Originally posted at Proud2Bme.

“Are you sure you’re not hungry?” he asked with grave concern as chicken grease ran down his fingers and his chin. We’d just finished a rigorous hike and I was starving—famished, ravenous and slightly light-headed. I mean, really, we’d been cavorting, frolicking and climbing the local mountains in the summer heat for over 6 hours and I hadn’t eaten anything except for an apple. Maybe.

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” I replied. He paused mid-bite and questioned me with raised eyebrows. “I’m good--really,” I said sounding far too relaxed and nonchalant about something as serious as a meal after physically exerting myself as excessively as I had. But, nope, I wouldn’t change my mind. I was not going to let him see me eat, especially a greasy, messy meal like that. Mind you, this is the same guy I wouldn’t take a pee around. I’d turn the faucet on when I had to go really bad to make sure he didn’t hear me, otherwise I’d hold it until I got home. I know I wasn’t the only 17-year-old girl to pull a stunt like that.

If there was anything I’d learned up to that point, it was that girls and women don’t have bodily functions or odors (unless they’re created in chemical factories and mask your natural female body smells), and they aren’t supposed to be seen eating (unless it’s yogurt, salad or other “girl” food) or sweating (unless they’re sweating like women should—hello, female antiperspirant industry).

Fast forward to 15 years later:

“Are you going to eat that?” the student I had been mentoring asked with nervous excitement. “Yes,” I said awaiting the sweet taste of carrot cake as my fork hovered close to my lips. “In public?” she continued.

“Um, where else should I eat it? In the bathroom or the broom closet?” I laughed as I sank my teeth into the cream cheese frosting knowing perfectly well that those were considered viable options, ones preferred over this scenario—that of a woman eating cake out in public in broad daylight. I’m talking a slice of cake, not a bite of cake and not an entire cake. A slice of cake. On a Tuesday at 1 in the afternoon. There was no special occasion. I simply wanted some cake and I felt no shame or remorse about it.  Shame and guilt had led me to stuff myself in private after starving myself publicly one too many times in the past.

“Wow. I admire you. I wish I could do that,” she said slowly. I asked her what was stopping her and she went on to tell me about her mother, a woman who kept a scale in the dining room so she could look at it while she ate dinner and remind herself not to eat too much. And when it came to cake? Well, her mother always cut much smaller slices for the girls and reserved the big frosted pieces for the boys at the family party.

We continued to have lunch on campus between classes with a few other students for several weeks and each time I’d enjoy something sweet without embarrassment or great fanfare on my end. One day she sat down and said, “I have to tell you something.” She giggled like someone about to dish a shameful secret. “I went to my cousin’s birthday party over the weekend and when my mom handed me a thin slice of cake on a paper plate, I told her that I wanted a big one. She looked at me with surprise as I put the plate she handed me back on the table and grabbed one of the large slices. I felt great.”

“Over It” by Liz Acosta. For the full artist statement on this video, click here.

Tune in at 32:30– we barely scratched the surface. For more, join us on December 1 at 6:30pm and the rest of our panelists: Yashar Ali, Kalil Cohen, Jacqueline Sun and Shira Tarrant.

Listen here, beginning at 32:30: Melanie Klein, Pia Guerrero and Hugo Schwyzer on KPFK’s Feminist Magazine.

How many times have you looked at a model in a magazine or an actress on TV and thought, “Hey, that doesn’t look like me or anyone I know”? This group of students decided to talk back about the difference between media fantasy and their reality.

It is that act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject – the liberated voice.
–bell hooks

Let’s face it, we’re plugged into an awful lot of media. Sometimes we’re aware of what we’re consuming, like when we turn on the television, go to a movie or download a new song off iTunes. But much of the time it isn’t an active choice. Think about all the billboards and ads we’re subjected to without our consent. Add up the images from the voluntary and involuntary sources and you’ve got a tidal wave of images —and most don’t look anything like us or the girls we know. Several of the students in my Women and Pop Culture class decided they’d had enough-they were going to talk back to the media and tell them what “real” women look like.

What do you think? How would YOU talk back?

Originally posted at Proud2Bme, a revised version first posted at Feminist Fatale + cross-posted at Jezebel.

I wasn’t trying to make a political or intellectual statement when I decided to get rid of my television in college.

I was trying to send a message to my live-in boyfriend, the one who was perpetually tuned in to sports channels and too distracted by video games to do his share of household chores. My message was simple and practical. Like, hey, pick up your wet towel off the bathroom floor. Or, hey, time to make dinner for me.

I’d been a pop culture junkie since girlhood and when I broke up with the TV, I felt like my best friend and I had broken up. But I noticed something extraordinary in a few short months. For the first time since I was 8-years-old, I felt good about myself. I wasn’t as critical, meticulously evaluating and judging every inch of my body. It took me a few weeks to figure out how the usual “fat talk” had diminished.

I didn’t completely cut media out of my life. I still enjoyed movies, read a weekly tabloid or two, and of course I continued to be subjected to the usual onslaught of media messages on virtually every cultural space available; billboards, buses, check-out stands, the free “postcards” (ahem, ads) in restaurants etc. But just that one effort to minimize my level of exposure had produced some important results: an increase in my self-esteem and a broader, more inclusive image of beauty- one that was less defined by unrealistic standards and Photoshop.

I’d always known that I didn’t fit the cultural beauty ideal, but it certainly didn’t keep me from making endless dangerous attempts to squeeze myself into that narrow definition. But it wasn’t until I stopped watching television that I realized the monstrous amount of images I had been exposed to, their negative consequences and the incredible difference between what is expected and what is real.

Years later when I began teaching a college course called Women and Pop Culture, I wanted to create a similar experience for my students, an opportunity for them to come face-to-face with the barrage of unrealistic expectations that profit from our insecurities and the reality of female beauty. The result was a project called the Body Collage. Each student was required to fill a poster board with images of beauty from mainstream magazines. I took each poster and covered 2 walls from floor to ceiling and then photographed my students in front of this “empire of images.” The results were striking.

“The power of the body collage was, not to sound redundant, powerful. Being able to stand in front of the endless images of “real” women and realizing that I myself was the real woman, was beyond inspirational.”- Chandler R.

“My mom and I have probably have about 4 different (fashion) magazine subscriptions so each month as I browse through them I am shown what is the ‘ideal’ and what the media considers ‘beautiful.’ It was so easy to get these images because these magazines are half ads. The first section is just a parade of these women’s “perfect” bodies. Then there are the actual fashion spreads. Standing in front of the wall filled with these images was like standing in front of my months subscriptions. The only thing missing was the occasional article. It pretty ridiculous how these ads force and coerce people into believe that this is the ‘standard’. Seeing the bodies all put together only illuminates the fact that the size 0 frame is anything but normal, average or the ‘standard’” –Devin R.

“It made me upset when I looked at my finished collage and I didn’t even see one person who looked like me. I’ve always felt like I am the one who looks different and that there is something wrong with me, but I was wrong because I didn’t realize that these images in the media are fake and altered and in no way reflect what real women look like.- Charlene G.
“Looking at all the collages together,  you can’t help but feel overwhelmed by all the images that are plastered around you and it’s amazing how we think we can ignore it but we can’t.”- Diana S.

“When viewing the wall of images that the class created with everyone, I realized that not a single person in the room looked the way that all of the models did. It really emphasized just how unrealistic and altered the images really are. Everything from the models’ waist sizes, breast sizes, and perfect skin are in some way altered through Photoshop, the makeup they have on, or the extreme measures most models take to become so skinny. There was really no diversity, which is ironic because the United States is probably the most diverse country in the world. The high, high majority of real women were not represented in any of the collages, which shows how cultivated our media really is.” -Kaila M

“The wall of all these fake women that have been altered to look ‘perfect’ was an eye opener for me. None of the women in the class that stood in front of the wall looked like none of the women on the wall yet those are the images that are bombarding us to say how we need to look. When I was doing my poster I started to get mad of how I was cutting out all these women from all these different magazines and I couldn’t relate to none of them. I had a Spanish magazine were Latina women were being shown in it and it got me even more pissed because Latinas are known for having curves and not being stick thin yet every single woman I cut out was changed to look skinny and flawless.” -Maribel M

Originally posted at Proud2Bme, a revised version first posted at Feminist Fatale.

The image above was created with a sample of recent post titles, and the comments I found on those posts.

Gawker has 8 different blogs, each with a different focused topic.  Kotaku is Gawker’s gaming blog, and it’s little surprise that they also have a bit of a problem when it comes to women.  While in recent months the site has semi-frequently posted about the issues that women in gaming face, and the misogyny that’s usually allowed to run freely, their comment moderation shows a serious case of hypocrisy on the part of the editors.

While men are the majority of Kotaku’s writers (they compromise the entire daily editorial team), there are two female contributors who write occasionally for the site.  A majority of the comments on the bios of Leigh Alexander and Lisa Foiles comment on their looks, or belittle them for constantly drawing attention to the fact that they’re female.  (Interesting side note – neither woman writes the posts that deal with gender issues in gaming – these pieces are almost exclusively written by the all-male editorial team mentioned above.)  A comment on one of the women’s bios included a death threat which was visible for months before it was finally removed, and the user banned.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many options for gathering gaming news that doesn’t also include having to read through sexist drivel.  IGN, Joystiq, and Destructoid all have the same problem.  However, while a site like Destructoid makes a mockery of a petition against Duke Nukem, Kotaku asks why girl gamers don’t get respect, then retweets someone who reduces one of the female staff members to her breasts.  Oh, and the featured comment on one of the women’s latest posts was “Tits! Nice!”  Talk about a hostile work environment.

No matter what is written, no matter the topic, the focus always becomes their appearance.  On every one of Lisa Foiles’ recent posts, the majority of comments are sexually harassing, threatening, belittling, and just plain cruel.

Kotaku wants to draw attention to women’s issues in gaming and hear our thoughts but provide nothing even slightly resembling a safe space for us to do so.  If they are promoting comments that reduce their female staff to their cup size, why the hell would I want to register for an account to contribute to the discussion of “I’m An Anonymous Woman Gamer“?

My guess for the reason behind this completely contradictory attitude is that if they remove comments and ban users who contribute misogynistic comments on a daily basis, their readership will suffer. (Something that I don’t think any Gakwer blog is willing to risk after the redesign.)

Kotaku’s own commenting guidelines claim, “…break the rules, get off topic, start calling names, and you’re going to get banned.”  However, with a complete lack of enforcement, the “guidelines” are joke, and utterly worthless.

I went to Comic-Con this year; on Thursday, I attended a panel titled “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” a discussion of the implications of “sexy women” in geek/nerd culture, and how that may or may not be used to pander to men.  The panel consisted of moderator Katrina Hill and panelists Clare Kramer, Adrianne Curry, Bonnie Burton, Jennifer Stuller, Chris Gore (who almost no-showed), Clare Grant, Kiala Kazabee, and Jill Pantozzi.

I was excited for the panel, considering I am frequently frustrated by the media’s exploitative use of women (whether it be the host of a show, such as Olivia Munn, or booth babes at E3) to appeal to a market that they treat as exclusively male.  However, my expectations were quickly dashed when discussion of media literacy was tossed aside in favor of accusations of jealousy.  Bonnie Burton and Adrianne Curry mused that women who were critical of sexy geek culture in any way were just jealous, had no confidence, and were projecting their issues with self-esteem onto the women who felt empowered by walking the Comic-Con floor in a Slave Leia costume.

When Jennifer Stuller (one of the creators of the upcoming Geek Girl Con) suggested that women who criticized “sexiness” were more than likely deconstructing the media, and by extension a society that tells women their worth lies in their ability to appeal aesthetically to men, she was rebuffed by the other members of the panel.  Later, Stuller attempted to turn the discussion towards media literacy, to which Clare Grant responded that she doesn’t read magazines, therefore the media has no influence on her whatsoever.  Adrianne Curry added that women criticize one another “because we’re all a bunch of bitches.”

Attitudes such as “Slave Leia kicked Jabba the Hutt’s ass while wearing that bikini – that is EMPOWERING!” and “I can’t help it that some of the characters I like to cosplay as are scantily clad” were met with rounds of applause from almost everyone in the audience.  When the moderator mentioned that one of her friends posted a picture of her seven year old daughter wearing Slave Leia costume on Facebook, Adrianne Curry responded that there was nothing wrong with the human body, and that the U.S. is way too purtinical and prudish.

There were many disappointing moments that had me almost leaving the panel entirely, but nothing was quite so horrifying as the one contribution Chris Gore made when he finally showed up five minutes before the panel ended.  He took the stage, apologized for being late, and said “Hey, I’m here to represent all the guys in this room who want to stick their penis in every woman up here on this panel.”  There was nervous laughter and a bit of applause.  I don’t even need to explain how disgusting and problematic that is.

The only good moment during the entire hour, was when the moderator called out Seth Green, who was looking disappointed with the discussion, sitting in the front row of the audience.  Katrina Hill asked if he wanted to contribute or share his thoughts, and he unexpectedly took the mic for about fifteen minutes.   As Hill explained to the audience what the audience would know him from (Robot Chicken), Jennifer Stuller mentioned that she had seen him promoting media literacy for the Girl Scouts.  Seth responded that he felt media literacy is incredibly important in the ever-increasing, constantly-unavoidable, media saturated world we live in.  He described how celebrities hold tons of influence over decisions people make, whether it’s over what product to buy or what sources can and should be trusted, and that certainly shouldn’t be the case.  Green said that the media promotes a lot of “poison” and that girls, kids, and even adults need to know how to keep that poison from infiltrating the way you think, make decisions, and live.

When I returned from Comic-Con, one of the first things I did was go in search of that video.  It is amazing and here it is:

“Look! I married you a certain way! I like women who look a certain way! It’s my right to like women who look a certain way and I shouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life not being happy,” Brad exclaimed.

The retort from my friend Jasmine’s husband was a reaction to her staunch refusal to get ‘another set’ less than two months after removing the implants that nearly cost her her life.  For nearly a decade Jasmine endured numerous health complications that Western doctors claimed had nothing to do with her silicone breast implants.

Brad seemed different from her last fiance, which is why Jasmine married him. He seemed open-minded, kind, forgiving, gentle, nurturing, and accepting. When she sprouted a few stray gray hairs in her late twenties he urged her not to pluck them saying he loved her “wisdom hairs.”

Tim, her boyfriend a decade earlier, told her she was perfect and the “girl of his dreams.” Well, almost. She was the girl of his dreams except her breasts were too small and she’d be perfect if they were bigger. In fact he’d marry her if she’d consider breast enlargement surgery. Within a week Jasmine, then 18 years old in 1990, found herself under the knife. When she woke up the static and lifeless silicone orbs on her chest were much larger than what she had agreed to during the initial consultation. The consultation that came within days of her halfheartedly agreeing to consider them.

Jasmine was genetically tiny and naturally beautiful by today’s standard. Now she embodied the girl on the back of a trucker’s mudflap. Tim’s version of the perfect wife. As promised, they were quickly engaged and twenty-five-year-old Tim, the ‘hot guy’ in town, paraded her around like a trophy–until she had the courage to leave him for being emotionally abusive and controlling.

I met Jasmine a few years after her plastic surgery and we became tight friends. In numerous intimate conversations she confided in me about her implants and Tim, her body image issues, and her distrust of men. These conversations were plagued by a deep sadness and marked by intense insecurity and regret. With her striking eyes and “porn star body,” Jasmine commanded a lot of male attention, attention that she deflected and tried to avoid by dressing in ways that diminished her figure.

I was one of the only people that knew how uncomfortable this attention made her and how much she longed to have her original body back. Shortly after leaving Tim, she began looking into removing the implants. She was repeatedly told by male doctors that she would be ‘disfigured’ and that there was no sound reason to have them removed. That is until they began to break down inside her body and wreak havoc on her immune system.

By the time she began noticing her brittle hair and general dis-ease, Jasmine had developed into a smart, sharp-tongued feminist with a penchant for alternative holistic medicine and healing modalities. Eight years after the initial breast implant surgery, four years after finding her feminist voice, and two years after discovering massive amounts of hair shedding on her clothes and furniture, Jasmine fell off her mountain bike with her chest landing smack down on the handle bars.

She heard an audible tear and immediately knew one of her implants had torn. She went to her doctor and he blew her off, as did the countless doctors after that. They waved her off as an irrational, over emotional, and slightly insane woman. The following year she married Brad and within months of their wedding the symptoms of a ‘crazy’ woman began to increase.

She discovered that:

Studies have shown rupture rates to be 50% to 60% in silicone implants 10-15 years old,^[24] with one study showing a failure rate of 6% per year for the first 5 years, 50% at 10 years, and 70% at 17 years.^[22] Twenty-one percent of women in one study, following implant rupture, had silicone gel migration out of the fibrous capsule of scar tissue that surrounds the breast implant.^[24] These studies utilized MRI, which has been shown to be 74% to 94% sensitive and 85% to 98% specific in detecting implant rupture.

Over the course of the next year:

• Her hair had become so brittle that chunks would fall out, leaving bald spots on her scalp.
• Her face was permanently bloated.
• She developed large cystic acne in her lymph node areas of her armpits, neck, jawline, and the sides of her cheeks.
• Her digestive track became paralyzed and completely shut down. She was unable to defecate for a month. It took three weeks of daily colonic treatments to remove the compacted fecal matter.
• She also began to develop cysts, which turned into tumors around her nipples and across her breasts.

Most Western doctors declared the symptoms as unrelated and, again, chalked up her concerns to the rants of a highly paranoid and overly sensitive drama queen. Jasmine had to diagnose herself through her own research on Dow Corning’s polyurethane-coated silicone breast implants and heal herself (keep herself alive) to the best of her ability by seeking out alternative health care. Her research confirmed the source of her failing health as more and more women spoke out publicly and Dow Corning endured scrutiny for their product.

Despite her list of growing health problems, many doctors encouraged her to leave them in precisely because Dow Corning was under current pressure to remove silicone from the market. Their reasoning? Silicone implants feel better than saline implants and if she were to remove her silicone implants and replace them with saline she would look and feel less desirable.

Eventually, she found a doctor that not only agreed to remove her implants, but told her that if she didn’t have them removed she wouldn’t live to see her next birthday. After long discussions with her husband, her mother, and myself, she scheduled a removal date. I took off a week from graduate school, borrowed some money from a friend, and flew five hours to be with her.

Shortly after they were removed, Jasmine regained mental clarity, felt less scattered, her body became stronger, and she felt generally relieved. And that’s when Brad dropped the bomb on her.

“When do you think you’ll be ready to replace these with the next pair with saline implants?

At this point, Dow Corning’s silicone implants were off the market (only to be reintroduced in 2006, a decision that was deemed “sound” mere days ago). Jasmine made it clear that she had no intention of replacing them. She reminded Brad that he had been supportive of her decision to remove them and that he had taken vows to love her in sickness and in health. That’s when he retorted with his right to be with a large-breasted woman, like the one he originally married. Jasmine’s feelings of rejection and fear were confounded when they divorced a year later following Brad’s affair with a buxom hostess at work. She was mortified and depressed.

Not only did Jasmine’s marriage fail, she began to notice a shift in attention from men–attention that shifted away from herself and to women now younger than she with fuller bust lines. Despite the initial pressure into getting breast implants, her regret over getting implants and the fact that they nearly ended her life, she confided in me that there were several occasions in which she contemplated getting that next pair.

Jasmine’s story reveals many things. First and foremost, it demonstrates the incredible pressure girls and women feel to embody an unrealistic and dangerous beauty ideal. It also exposes the mental and emotional health risks and the incredible and painful risks women are willing to take in order to embody an ideal of perfection. Because in the end, as bell hooks proclaims in Communion: The Female Search for Love, being beautiful is about being loved. Girls and women understand from an early age that we’re primarily valued by the way we look and that if we can achieve this oppressive beauty ideal, we’ll be rewarded. In the words of hooks, girls and women strive to “make [themselves] over, to become someone worthy of love.”

Like more and more women, Jasmine became aware of the damaging fallout caused from pursuing a society’s singular beauty ideal. Her awareness was shaped by her personal experience as well as from her feminist consciousness, which was informed by the continued efforts of the feminist movement. But as hooks points out, awareness is not enough.

To solve the problem of body self-hatred, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new ways of seeing ourselves.

Editor’s Note: Last week the FDA stated in a report that breast implants are safe but will fail within 10 years. Here’s an excerpt from the report:

The longer a woman has silicone gel-filled breast implants, the more likely she is to experience complications. One in 5 patients who received implants for breast augmentation will need them removed within 10 years of implantation. For patients who received implants for breast reconstruction, as many as 1 in 2 will require removal 10 years after implantation. The most frequently observed complications and outcomes are capsular contracture (hardening of the area around the implant), reoperation (additional surgeries) and implant removal. Other common complications include implant rupture, wrinkling, asymmetry, scarring, pain, and infection.

Originally posted at Adios Barbie. Cross-posted at Elephant Journal.

On Monday, The Supreme Court announced their ruling in the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (representing the video game industry).  I was ecstatic.  Despite how often I write about the horrid depictions and unnecessary violence against women in video games, I’ve never called for their censorship.

To give a little backstory and context of the Supreme Court case, the law in California was an unprecedented restriction on media.  Films are self-governed by the MPAA, not the law, and it works.  An employee at your local theater who sells a ticket to an R-rated film to an underaged kid, is not criminally liable.  While, the video game industry has an equivalent with the ESRB, the law that Leland Yee proposed would hold cashiers and retailers criminally liable for selling an M-Rated game to a minor.  Especially absurd, considering the FTC report released earlier this year, that rated the ESRB as the most successful self-governing body in the entertainment industry.  X-Play’s Adam Sessler does a great job of explaining the ramifications of this law being upheld in his most recent episodes of Sessler’s Soapbox, available here and here.

There seems to be frequent confusion in the interpretation of my posts – that by expressing frustration with misogyny in the video game industry, that I have a problem with violence in video games, or I think they should be subjected to censorship.  It’s certainly not the case.  I find people like Jack Thompson, and Carol Lieberman abhorrent.  Using video games as a scapegoat, and making up information as you go along has potential to be incredibly harmful.  Leland Yee, is similar to Thompson and Lieberman in his views on video games (he certainly has a history of falsifying statistics), and almost succeeded in setting a federal precedent for restricting the freedom of speech.

I view video games in the same way I view every other form of media – with a critical eye.  Writing about Victorias Secret’s stupid ad campaign doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t be allowed to market their products, and writing about the incredibly sexist attitudes held by the video game industry doesn’t mean I think their games should be banned from sale.

In my first post on Feminist Fatale, I wrote that despite my disgust with imagery and depictions of women in media, I “believe in…having the right to publish.” It’s an opinion that extends to video games. I hope that by writing about video games, consumers will learn to demand better from the creators.  The writers, designers, and developers shouldn’t be forced to limit their creations by the government.