Hmmmm.

The popular all-American toys turn out to have been created by “a full-blown Seventies-style swinger” with “a manic need for sexual gratification,” who based their design on his favourite adult dolls, according to a new book.

Jack Ryan, whose five wives included the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, is accused of staging wild orgies at his mansion in the exclusive Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air and surrounding himself with busty prostitutes hired because of their resemblance to Barbie.

The Yale-educated executive, who died in 1991 at the age of 65, used his office at the toy firm Mattel to take calls from a local “madame,” and liked to pay for sex with “everyone from high-class call girls to streetwalkers,” including “a very thin and childlike hooker”.

In Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, the author Jerry Oppenheimer claims that Ryan, who also created the Chatty Cathy talking doll, spent decades hiding the seamy private life that might have sullied Barbie’s squeaky-clean reputation.

More sinisterly, the book suggests that Ryan’s colourful sexuality played a formative role in the design of the doll.

“When Jack talked about creating Barbie, it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode,” Mr Ryan’s former friend, Stephen Gnass, reveals. “It was almost like listening to a sexual pervert.”

Oppenheimer reveals this, among other stories, in Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel.

Read  complete article here.

Apparently, Barbie was modeled after a German prostitute. Read here.

Who’s surprised?

Bride Wars reinforces catty and two-faced “friendships” between women in which women overtly and covertly try to sabotage one another.  The second layer of stereotypes involves painting these women as vapid and superficial creatures that are willing to fight over a wedding day, the day that “all little girls dream about.”

But their aggression toward each other isn’t their fault — they’re just women, after all, empty-headed creatures naturally prone to impractical fantasies and vicious rivalries.

Ugh.  Welcome to 2009.  As things change and we celebrate women like Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric and Campbell Brown, we are reminded how much stays the same.

Read Stephanie Zacharek’s full review here.

Beauty norms come and go.  As a byproduct of the cultural atmosphere, standards of beauty are bound to change as the culture changes.

Yesterday, Myra Mendible posted an interesting article on racial and sexual stereotypes and how the culture’s changing attitude and affinity for the backside is indicative of diversity and acceptance.

It may well be that America’s butt fling signals a growing acceptance of difference—a desire to broaden the repertoire of acceptable body types and beauty myths. If this celebration of fulsome booty helps women move beyond the self-hatred and anxiety attached to body fat or encourages ethnic pride in women whose bodies have historically been pathologized and denigrated—then power to the butt, indeed. But then again, in a consumer society, fashion trends are short-lived and the demand for novelty fuels profit. Will the buttocks be relegated to the margins of culture once more, disavowed and disowned by a fickle mainstream culture? Either way, I’ll still be dreaming of a time when (to loosely paraphrase Martin Luther King), women will be judged by the content of their character and not the size of their butts. Now that would be truly bootyful.

In light of the recent facebook controversy regarding photographs of breast feeding, I wanted to post an article from 2006.

NEW YORK – “I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third.

These readers weren’t complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine — yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains greater support from the government and medical community.

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.

One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.

“I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.”

It’s the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public — a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: “lactivists,” meaning those who advocate for a woman’s right to nurse wherever she needs to.

“I’m totally supportive of it — I just don’t like the flashing,” she says. “I don’t want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn’t want to see.”

Another mother, Kelly Wheatley, wrote Babytalk to applaud the cover, precisely because, she says, it helps educate people that breasts are more than sex objects. And yet Wheatley, 40, who’s still nursing her 3-year-old daughter, rarely breast-feeds in public, partly because it’s more comfortable in the car, and partly because her husband is uncomfortable with other men seeing her breast.

“Men are very visual,” says Wheatley, 40, of Amarillo, Texas. “When they see a woman’s breast, they see a breast — regardless of what it’s being used for.”

Babytalk editor Susan Kane says the mixed response to the cover clearly echoes the larger debate over breast-feeding in public. “There’s a huge Puritanical streak in Americans,” she says, “and there’s a squeamishness about seeing a body part — even part of a body part.”

The facebook ban isn’t as surprising as the controversy ignited by this 2006 cover of a parenting magazine.

It’s always amusing to hear people cite the “protection” of children and teenagers as a defense for banning images and actual breastfeeding.  I see more breast walking down the street, at a club, at the beach or in the media than I ever see on nursing mothers.

Lisa Latham, in Bitchfest, writes a great article (Double Life: Everyone Wants to See Your Breasts-Until Your Baby Needs Them) on the disjuncture and conflict between the sexual and “working” breast, the public and private breast.

In the end, whether the breast is feeding a baby, as nature intended, or pushed up in a bra, the female body has been and is concerned public domain.

The Miss Bimbo website made headlines back in March 2008.

A website that encourages girls as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure was condemned as lethal by parents’ groups and healthcare experts yesterday.

The Miss Bimbo internet game has attracted prepubescent girls who are told to buy their virtual characters breast enlargement surgery and to keep them “waif thin” with diet pills.

Healthcare professionals, a parents’ group and an organisation representing people suffering anorexia and bulimia criticised the website for sending a dangerous message to impressionable children.

In the month since it opened the site, which is aimed at girls aged from 9 to 16, has attracted 200,000 members. Players keep a constant watch on the weight, wardrobe, wealth and happiness of their character to create “the coolest, richest and most famous bimbo in the world”. Competing against other children they earn “bimbo dollars” to buy plastic surgery, diet pills, facelifts, lingerie and fashionable nightclub outfits.

The website sparked controversy when it was introduced in France, where it attracted 1.2 million players.

Dee Dawson, the medical director of Rhodes Farm Clinic, which treats girls aged from 8 to 18 who suffer eating disorders, said: “This is as lethal as pro-anorexia websites. A lot of children will get caught up with the extremely damaging and appalling messages.”

Susan Ringwood, the chief executive of Beat, an organisation that supports those suffering eating disorders, said that the website could make girls believe that weight and body size manipulation were acceptable.

The Miss Bimbo site was set up by Nicholas Jacquart, a French entrepreneur. He moved to Tooting, South London, recently and with a 30-year-old businessman called Chris Evans set up Ouza Ltd to promote the website in Britain.

From the way it looks, the site has managed to maintain it’s 1.2 million registered users or “Bimbos.” In fact, the site is offering several special promotions for 2009. Upon registering for the site, you can become a trendsetter, a socialite and find the perfect boyfriend. This allows you to become “Queen of the Bimbos.”

Jacquie O’Godless is an atheist, feminist, queer living in Los Angeles. She is a passionate activist heavily involved in politics and has spent time working on and off as a writer for local campaigns. She currently blogs for The Daily Profaner, a news blog for the godless and irreligious.

My click moment: My true understanding of feminism came after ending my monogamous relationship of four years. At this time, I came to understand the connection between hetero-normative society, patriarchal oppression and monogamy as the contractual ownership of another person. Since then, I have been a passionate advocate of polyamory as a feminist practice.

Favorite reading material: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Valencia by Michelle Tea, Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson and My Revolting Life by Penny Rimbaud.

Feminist Icon: Simone de Beauvior

Personal role model: Kathleen Hanna

My issues/concerns: Atheist visibility, exposing the relationship between judeo-christian religion and patriarchy, destroying class privilege and hetero-normative society, dissecting gender, and fighting for equal status for feminist men within the movement.

Favorite quote: “…the most intense pleasures occur in deep despair…” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Happy New Year!

To celebrate, I’d like to quote an excerpt from Anne Waldman, performance artist, poet and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. Her 31 page poem, “Fast Speaking Woman” from the book by that name is a lengthy mantra and tribute to every kind of woman and the many facets of each woman.

because I don’t have spit

because I don’t have rubbish

because I don’t have dust

because I don’ have that which is in air

because I am air

let me try you with my magic power:

I’m a shouting woman

I’m a speech woman

I’m an atmosphere woman

I’m an airtight woman

I’m a flesh woman

I’m a flexible woman

I’m a high-heeled woman

I’m a high-style woman

I’m an automobile woman

I’m a mobile woman

I’m an elastic woman

I’m a necklace woman

I’m a silk –scarf woman

I’m a know-nothing woman

I’m a know-it-all woman

I’m a day woman

I’m a doll woman

I’m a sun woman

I’m a late afternoon woman

I’m a clock woman

I’m a wind woman

I’m a white woman

I’m a SILVER LIGHT WOMAN

I’m an AMBER LIGHT WOMAN

I’m an EMERALD LIGHWOMAN

I’m an abalone woman

I’m the abandoned woman

I’m the woman abashed, the gibberish woman

the aborigine woman, the woman absconding

the Nubian woman

the antediluvian woman

the absent woman

the transparent woman

the absinthe woman

the woman absorbed, the woman under tyranny

the contemporary woman, the mocking woman

the artist dreaming inside her house

I’m the gadget woman

I’m the druid woman

I’m the Ibo woman

I’m the Yoruba woman

I’m the vibrato woman

I’m the rippling woman

I’m the gutted woman

I’m the woman with wounds

I’m the woman with shins

I’m the bruised woman

I’m the eroding woman

I’m the suspended woman

I’m the woman alluring

I’m the architect woman

I’m the trout woman

I’m the tungsten woman

I’m the woman with the keys

I’m the woman with the glue

I’m a fast speaking woman

water that cleans

flowers that clean

water that cleans as I go

II.

woman never under your thumb, says

skull that was a head , says

bloodshot eyes, says

I’m the Kali woman the killer woman

women with salt on her tongue

fire that cleans

fire that catches

fire burns hotter I go