Hilarious!

Check this out! I haven't laughed so hard in ages!

Fat is the New Skinny? I think not.

"Statistically, half of us must be homelier than average, but the ideology of self-esteem insists that 100% of us are attractive. Somebody is lying." (Aoki, 15).

I am really tired of Dove. I hate their campaign for real beauty. I think it's ridiculous. Like much lazy feminist theorizing, the crux of its argument centers on the idea that contemporary beauty ideals are exclusionary and unrealistic. Let's look at the first bit - exclusionary. If any of these feminists/Dove advertising executives were to grab a dictionary, they would find that an ideal is "a standard of perfection or excellence". Not everything can be perfect or excellent. Perfection and excellence exist as comparative concepts as does beauty. So if we were all perfect, perfection would cease to exist. My body is not the ideal and I have no problem with that. My body is not supposed to be the ideal. Why are we so mad that we are not being defined as idyllic? Are we all flaming narcissists?

(As a side note, I realize that the point here for many feminists is that this "tyranny of slenderness" (a phrase so overused I would classify it as a cliche) justifies the continued imposition of disciplining mechanisms of bodily control (Bartky). But, is that not precisely what Dove is selling - products to be used by women to alter/maintain their physical appearance?)

What really piques my derision is the ever-so-common invocation of eating disorders to justify the absolute necessity of women loving their bodies regardless of aesthetic standards. These tragic women, we are told, are so blindly obedient to the whims of the culture industry's call for size 0s that they have starved themselves into martyrdom. Quick, let's all revel in our beauty before we too contract eating disorders! I find it interesting and endlessly frustrating that feminist analysis so often thoughtlessly appropriates the bodies of other women to rage against the unfair treatment and judgment of their own bodies. It is also interesting that this line of criticism persists even as obesity rates continue to rise.

Also interesting and rather suspicious is the fact that the one group of people this overly inclusive new image of beauty excludes is those who meet the apparently unrealistic ideal - skinny people and supermodels. Perhaps this can be chalked up to our discomfort with the fact that their existence provides the undeniable proof that the “unrealistic” ideal is absolutely realistic – there it is.

I say to hell with the liberating potential of plus sizes. It is nothing more than theoretically indefensible bullshit. Plus, none of us actually believe the “we are all beautiful” propaganda no matter how hard we try. If we did, the rhetoric would disappear as it would have outlived its usefulness. So why (or perhaps more importantly, how) do we hold on to these notions of universal beauty when mere seconds of critical thought would reveal them to be total crap?

Aoki, Doug. "You Look Beautiful Just the Way You Are (But If I Looked Like You I'd Want to Kill Myself)"

Bartky, Sandra. "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power."

A Necessary Sacrifice

I don't think I love my kitten enough to give up masturbation.

Contradictions and Juxtapositions

White calls attention to both the endless, repetitive flow of television that works to knit all of its products into a seemingly unified whole, and the contradictions and juxtapositions embodied across different programs, within different programs and within commercials. Contradictory messages are simply accepted and absorbed into the larger flow of television and their incompatibility goes unrecognized. Susan Bordo examines this phenomenon in relation to advertising directed at women. She notes that “with a flip of the page or barely a pause between commercials, images of luscious foods and the rhetoric of craving and desire are replaced by advertisements for grapefruit diets, low-calorie recipes and exercise equipment (Bordo 199). As a result “bulimia emerges as a characteristic modern personality construction” as we are commanded to both indulge in endless consumption and employ self-control in denying desires (Bordo 201). Bordo notes that, in consumer capitalism, this same tension exists as individuals are required to both consume endlessly and deny desires to consume in order to produce. She further notes that of key importance to the continuation of the capitalist system is the masking of this contradiction, which is accomplished through advertising that demands we can ‘have it all’. Thus, as is seen in this magazine cover, we find images of slender women combined with headlines urging us to “lose 9lbs. this week” next to images of rich desserts. Perhaps due to the an endless and ever-increasing acceleration of images combined with a lack of distance, we lack the “heightened presence of mind” necessary to pick up on the obvious contradiction. There is no reflection, no “significant crystallization” allowing for the revelation of the obvious tensions embodied in such advertising.

Bordo, Susan. (1995). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

White, Mimi. Ideological Analysis and Television

Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Try as we might...

So, as I write, I am watching my first ever episode of Entourage. I am watching this because I was watching "Without a Trace" and when it ended, I realized I left the remote by the TV and I couldn't be bothered to get up to change the channel. Perhaps A & H are right; I am a passive automaton!

But, no! I will not go placidly into the realm of the drone! I am reading this text critically, and amid the references to women as meat and to the wimpy member of the group as the "bitch" of the crew, who should waltz onto the scene but a female body builder. Apparently the guy with the creepy (and in my opinion, ill-advised) mustache is "banging" her. She makes her exit and "the crew" proceeds to berate their friend for his clear homosexual-esque behaviour; I mean, she's practically a man!

Fen Coles proposes that female body builders represent a double drag. Muscles, gendered masculine and understood as belonging only and appropriately to men, are taken on by women. In so doing, the female body builder exits the realm of gendered intelligibility. But, the gender bending does not end here! In order to redeem herself, and regain the position of subject, the female body builder must subject herself to the ideological practices that constitute femininity, only she must do so in an extreme and exaggerated manner – she must be excessive in her performance of femininity (i.e. breast implants, skimpy bikinis, bleach blonde hair, over-the-top make-up).

The female body builder is a walking contradiction. She presents an excessive representation of femininity in conjunction with an excessive representation of masculinity. Her existence, her appearance, is shocking and tactile, but perhaps ineffective with regards to the exposure of norms, as she is largely passed off, as in Entourage, as a freak, a lesbian, or a hermaphrodite. The audience at large appears to lack the “heightened presence of mind” necessary to lead to any productive or critical reading. This seems true of many of the hyperbolized normative representations we have examined in class (i.e. 50 cent). How productive are hyperbole, excess, and shock effect if the vast majority of audience members simply either reinsert the subversive text back into a dominant narrative, or interpret it within a dominant framework which passes it off as “weird” and therefore not worth further scrutiny?

Coles, Fen. (1999) Feminine Charms and Outrageous Arms. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. New York: Routledge. 445-453.