Month: September 2008

Starving for attention

Published by Danni Miller on September 23, 2008

Guest post by Enlighten Education NSW’s newest team member, Nikki Davis:

Looks like thin is no longer in. Skeletal is the new body ideal judging by the physiques of the female celebrities who are hot property right now.

I have to confess that I, and a number of my friends, were more than a little excited about the premiere of the new 2008 version of 90210. We were all huge fans of the original 1990’s series. The first ever episode aired when I was 13 years old and I was immediately hooked – complete with a huge crush on Dylan and a keen eye that followed the fashion choices of my new role models.

So I must admit that the thought of catching up with Kelly and Brenda again had me refusing to take calls from 8:30pm on the first night it aired.

And yes, it was fabulous to see Kelly and Brenda again (who were reunited at the Peach Pit nonetheless!).

However, I was very distressed by the new female cast who now play the children and little sisters of the originals. They are so thin. I am talking painfully thin. The lead girl “Annie” (played by Shanae Grimes) and her friend “Silver” (played by Jessica Stroup ) are excruciatingly skinny. As one of my mates so eloquently put it in her text message to me during the show the other night, “Watching this is making me hungry”. The characters must be hungry too as the only consumables we saw in Episode 1 were alcoholic beverages, coffee and salads (Annie had salad for lunch in the cafeteria, I guess you can’t look as tiny as she does by eating carb’s/protein/fat/non-vegetable matter). Why can’t teens on TV eat real food anymore? Even The OC had the girls eating burgers, fries, milkshakes and Thai takeaway….

One of the tiny stars of new series of “90210” – Shanae Grimes

Turns out my friends and I were not the only ones who noticed how thin these new stars are; a couple of articles have popped up on Entertainment websites claiming that “sources” inside Hollywood are reporting talks on set and at the network about the girls’ weight. One article even claimed that the male stars of the program are planning to stage an intervention with the girls as they never eat and the guys think it is unhealthy. Well if this is true, then go guys I say!

Below are pics of the old and new cast… the new photo doesn’t really show just how thin the young girls are in the series (perhaps they airbrushed them to be less thin for the pics?) but oh how the concept of a “hot body” has changed over time.

I grew up in the Supermodel era where Cindy Crawford reigned supreme. Cindy was a genetic freak (she was so strikingly beautiful) but her shoulder blades wouldn’t have taken an eye out – she had some flesh on those bones. In the late 90’s Kate Moss rose to fame and the fashion industry deemed the “coat-hanger” was the new body ideal. In turn, this lead Hollywood down the very thin, and the carb-less, garden path.

Researcher Botta, in the 1999 study on television images and adolescent girls’ body image disturbance, made the observation that “our culture’s obsession with the thin ideals is now played out in the media via models and actresses who may have eating disorders themselves, who may have personal trainers to help them maintain a thin body, and whose bodies, as portrayed through airbrushing and camera-angle techniques, may not even be their own.” What would Botta have made of 90210 – 2008 style?

Surely it’s not just me being alarmist, and surely the new “Beverly Hills waifs” provide just one example of how much worse have things become.

We are now seeing children as young as 8 hospitalized with eating disorders. Dieting, detoxing, purging…all have become normalized. I have been engrossed in the work of Courtney E Martin; her book “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters” really sums it up as she points out just how “normal” it has become to equate thinness, food deprivation and excessive exercise with success. Martin also looks at just how much time women spend thinking and obsessing about dieting and their bodies – is this what we want for our young women? To rate “thinness’ over wit, intelligence, talent, warmth? To waste their energy thinking about how they look in skinny leg jeans? No way!

I am hoping the backlash over the body shapes presented on the new 90210 continues to grow. We need to be speaking about this! We need to open our eyes and minds to a broader concept of gorgeous.

Because this look is killing us – literally.

Finally, on a lighter note, if you do still pine for your fix of 90210 (there are rumours of Dylan making an appearance so I can’t tune out yet!) or one of the array of other crappy American shows of this genre – do as my friend does in her share house with the four young women she lives with. Make Monday nights “90210 and cookies” night. Indulge in all the fun, fashion and cute boys without the starvation.

It’s much more fun.

It’s beautiful.

Wall of Shame

Published by Danni Miller on September 16, 2008

The healthy Beer?

What was Jessica Simpson ( who is not only the spokesperson for this new brand of beer but also an investor in the brewery that manufacturers it) thinking when she got involved in a range that obviously targets young female drinkers in the most irresponsible way?

The singer, 28, says in the campaign: “I work out and take care of myself. But I also like a cold beer once in a while. That’s why I made the smart choice with a smart beer. Stampede Light, it’s beer plus.”

Yes, it is light beer infused with vitamins…I kid you not. The company’s web site declares it contains vitamin B and is “made from pure spring water…geared towards the health-conscious.”

Take Me On The Floor

Australian Rock group The Veronicas (twins Jess and Lisa Origliasso) are heavily marketed towards the tween demographic. They have a highly successful clothing range for girls aged 7-16 which is sold at Target stores and are regular cover girls for tween magazines. In recent interviews, the twins have acknowledged that fans as young as four go along to their concerts: “For our last record (their debut, Exposed: The Secret Life of the Veronicas) we were surprised by the age demographic it appealed to – we had kids as young as four coming, but adults as well,” Lisa says.

What will their devoted tween fans make of their new single “Take Me On The Floor”? The film clip is simply soft-porn. Shots of the now almost obligatory girl on girl kissing, lots of gyrating and close ups of thighs being groped…the lyrics include an incredible amount of heavy breathing (do they suffer from asthma perhaps?) and the mantra “I wanna kiss a girl, I wanna kiss a girl, I wanna kiss a boy, I wanna … ” The dancers meanwhile writhe uncontrollably as they all “take each other” on the dance floor ( all this at 9am on Saturday morning TV, before I’ve even had my Coco Pops!)

When asked about the move towards highly sexual lyrics in their new album “Hook Me Up ” when the album was first released way back in October last year in an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, Lisa offered this:

I think in the music world today that (sex) is a very big part of all songs…You can’t really listen to one song on the radio that isn’t referring to relationships or that whole thing. Every song seems to be about that, it seems to be driven by that. I don’t think this is any different. It’s just a fun song. You know, you can interpret how you want to. But I think kids are a little bit more wise these days … I mean kids have boyfriends when they’re 12. I didn’t have my first kiss until I was 15,” she adds, with a laugh. “

So Lisa wasn’t ready for her first kiss until she was 15, but children nowadays should be ready for anything much earlier? And sorry, but unless I am missing something this new song is not about a relationship at all, the opening line states: “I barely know you…”

My 9 year old daughter had a Veronicas t-shirt.

It’s been binned.

Ralph magazine makes me ralph

Ralph maagzine hit a record low (and that is saying something!) with their pictorial of ex-Big Brother “star” Brigitte this month. She is posed in scanty lingerie, proudly exposing her fake breats – on a bed surrounded by children’s cuddly toys, with a baby’s dummy in her hand! One can only assume readers are meant to be aroused by her child-like appeal. Disgusting. Devastating.

And, what sage advice does she offer to readers? When asked what she would do if she became PM she offered this: “I’d probably give everyone free boob jobs. I think guys would appreciate the girls getting them.”

Seems our work is far from done…

Raunch=Empowerment? Think again…

Published by Danni Miller on September 10, 2008

Guest post by Enlighten Education’s Victorian Program Director Sonia Lyne:

Why is it that popular culture has now connected the sexual excitement of men with the “empowerment” of women? Why is attaining sexual power through stripping, fishnets and mimicking porn stars seen as the only way to be desired and desirable? Why is sexual power an attribute that we value so highly?

Many women today are preoccupied with their bodies and looks and have forgotten about the power of their minds. We live in a world today that is saturated with products, services and advertisements selling us the idea that we need to always look “perfect” and appear sexually available.

We are inundated with images of women that are not reflective of how women really are. We continually see a cookie-cutter stripper/porn star version of “sexy”. Real female sexuality can be far more contradictory, complex and interesting. Real female sexuality is not solely focused on being “eye candy” for men.

80 Year old Hugh and Paris. Is enticing “Granddad” really liberation? For whom?

Many young women feel defeated and engage in self loathing because they cannot live up to this “Hugh Heffner-esque” ideal. Ariel Levy’s insightful book Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, looks at the new breed of so-called “empowered women” who are really only being sold a type of male centered pseudo empowerment and buying into their own sexualisation and objectification:

Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were “burning their bras” and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?

What was almost more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and — often — women who edit magazines like Maxim and make programs like The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild. This new raunch culture didn’t mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We’d earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture, where men had been enjoying themselves all along. If Male Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”

Just one look at the “Girls Gone Wild” brand reminds us that this raunch obsession has indeed become mainstream. In our hyper-sexualized culture, to gain attention even very young women will adopt stripper-like dance moves and bare all. How telling are the song lyrics to the hit song ‘I Kissed a Girl”:

“This was never the way I planned
Not my intention
I got so brave, drink in hand
Lost my discretion…

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it…”
( I Kissed a Girl, by Kate Perry).

It seems for this girl the act of kissing another girl had more to do with the drink in hand and the coquettish desire to provoke her boyfriend than any real pressing sexual urge of her own. Teen girls tell me it is now almost passé to engage in a girl-on-girl kissing session in front of the boys at parties. One girl I spoke to explained it thus: “Getting smashed and then getting it on with a girl friend used to be a guarantee of getting attention at parties, but now the boys expect more. They’ve seen it all before. Now it’s like, ‘yeah, yeah, whatever’.”

A recent essay titled “The Pornification of Girlhood” by Melinda Tankard Reist, published in Quadrant Journal (JULY 2008 – VOLUME LII NUMBER 7-8) delves into this concept and highlights the disturbing home truths about the effect this is having on even our young women and girls. Tankard Reist writes:

…the movement for women’s equality was overtaken by the movement for sexual license-the sexual revolution. To be free has come to mean the freedom to wrap your legs around a pole, flash your breasts in public, girls-gone-wild style, or perform acts of the oral variety on school- boys at weekend parties in lieu of the (as traditionally understood) goodnight kiss. In an age of “Girl Power”, many girls are feeling powerless. They are facing unprecedented social pressure, their emotional and psychological well-being at risk in ways never before imagined…

To quote[Joan Jacobs] Brumberg: ‘We have backed off from traditional supervision or guidance of adolescent girls; yet we sustain a popular culture that is permeated by sexual imagery, so much so that many young women regard their bodies and sexual allure as [their] primary currency.’ ”

Sexual allure as our primary currency? It is disturbing that it has come to this.

Postsecret

Published by Danni Miller on September 4, 2008

I am a HUGE fan of Postsecret. I am not sure if you know about this community art project but an American man started leaving random notes asking strangers to send him a postcard sharing their secrets with him.

It started a phenomena and is ongoing. Selected cards have been turned into beautiful books and his web site posts some of the many hundreds of cards he receives from around the world each week.

I love this Youtube clip that features some really uplifting Postcards…many deal with beauty, friendship and the relationship between mothers and their daughters.

Enjoy.