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Body image : page 3.........
I can't change the way I look nor can I sit back and let that rule my life when I know in my heart that I'm a real girl.
It's just utter nonsense - this ideology that women who are pretty don't feel, don't have pain, or don't understand human conflict, because everything's just so dandy for them.
Charlize Theron - darkhorizons.com interview [Sept 21 2005] - referring to filmmakers recognizing her talent and casting her in roles she really wants - such as her new film "North Country" - a fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the US.
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"At the heart of it, the show is about why people hate themselves and how they are put in a box by others and by themselves," Murphy says.
..
.."Gay people can certainly relate to that in the looks classism that exists."
Each episode of Nip/Tuck, which Murphy describes as a Brothers Grimm fairy tale every week, begins with the query, "Tell me what you don't like about yourself." But, says Murphy, the show is not all dark. "It's about the powers of transformation. That's why we have a psychologist at the surgery.
"You can always make the changes on the inside that you want to make on the outside."
Nip/Tuck series creator Ryan Murphy
from article Six stitches under - By Mike Goodridge,
The Advocate, Sept 2, 2003
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 .. .. |
her
daughter Julia McNamara (Joely Richardson)
: Why would you want to mutilate yourself?
Erica : Age is what mutilates, Julia. You'll find that out soon enough. Cosmetic surgeon Dr. Sean McNamara” (Dylan Walsh) : But you don't need to do anything to your appearance to sell your books. You're an acclaimed child psychologist. Erica : That's not what sells books. Sex sells. paraphrased from FX series "Nip / Tuck" June 2004 [site] ...Nip/Tuck - Complete First Season [dvd].... photo
Joely Richardson is also Vanessa Redgrave's |
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Roseanne not only lost weight, but submitted to a permanent touch-up on her face. "Women especially are nicer to you when you're thin," she says, "absolutely. "It's so amazing, it's really depressing. You lose a lot of weight, you're always prepared for men to be nicer to you, but nobody ever tells you about the women."
from article Hollywood beauty was once skin deep. Now it's bone thin - by Luaine Lee
photo from Roseanneworld.com
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 .. .. "I have become a very involved member of the vagina army," Jane says. Because the vagina is a metaphor for self-love, for owning one's power, which is one's body." She says the nost revolutionary act we can take "is to stand within our bodies and say, 'Here I am. Deal with it!' When that happens, everything in the world will change." /// |
"I
don't mean to say this is an easy process," she concedes.
"I may be wealthy, white and famous, but I know how my life has been hurt because of my inability to like myself and cherish my body. "I don't want it to take 60 years for other girls." /// Fourteen years after retiring from acting, she's about to make a movie with Jennifer Lopez, Monster-in-Law. "I'm scared to death," she says. "I'm nervous about being 66 on a big screen in a country that doesn't value age. You don't just wave a wand and all the fears and self-consciousness go away. But I'm going to have a good time." from article The It Body, by Sara Davidson, O, The Oprah Magazine, May 2004 The Vagina Monologues / V-Day |
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BUST : You've been quoted before about how you were afraid of not being taken seriously if you were sexual in your act or even if you wore skirts on stage. Aisha Tyler : It's more about people looking at you and deciding that you didn't have anything important to say if you were attractive. It's funny because we are so fixated on beauty in this culture and at the same time pretty people, especially pretty women or sexualized women, aren't taken seriously at all.
Hopefully, we are at the point now where you can be funny and sexy and smart. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
BUST, Summer 2004 // photo from aishatyler.com
---Swerve: Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl - by Aisha Tyler
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I'm a tomboy beanpole? I can't use a computer, so maybe I'm a bit out of the loop. I don't know whether to be flattered or not flattered. The beanpole bit, is that good? Can you be a sexy beanpole?
Keira Knightley .... [imdb.com bio]
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 .. .. Lindsay Lohan : Sometimes. But people I admire like Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn and Ann-Margret, had beautiful figures. I don't like the fact that people my age are dealing with today's images, because they're not realistic, and people think that's how they should be presenting themselves. It's scary because these little kids are looking at you like you're perfect, and nobody's perfect. If you're willing to grow up in public, then you have to be yourself. /// Lynda Obst : Why do you think your generation is getting so much attention now? Is it because the older actresses are overexposed? |
 .. .. Personally, I think it would be nice if the studios went back to how they used to be when they protected their actresses -- and girls actually wore more clothing. That may sound hypocritical because I like to wear sexy things sometimes, but that's just because the only things that people consider sexy right now is what's out there. If sexy was brought back in the way that Marilyn Monroe of Brigitte Bardot used to do it, then it might be different. Lynda Obst : Do you feel pressured to dress sexier? Lindsay Lohan : Yeah, totally. It's like when people dress more covered up, it's like, "Oh, she's trying to be too old -- she's not dressing youthful enough." [Interview mag., June 2004] |
--..related page:....sexuality : teen/young adult : page 1~ ~ ~ ~
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Appearing in the new edition of More magazine in the US, Jamie Lee Curtis said that treatments like liposuction and Botox injections did not produce the results often claimed.
..
.."I've had a little lipo. I've had a little Botox. And you know what? None of it works. None of it," she said.
The actress, who once played a shapely aerobics instructor in the film Perfect and showed her breasts in Trading Places, called her personal beauty "a fraud".
"People assume I'm walking around in little spaghetti-strap dresses. It's the insidious Glam Jamie Jamie, the Perfect Jamie, the great figure, blah, blah, blah - it's such a fraud," she told the magazine.
She asked for a more honest photo-shoot to balance her public image. She also said showing her real body was part of her recovery plan for addiction problems.
..
.."In the recovery program I'm in for addiction problems, they talk about peeling an onion, exposing more layers."
[BBC News news.bbc.co.uk 21 August, 2002]
photos: More magazine / September 2002---I'm Gonna Like Me : Letting Off a Little Self-Esteem
by Jamie Lee Curtis---~ ~ ~ ~------
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Margaret Atwood - in her book Alias Grace
image at left from book: Support and Seduction : The History of Corsets and Bras
Tom Petty in a Nudie Rodeo Taylors jacket
related book: How the West Was Worn---
Lucy Liu was bullied at school - because she didn't look like a Barbie doll. The Charlie's Angels star confesses she was a "tomboy" as a youngster - and admits her short, black hair meant she stood out from the crowd. She says, "As a kid I was skinny with a bad haircut. I didn't have the blonde, flipped hair or the curves. "My mother used to cut my hair really short - I think she used a tea saucer, not a bowl! That's probably why I wear it so long today.
"When I was little I was picked on. The popular girls were all blonde - and I was as opposite to Barbie as you could get!" ... [imdb.com Celebrity News Dec 5, 2000]
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| I
used to sit on the sidelines and watch other women light up rooms. They
weren't stunning in the way that women are supposed to be, but they had
this beauty about them that I just couldn't pinpoint.
All I knew was that I was lacking in it. It was body confidence, I later found out - a confidence I embrace today, knowing full well how long it took me to find. When I was thirteen years old, something as minor as a pimple could leave me moping for hours. I wore heavy makeup to cover up my acne -- so much so that I could spend an hour in the bathroom before school to make sure every blotch on my face was hidden. |
 .. .. from Time Lost in Mirrors by Maria Pascucci article from Blue Jean Online |
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 .. .. "I think, in a way, it is the antithesis of glamour," Lennox told Primetime's Chris Cuomo as she previewed her photo exhibit in New York. The exhibit features 30 self-portraits. Lennox says she became so fed up with celebrity that she swore she'd never do another photo shoot, so she started taking photographs of herself. |
"I've
been very interested in aesthetic beauty, and most women are," she
says.
"Even young girls -- children -- we are encouraged to look pretty.
So I thought, 'Do I try to compete with this youth market culture that I'm in, or do I go the opposite way and show my fragilities, expose the fact that my skin is getting older?'" .... "I know I have to accept the process of age like everybody. And if I can still make music and be of some value, then that's a fantastic thing to do." ABC Primetime June 19, 2003
|
more on related page:....self-esteem / self concept~ ~ ~ ~
[publication date: Jan 2004]Rapunzel's Daughters is the first book to explore how and why hair affects the lives of American girls and women from all ethnic groups and from childhood through old age.
The book addresses the common issues women face as well as the differences brought by social class, age, religion, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and illness.
Using engaging stories about hair collected from a diverse sample of American girls and women, I introduce readers to issues of gender socialization; adolescent identity construction (including how it is affected by social class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation); power in intimate relationships; appearance pressures in the workplace; the pains and the pleasures of feminine attractiveness; and the tensions between aging, illness, disability, and mainstream ideals of femininity.
author Rose Weitz - in WMST-L: Academic Women's Studies List
from book cover: Rapunzel
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being blond
You got into Harvard Law?
Elle Woods: What? Like, it's hard?from movie Legally Blonde -
ReeseWitherspoon as Elle -
based on book by Amanda Brown
photo from Peekaboo:
The Story of Veronica Lakerelated autobiography:
Veronica~ ~ ~ ~
Being a blond makes you very ruthless, insane and self-centered. Sean Young
[On wearing a blond wig in Fatal Instinct]
[imdb.com bio] // photo from her site seanyoung.com
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Women on these [Jerry] Bruckheimer shows are the thinking person's blonds. They're just as sexy and girly as girls can be, but their personalities are like brunets stuck in a blond's body. I had a discussion about my character's blondness and her sexiness with Bruckheimer and ['Cold Case' creator] Meredith Stiehm. ...
My main thing was that she not apologize for her sexuality, not apologize for her femininity. ...
Blondness adds to an image of fragility. So I have to have more inner strength because of the assumptions that are coming my way.
Kathryn Morris
"[Jerry Bruckheimer] is definitely someone who considers sex appeal when making a TV show," Emily Procter says. "In someone else's version of 'CSI: Miami,' Calleigh's hair might not be down and there might not be an issue about it.." ... While filming the pilot, Procter said, she improvised a hair flip in one scene, which stopped the production for a 10-minute scolding.
"It was like, 'We just can't have that. It's not professional. Crime scene investigators wouldn't do that.' And I was like, 'Sorry, I was just trying to get it out of the way.' And then of course it ended up in the teaser for the pilot."
Poppy Montgomery, who played the lead in "Blonde," a TV movie about the life of Marilyn Monroe, was subsequently hired for "Without a Trace" without an audition. She imagines that blondness has helped her character, Samantha, get ahead in the FBI. "I think she uses it, because it's a male-oriented business. She uses it when she needs to, and she puts it away when she wants to be taken seriously." ...
"There's something sort of primal about having long blond hair. You feel like the wild woman. ... Why are we obsessed by blonds?"
all quotes from Heroines: the gold standard, by Michael Joseph Gross, LA Times, Sep 14 2003
Blondes
Now Exude Power LONDON (Reuters) - Farewell the dumb blonde. Now the fair of hair not only have fun, they also exude power. So says British art critic Joanna Pitman who studied blondes through the ages from Aphrodite to popstar Madonna for a book and exhibition on their startling evolution. "The dumb blonde joke seems to have disappeared. People take blondes more seriously," she said. |
Pitman..
said that in the 1950s the blonde message was all about sex.
"Then came the rise of feminism and there was a complete shift of emphasis with women standing on their own feet." And the right color can be a chart topper. "Madonna sells more albums when she is blonde. She certainly does change a lot. She has very hard-working hair," Pitman said. Pitman was inspired to write her book after she was bleached blonde by the sun while working on an aid project in Africa. She said people in Kenya "kept pointing at my hair. They believed it had magical powers." Pitman said: "I am now having a dark-haired winter in hibernation while recovering from the birth of my third child." But come the spring, she will be going blonde again to celebrate the launch of the book and exhibition. On Blondes by Joanna Pitman |
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[Is the way people approach you as a blonde different as to how they approach you as a brunette?] Yes. I felt honestly, and I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but I feel a lot of people kind of speak over me now that I am a brunette.
For some reason I feel more confident. I feel like, I, myself, speak out a little bit more.
As a brunette I feel more like myself. I feel a lot more comfortable.
As a blonde... it wasn't like a conscious thing, like, oh, this is how I'm known, this is just the image for the typical girl of pop genre music to have this blonde hair. I loved being a blonde, but you know, it's just on a whim, I decided to colour my hair.
..
..Mandy Moore**[DarkHorizons.com interview, Jan. 24, 2002]
photo from mandymoore.com~ ~ ~ ~
Fairly often, people get confused about the point of About-Face and think we are bashing the models themselves. ... We don't have anything against thin women. Actually, we don't have anything against any women.
..
..The whole point of About-Face is to try to provide a place where a woman's worth is isn't weighed in weight; where we begin a discussion where all of us participate in creating more inclusive, healthy images and messages about women. It's so radical, I realize...
When I produced the first poster with an image of supermodel Kate Moss from the Obsession perfume campaign, many people wrote graffiti on the poster that said things like "Leave Kate Alone," or "I think Kate is beautiful!" ....
It appeared that some people were completely unable (or unwilling) to separate the existence of Kate Moss the beautiful young woman from the very negative version of Kate that was the cornerstone of the Obsession ads. (Perhaps this is why advertising works so damned well. And why a shocking number of people think soap opera characters are real people.)
Calvin Klein's Obsession campaign took the beautiful Kate Moss and made her look weak and scared, cadaverously thin, and above all, sooo vulnerable. I would argue that never before had such an emaciated ideal been used to peddle product.
Kate is thin, no doubt, but there are plenty of photographs taken of her in the same period as the Obsession ads that show her in a healthier light. The Obsession campaign used severe lighting and vulnerable poses to elicit a very specific look. The finished product was completely manufactured.
At the time, I created a visual to illustrate my point. It juxtaposed two images of Kate Moss side by side in almost identical poses. The image on the left was one of the Obsession ads; the one on the right was from the "drink milk" campaign with famous people wearing milky mustaches.
> from article: Bear in Mind - It's Not About The Models by Kathy Bruin of About-Face [see site listing below]
> additional perspectives on Kate Moss and the Obsession ads by writer Mary Gaitskill on page: sexuality : page 2
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Mindy Cohn [who starred in series The Facts of Life] doesn't have to spend hours in hair and makeup when doing voice acting. "It's the best! You don't care what you look like as long as you sound right," she explains. "There's a different kind of camaraderie that I've noticed. I guess it has a lot to do with how you look and the vanity of [stardom]. When you're on a TV show it's like, 'Is my wardrobe OK? Is my makeup OK? Does she look better than I do?'
"You can't help but get caught up in that. And here it's just not about that, so there is a real sense of joy. You just go into a room and play for a while!" .. [tvguide.com May 25, 2000]
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