Women’s Day end in bloodshed

International Women’s Day Egyptian march met by men

Not a good day to google news with the keywords “International Women’s Day” really.

Sorry I have turned on my cynical pump full cylinder today. Turbo-Cynicism FTW! And really it is all my own fault. Nobody else to blame. I kept on seeing since this morning tweets that asked women to share their greatest accomplishments.

I thought long and hard. <– Elly, this one is for you. Who loves ya baby?!

I could only come up with “Gave births twice but only suffered acute birth pain for 15 minutes so probably did not count after all if you want to be all picky about it”. It’s that or “Managed to keep children alive longer than any pets i.e. fish I have had”…

Ok. Enough about me.

So… how’s everybody’s Fat Tuesday coming along?

* Don’t get me wrong. I love the promotional video for www.weareequals.org with Daniel Craig and Judy Dench narrating the facts and statistics. Here, I’ll prove it by putting the video right here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkp4t5NYzVM

I’ll take the one on the left to go

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I am letting it all out today.

What you are looking at is my butt. Well, half of my butt: I had to crop the top of my butt off so you cannot see my muffin top. Ok, so technically, I am not really letting it all out today. Just half out.

I took these pictures when I went to a Warehouse Sale for 7 for All Mankind. Because it meant the potential of buying jeans that did not have any stretch capability in them and allowed my muffin top to hang over the low-rise top like an over-risen bread dough for a whopping… WAIT FOR IT… 20 to 30% off, I proceeded to get jiggy with it, ~~struggle~~ wiggle out of my clothes, and strip nekkid right inside the Union Station. Only to notice later that there was a camera pointing right at the makeshift dressing area.

Did I scream and run away when I noticed the security camera? Nah. First of all, I took a picture of it. (Of course!) Then I felt sorry for whoever had to sit there and watch. Besides just at that moment, I noticed that my butt looked different in the two types of mirror they had there (as you could see for yourself): my problem area, as many of the diet programs would call it, looked decidedly less wide in one mirror than in the other. I was very excited about my discovery: My own magic mirror! I stared at my own butt, the one on the left, with appreciation. I committed it to the memory vault for future emergency use.

No. I did not buy the mirror on the left. I tried but they wouldn’t let me. The guy just looked at me like I was crazy.

What? Oh. Duh. Of course the one on the left is my real butt. That’s my story and I am sticking to it.

Like all of you here, I am ~~obsessed~~ fascinated with and intrigued by Search Terms.

Compared to some of the search terms that led people to the other blogs out there, Yes you know who you are, the ones that led people here are lame.

“Tiger balm in ass”. Funny but not jaw-dropping eye-popping funny. I don’t even want to know why people searched for that. OUCH.

I am also worried that people may actually be disappointed when they come to a page on my blog and realize that it is NOT what they have in mind, for example, when they typed in “Wedding Invitation” and they saw THIS.

Anyway, I have been noticing a trickle of people searching for “People of Walmart” AND “Muffin Top Belly” and landing on an old post of mine written when I first discovered People of Walmart with uber excitement.

It showed up again today.

Muffin tops.

Yeah. I have a big one of those myself. I KNOW that me getting rid of my muffin top would be one of the Top 10 Wishes on my husband’s wishlist. I don’t understand. I see my muffin top as a safe guard for our marriage. There is NO way I would want another person in this world to see my muffin top. So there goes the risk of me having an affair. Just sayin.

Food for thought.

You are welcome.

p.s. For more exciting key words that REAL people ACTUALLY used for their Internet searches and frankly, that make you worry about humanity, Elly over at BugginWord does a weekly column on Search Terms that led to her site (I like calling these things “Weekly Columns”, it makes us all sound more sophisticated, with our cardigans and fountain pens and stuff…)

Marge Simpson, the next Playboy girl? Magazine editors amaze me too…

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Marge Playboy girl

This is all over the news lately. Or at least, on the Interweb. Here is the part that made me laugh out loud:

New CEO Scott Flanders says the idea is to attract readers in their 20s to a magazine where the average reader’s age is 35…

So, let me get this straight: the 20-something male would 1) prefer to see a cartoon character naked 2) they would want to see a middle-aged cartoon character naked 3) they have otherwise NO options to see a cartoon character naked.

Seriously?

I googled by typing in “Manga girls” and I was inundated with tons of images I don’t want my boys to see. Care to imagine if I had used more specific key words?

manga girl

And say what you may, Jessica Rabbit is still the sexist female character, EVA. (Where’s Kanye West when you need him?!)

Maybe, just maybe, The People of Walmart has something to teach us?

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Scene 1:

There is this new website, People of Walmart, that’s gaining the buzz. (Heck, even The Bloggess mentioned them as “shit-I-didn’t-write-but-wish-I-did-because-it’s-kind-of-awesome” for this week…)

(Note: Time.com also wrote about it on August 31, 2009, the day after this post was originally published.)

Here is one of the most excellent specimen, in all its glory:

(Do check out the guy’s YouTube site as advertised on the back of his jacket… Did I? Of course!)

Like a guilty pleasure and inexplicable obsession, I gawk at the pictures on a daily basis ever since I was alerted to its existence, shaking my head, unable to avert my eyes away from the grotesque. The proverbial Train Wreck, and I am one of the Rubber-neckers.

I tweeted. Sent the link to everybody I know. “Hilarious. You’ve got to see this!”

Scene 2:

Last week Jezebel.com brought this to our attention:

Glamour Shocks Readers By Featuring Plus-Size Model’s Belly

Lizzie Miller by all means is a gorgeous woman. We all agreed. The reaction from female readers to Glamour’s featuring her, tummy and thighs and all, is spetacular yet not surprising.

I want to believe with all my heart that this picture is going to stop myself from agonizing over my body image, to convince myself that what I see in the mirror is good enough – I am not greedy. I don’t ask for “gorgeous”. I am only asking for “confident”. But despite being a gullible person when it comes to panhadlers, I, decidedly, unconsciously, took a cynical stance towards this whole “Rah Rah Big is Beautiful” self-congratulatory outbreak of celebrations in the cyber space.

And as usual, I feel guilty because I desperately want to do the right thing.

Scene 3:

I came upon this blog post by chance:

News Flash! Average is Beautiful. Then Why Am I Having a Fat Day?

“Jane” eloquently put in words what I could not have expressed. The witty title alone summed it up. Here is the part that resonated with me, hitting me like a bucket of cold water and an injection of warm vodka at the same time:

So I sit here. Feeling fat. And all this media coverage saying size 12 is beautiful hasn’t made me feel much better at all.

Although many would consider my self-critique of being overweight as insincere whining, “Is she backdoor-bragging? That bitch!” Let’s face it, I am Asian, and if I am not willowy, I am considered fat. Also, I am just better at hiding the extra pounds:

Control-top panty hose, body shapers, smoothers, I have come to accept this, are my friends.

But are they really?

We have come a long way since the Corset scene in Gone with the Wind, or have we?

*See “Hattie McDaniel: What We Don’t Know About Mammy” for a re-reading of the Mammy character if this picture unsettles you, still, after you have seen it so many times…

Scene 4:

Back to People of Walmart, and this time, we encounter “Pink Belly“…

Part of me naturally gawked and tzzked at the unsightly middle bulge, the Muffin Top of all Muffin Tops, wondering why anybody in their right mind would let it all hang out like this.

“OMG, does she really think that is attractive?”

Part of me though wanted to say, sincerely,

“I salute you. I admire you for the courage that I do not possess. You go girl! Be yourself! Say No to corset! And wear whatever the fuck your heart desires!”

The Absence of Alternatives

My therapy sessions…