Whitney had no problem stripping down for a good cause, joining Love Your Body Day founder and Hollywood NOW president Chenese Lewis in promo shots for the event. NOW launched the Love Your Body campaign in September 1998, and this year’s festivities take place October 22nd through 24th.
While Whitney will fulfill her hosting duties in Hollywood, NOW encourages women around the country to “say ‘no’ to twisted beauty standards and hazardous advertisements by holding rallies, pickets, house parties, classroom discussions and more.” Who could say no to a body-positive house party?
And though Whitney’s known for being a “Top Model,” she’s more than just a pretty face. As a 2010 ambassador for the National Eating Disorder Association, she’s been pretty vocal about the same messed up media images we get riled up over at About-Face.
The girls pose for another Love Your Body promo shot.
Even after appearing on E! News recently to promote the NOW campaign, she wrote on her blog, “I do wish that they had female hosts who were at least size four, but they do have all the latest info and are quite informative. As a matter of fact, I think that they should hire me. LOL but I am a little biased.”
Whitney also spoke out about that whole “Top Model” teeny-tiny waist controversy we told you about. “Tyra supports women of all sizes as long as they are healthy,” she said in a press release. “I do not fault her for her reaction to seeing such a tiny waist. She had a similar reaction to seeing Toccara‘s enormous breasts. Tyra remains a leading figure in the fight for body equality in the fashion industry.”
I’m not sure whether I can agree with that, but it’s hard to disagree with her awesome attitude.
Stay tuned for future updates on this year’s Love Your Body Day.
Eating disorders as entertainment? E!'s "What's Eating You?" isn't exactly "Keeping Up With the Kardashians."
Interested in watching a girl eat ant-covered food out of the garbage? Or how about a guy who continually chews and swallows entire packs of gum? Stellar entertainment, right?
It may sound like a “Fear Factor” ripoff, but it’s actually “What’s Eating You?”–the E! network’s new eating disorder reality show.
Oh boy.
The always-classy E! (“classy” as in, “I can easily name three of their resident stars who have starred in homemade sex tapes“) is promoting its new show as if it centered around a bevy of circus freaks.
Unfortunately, the “bizarre rituals” described in the network’s press release aren’t wild and wacky stunts, but just a couple of the “extreme habits” exhibited by participants on the new show.
So what the reality genre is sorely missing is an exploitative exploration of mental illness? Not really. We already have “Celebrity Rehab,” “Hoarders,” and a slew of “True Life” episodes documenting the anguish of addiction, obsession, and more. But this is about eating! And it’s on E! Surely it couldn’t be a bad idea!
Judge for yourself. Executive Producer JD Roth swears that “this show really is about the incredible fortitude and strength of people with intense obstacles to overcome, and how they strive to get their lives back on track.”
E! should stick to what it does best and continue only exploiting those who ask for it.
Really? Then why does the lengthy first paragraph of the press release about this show chronicle the gory details of each person’s disorder with the perverse glee of, as Hortense at Jezebel.com brilliantly asserts, “a carnival barker”? I’m surprised the statement doesn’t start with “step right up!” and go on to announce the participants alongside the bearded lady.
Personally, I’d like E! to stick to what it does best and exploit only the people who actually asked for it (i.e. the Kardashians of the world). Let’s leave the real issues to those actually qualified to present them tastefully.
Proenza Schouler's new ad campaign features a model who seems to have misplaced her waist.
Flat abs, lean legs, perky breasts: these fashion industry staples have been mandated so long, you can pretty much expect to find them on any straight-size model. But what’s the newest must-have on the runways? A teeny-tiny, impossibly thin waist.
Obviously, this trend isn’t a new one (ever heard of a corset?), but recent media hype has drawn a lot of attention to the trait.
If you own a TV and have ever found yourself “accidentally” surfing the CW network (Yeah, I DVR “Gossip Girl.” So?!), you’ve probably seen promo ads for the upcoming season of “America’s Next Top Model.”
While it’s never exactly been a stellar representation of realistic beauty (a handful of plus-size girls and a season’s worth of petite ones does not a diverse show make), “Top Model” may have finally gone too far.
In the video below, cycle 15 contestant Ann shows off her unbelievably itty-bitty waist (J. Alexander’s hands successfully touch when wrapped around it). It’s surprising Tyra Banks doesn’t have to wipe the drool off her chin, given the awe-struck expression on her face.
The commercial is only 21 seconds long, but it does a pretty efficient job of planting the seeds of some seriously distorted beauty ideals. Does 6’2″ Ann really have that miniature middle naturally? Maybe. But it’s still disconcerting to see that “regular-thin” is no longer the modeling world’s gold standard. The hosts’ mesmerized gazes pretty clearly convey that to get ahead, it helps to have almost unfeasible body parts. Great.
Jumping on the “oh my god, is that for real?” bandwagon is fashion line Proenza Schouler. In the company’s new ad campaign (seen at the top of this post), a model quite literally disappears when viewed from the side. Too much fun with the eraser tool in Photoshop? An unfortunate angle? Does it matter? Either way, this is the image designers Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez chose to project to the world, and it’s not healthy, beautiful, or for that matter, humanly possible.
While it’s wonderful to celebrate all the various eccentricities that go along with having a body, putting one on this high a pedestal can be seriously damaging. No amount of Spanx or sucking in will ever get most women the waist these fashion moguls are fetishizing. And it doesn’t matter one bit. But that doesn’t change the fact that swarms of style-savvy girls will buy into yet another unattainable aspiration.
UPDATE: Tyra Banks sat down with PEOPLE Magazine yesterday to issue a lengthy apology for the new “Top Model” promo.
“The passionate response the trailer has evoked proves that the message to promote and celebrate all different — healthy and natural –- body types has resonated with our viewers and I’m so proud of every one of you who voiced your opinion and participated in this conversation. I have experienced body image scrutiny from one extreme to the next –- as an awkward, extremely thin pre-teen who couldn’t gain weight no matter what I did, to later being slammed by the media for my fuller, curvier frame,” Tyra said.
“Driven by these personal experiences, I am committed to expanding the definition of beauty which includes ALL shapes, sizes and proportions, from skinny to curvy and everything in between. It’s about women telling the world to KISS their –- skinny, wide, droopy, flat, cellulite-covered or FAT -– you know what!”
Don't let that embarrassed look fool you. Nikki Blonsky plays it fierce in "Huge."
As promised, I tuned into Monday night’s series premiere of “Huge.” And despite all my powers of positive thinking (It’s written by Winnie Holzman! It stars a Golden Globe-nominated actress! It couldn’t be worse than anything else aired on ABC Family!), I was skeptical.
I mean, seriously? Overweight teenagers don’t feel ostracized enough? Now they need to be specifically segregated in a prime-time melodrama that could potentially incite audiences to laugh at, not with, the central characters?
Okay, so maybe my snap judgments shouldn’t come from a place jaded by years of destructive media consumption.
“Huge” isn’t necessarily what I thought it would be. Sure, it centers on the lives of teens and staffers at a weight-loss camp. And yes, the opening scene does involve Nikki Blonsky in a grandiose burlesque, revealing her (gasp!) cellulite in all its swimsuit-clad glory. But whatever fears I had of the show poking fun at the plus-size characters were essentially eliminated by the end of the hour.
While this isn’t the second coming of “My So-Called Life,” “Huge” has more to offer than its marketing campaign would indicate. The ubiquitous image of Blonsky awkwardly and apologetically clutching her abdomen in yet another swimsuit on the show’s promo posters is not at all indicative of her character, Willamena.
Hayley Hasselhoff as hot girl Amber.
Blonsky plays Will as a confident, conflicted and complex teenager. Hayley Hasselhoff is just as compelling to watch as the camp’s resident hot girl, Amber, and Gina Torres’s role as camp director Dorothy Rand is far more profound than the stereotypical evil dictator she appears to be at the first episode’s onset. Add in sure-to-be teen heartthrob Zander Eckhouse as fitness trainer George (the real-life son of “Beverly Hills 90210” legendary dad, James Eckhouse, a.k.a. Jim Walsh), and the cast proves to be pretty solid.
Overall, yes, “Huge” can veer into sappy territory (this is ABC Family, remember?), but it doesn’t take away from the show’s appeal. And more importantly, this isn’t an offensive exploration of weight (“Starved,” anyone?) or a corny PSA promoting sensitivity toward heavy teens. It’s just a decent show that handles a potentially touchy subject with grace and humor.
Ugh, great. Thanks a lot, “Huge.” Now I have yet another show to DVR every week.
ABC Family will surely be stirring up controversy next week (this is nothing new to the network; have you seen “The Secret Life of the American Teenager“?!) when it premieres the new comedy/drama “Huge” starring Hairspray‘s Nikki Blonsky.
The show centers on Blonsky’s character, Willamena, a rebellious teen banished to weight-loss camp by her parents.
Based on Sasha Paley’s book of the same name, “Huge” follows the lives of the campers and staff as they (according to the official ABC web site), “look beneath the surface to discover their true selves and the truth about each other.”
Though my schmaltz detector tends to go off any time a show explores teens exploring themselves (in the spiritual sense, not in the American Pie sense), “Huge” has some great things going for it.
For one, the series is written by Winnie Holzman and her daughter Savannah Dooley. Holzman is one of the mega-geniuses behind ’90s cult phenomenon “My So-Called Life,” and that earns her some serious points. Not to mention, she also penned the book for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire.
Blonsky has already proven she can hold her own, taking on the role of Hairspray‘s Tracy Turnblad, originally made famous by Ricki Lake. Plus, Hayley Hasselhoff stars alongside Blonsky, and who doesn’t want to see The Hoff‘s daughter in action?
We’ll be tuning in to ABC Family on Monday night at 9pm to catch the series premiere. If you do too, let us know what you think. I’ll be posting a recap next week, as well as an interview with Blonsky, so make sure to check back!
The Kardashian sisters peddle QuickTrim diet supplements despite "loving" their curves.
When the reality show “Keeping up with the Kardashians” debuted in 2007, I remember being very happy to see that Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian represented a curvier body type.
Thanks to the Kardashian sisters, young women could finally be proud of having hips, breasts, and a butt.
Unfortunately, Khloe Kardashian has been plagued by pregnancy rumors in the media lately, due to a slight weight gain.
Always blunt, Khloe “defended” her weight gain by admitting to US Weekly, “I’m not pregnant, I’m just fat.”
Though the Kardashians have always claimed to love and embrace their curves, they are now endorsing a weight loss supplement called QuickTrim. It seems as though the Kardashians have fallen prey to Hollywood’s narrow standards of beauty.
I think the Kardashians’ endorsement of QuickTrim sends a confusing message to young women. While the Kardashians claim to represent a curvier body type, by endorsing a diet supplement, they are just buying into Hollywood’s standards of thin.
Kourtney, Kim and Khloe Kardashian strut their stuff.
Maddy Bohannon hales from Menlo Park, California. She is senior at the University of San Francisco and will graduate with a B.A. in Communication Studies and a minor in Psychology. She is a self -professed human pop culture trivia dictionary (she’ll be happy to be your celebrity trivia lifeline on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”). In her free time, Maddy can be found flipping through the pages of celebrity tabloids and or enjoying all of what the wonderful city of San Francisco has to offer (AKA, the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market, Golden Gate Park, and Bi-Rite Creamery).
Kai Hibbard after her experience on "The Biggest Loser"
They laugh, they cry, they shed half their body weight!
Okay, admittedly I have never seen a full episode of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” but apparently, I’m in the minority. Since 2004, viewers in more than 90 countries have watched overweight contestants swap unhealthy habits for wholesome lifestyles, often emerging as toned and taut finalists vying for the ultimate clean-living reward: cold, hard cash.
While the contestants clearly and very, very literally work their butts off for the glory of being crowned “The Biggest Loser,” the breakneck speed at which some shed pounds can often seems too good to be true.
And apparently, it is.
Body Love Wellness founder Golda Poretsky recently spoke with Season 3 finalist Kai Hibbard about her experiences on the hit show, and Hibbard’s side of the story isn’t pretty. Nor is it anything like the warm and fuzzy accounts I’ve heard from “The Biggest Loser” fans who tune in every week.
Hibbard exposes a long list of behind-the-scenes transgressions, but the most startling is that participating in “The Biggest Loser” led her to develop an eating disorder.
You can read the full three-part interview at Poretsky’s site (warning: it’s full of potential triggers for anyone struggling with an eating disorder), but below are a few choice quotes:
“There was a registered dietician[sic] that was supposed to be helping [the contestants at the ranch] as well…but every time she tried to give us advice…the crew or production would step in and tell us that we were not to listen to anybody except our trainers. And my trainer’s a nice person, but I have no idea what she had for a nutritional background at all.”
“It gave me a really fun eating disorder that I battle every day, and it also messed up my mental body image because the lighter I got during that TV show, the more I hated my body… I do still struggle [with an eating disorder]. I do. My husband says I’m still afraid of food…I’m still pretty messed up from the show. It doesn’t help that when I go in public…the first thing they usually ask me is ‘what do you weigh now?’”
“I feel…that I have a responsibility to counteract some of the harm that that show does. Because I took a piece of being that problem, I now own a piece of being the solution…When I have people come to me crying, telling me how hard they work and how they log their food and how they’ve done everything they could and [they ask] ‘Why can’t I lose 12 pounds in a week like you?’ I feel a responsibility to get out there and go, ‘You know what? Sue me if you want to, NBC, but I’m telling these people, I didn’t lose 12 pounds in a week. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t a week. And even when it looks like I lost 12 pounds in a week…I was so severely dehydrated that I was completely unhealthy.”
Those are some serious allegations, and whether or not you believe them is up to you. But to complicate the sticky situation further, Kai promotes a line of diet pills and gushes about them on her web site.
She claims she lost weight “without exercising or changing my diet!” Ugh. Isn’t this contradicting every reason she might have had to expose the harsh extremes on the set of “The Biggest Loser”? If you’re speaking out against the show because you “feel a responsibility” to divulge the dangers of overboard weight-loss tactics, what are you doing promoting an appetite suppressant?
But as Poretsky points out on her site, “She may think that weight loss is an appropriate goal, and still be offended and harmed by her treatment and the treatment of her fellow contestants.” Good point. And something to think about next time you tune in to watch a too-good-to-be-true TV moment.
The concept of Jessica’s Simpson reality show “The Price of Beauty” has great potential: an A-list celebrity—famous for being overly-scrutinized in the judgmental tabloids—travels the world, learns about what’s beautiful in other cultures and the lengths people go to attain this so-called beauty, and shares those findings with American girls who need some self-esteem boosting.
Jessica Simpson & friends meditate on VH1's new show "The Price of Beauty"
But after the premiere on VH1, I’m not impressed. The show’s trailer looks promising, but the first episode missed the mark.
In the show’s first episode, Simpson and her two friends, both of whom are in the music and fashion industry, travel to Thailand where they are led round Bangkok by their “Beauty Ambassador” (an obviously-westernized Thai model who fits all the American molds of beauty) and learn about what’s considered beautiful in Thailand.
They learn about ideals of inner beauty from Buddhist monks, get intense Thai massages, and go to a rural village in the north where women elongate their necks as a sign of beauty. The trio also learns that beauty comes at a price—they meet a woman whose skin was permanently burned and deformed thanks to skin lightening creams. Fair skin is treasured in Thailand—a contrast to the dark skin-seeking Americans—because it represents upper class. This part of the episode is the only touching and teachable moment of the show, and it is very poignant.
“The Price of Beauty” has all the ingredients of being a powerful program, but aside from the couple of remarks Simpson made about dangerous lightening creams, it doesn’t fully connect the dots. Simpson doesn’t say, “Wow, I bet fake tanning is just as bad for my skin,” or “Wow, beauty is really in the eye of the beholder because in our country no one cares about neck-length.” The lessons aren’t emphasized enough.
If the rest of the season is like this first episode, “The Price of Beauty” will be more about three famous friends and their escapades in foreign places than about beauty. Simpson and her cohorts represent the typical, ignorant American tourists. She wanders around Bangkok in short shorts, cracks up uncontrollably during Buddhist mediation, and gags loudly at the food served at a local market. While I want to applaud Simpson for all the soul-searching she’s doing to enlighten self-conscious girls in the U.S., she is embarrassing herself and offending other cultures.
I do hope this show inspires young people to realize what’s considered beautiful in one culture isn’t in another, and I also hope Simpson herself grows and I hope this show enlightens HER. Even though she has slight moments of clarity where she realizes her own dangerous and ridiculous obsession with beauty, she still wears impossibly high heels all over the country (even though she says they’re uncomfortable) and still remarks on how much she wants a boyfriend.
The show has the potential to represent a refreshing take on Hollywood beauty standards and hopefully young viewers will at the very least realize that one of the most seemingly perfect women in the world feels insecurities. I just hope in the next episodes, the show connects the dots and connects to its viewers. We all need to become more conscious of society’s beauty standards and really question why we consider beautiful things beautiful.
Here in my hometown of Vancouver the main part of the Olympic Games might be over, but people are still talking about it. During the Games I was fortunate enough to attend three figure skating practice sessions. I’m a huge figure skating fan, but getting to follow its biggest event so closely made me think about how strong the pressure is on skaters to conform to traditional ideas of what it means to be masculine or feminine.
For one thing, figure skating is one of the only sporting events that calls the women’s event a “ladies” event, thanks to the sport’s regulators at the International Skating Union (ISU). So while you could buy tickets to women’s curling, women’s hockey, and women’s biathlon, your figure skating tickets would be for the ladies’ short or long program. Until fairly recently, women singles skaters weren’t allowed to wear pants in their programs. In Ice Dancing, women skaters are still required to wear skirts, and men aren’t allowed to wear tights.
Skater Elena Sokolova's cutesy nickname may distract from her skill
The “ladies” label and costume requirements contribute to the trivialization of women figure skaters’ athletic ability. One example of how this trivialization occurs is the tagging of skaters with cutesy nicknames by commentators, as Russian figure skater Elena Sokolova was when Dick Button called her “cupcake”. Unfortunately, the name stuck.
>And just as women figure skaters are pressured to appear as feminine as possible, so too are male figure skaters policed into conforming with ideals of manliness.
The quadruple jump has been a kind of holy grail of men’s figure skating, but under the judging system that was implemented after the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, the points skaters get for a quad are limited, and this opens the door for skaters who don’t have the quad to beat those who do. We saw this happen in Vancouver when Evan Lysacek beat out Russian skater and former Olympic and World Champion Evgeni Plushenko to take the gold medal.
Going into the long program Plushenko argued, “You can’t be considered a true men’s champion without a quad [quadruple jump].” Former world champion Elvis Stojko also weighed in, calling the night of the free skate: “The Night They Killed Figure Skating”.
As a skating fan, I can concede that discouraging skaters from attempting a quad jump could be a problem. However, it’s dismaying to see what could be an interesting and civil debate disintegrate into personal attacks based on skaters’ ability to conform to an arbitrary idea of “manliness.”
Another US skater who found himself in the public eye is Johnny Weir. Weir has been criticized in the past for being too effeminate and flamboyant,but during the Olympics two Quebec announcers for the French-language channel RDS took it to a whole new level. The announcers were forced to apologize for homophobic comments they made after Weir’s Olympic long program, wherein they suggested he should be made to undergo gender testing and joked he should enter the women’s competition.
The combination of artistry and athleticism involved in figure skating makes it unique among the winter Olympic events. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to police athletes’ gender. Worrying about how many rotations on a spin or whether someone two-footed the landing of a jump is one thing, but spreading homophobia and trying to pigeon-hole athletes into strict gender codes doesn’t help the sport; it only limits athletes’ ability to express themselves and fully utilize their talents.
Jillian Michaels, the in-your-face trainer from NBC’s extreme weight-loss competition “The Biggest Loser,” is facing not one, not two, but three lawsuits over the “Maximum Strength Calorie Control” diet supplement she endorses. Three separate women have filed lawsuits claiming that the pills are ineffective and potentially dangerous.
Despite the claims on the box, these pills will not make you look like this woman.
That the pills don’t work is no surprise—have diet pills ever worked?—but a lot of Michaels’ fans have been expressing disappointment that she would endorse such a product in the first place. Michaels has always claimed to be anti-pill, instead insisting that diet and exercise alone should be enough to make any body into, well, her body.
To those who have lost faith in their fitness hero, I can only say this: if you are surprised, you are not paying attention. Someone who endorses The Biggest Loser’s wildly unhealthy combination of undereating and overexercising (contestants would often intentionally dehydrate themselves to shed pounds) pretty obviously doesn’t have anyone’s best health interests in mind. But because the narrative spun around The Biggest Loser is one of hope and change and reinvention and finally being the person you always wanted to be and blah blah blah, it’s understandable how audiences, especially those with their own body concerns, eventually come to put trust in a figure like Michaels.
So what does it mean when a trusted fitness guru with a culturally ideal body tells you it’s OK to take a pill? Well, you’re probably going to take a pill. And that’s why I have absolutely no sympathy for Michaels in this situation. She’s being irresponsible and she knows it. She’s participating in a cultural exercise that puts a failure to achieve an “ideal” body squarely on the shoulders of an individual. She’s perpetuating an impossible ideal and she’s lying about how to reach it—she’s lying by insisting that it can even be reached by the average person.
Michaels has dedicated her life to building this body, but tells dieters that they can achieve similar results through a pill.
What her popularity masks is that fitness is her job. The reason she looks the way she does is that she dedicates her entire life to it. Her world is a gym and a carefully planned menu of appropriate foods designed to give her those arms and those legs and those abs. She doesn’t take those pills and she knows that taking those pills isn’t going to help you, yet she tells you to take them anyway because it’s going to put dollars in her pocket and in the pockets of countless executives in suits whose interests begin and end with how much money they made this quarter.
To the women who took these pills with the hope that they would be the end of a struggle: I feel for you. I hope that you will one day go to the gym because it makes you feel strong and not because it might make you thin. I hope that you find peace in the body that you have been given.
To Jillian Michaels: I hope that one day you realize the influence that you wield, and that you choose to use it for good rather than to sell yet another fruitless, harmful dream.
