How to have a beach body?

Another heatwave is coming to Central Europe and many people survive those hot days by going to the beach, swimming-pool or lake. And every year, starting from the first spring day until the last warm day of the year, girls and women (also boys and men) ask themselves: “How to have a beach body?” or “How to get a beach body in just a few days/weeks?”. There is this pressure by media and society to show the perfect body at the beach. In every TV show, in social medias or in magazines you can learn what to do, what to eat and what to buy (especially those expensive training programs who promote themselves with “perfect” looking bodies). People talk and judge about celebrities and their bodies (“Oh she gained weight”, “Oh she looks too skinny”...) and many girls are influenced by such gossip.

But it can be easy to have a beach body. There are just two simple rules:

           

           1. Have a body

           2. Go to the beach

So girls, in the middle of summer, enjoy yourselves and enjoy your life. You don’t go to the beach to show your body and to expect other people to talk about it. You go there to relax, have fun and cool off. The most important thing is: feel comfortable :)

Sunday is for Horizons: Barbie alternatives FTW!

The world might be becoming a better place as I've seen alternatives for barbies (or fashion-dolls as they are called not to offend Mattel) coming up in news and posts. Here you have 3 different approaches each dealing with one of the problematic aspects of fashion dolls:  

1) The oversexualized and over-adult looks of the typical fashion doll leads us to taking the make-up off the Bratz dolls. The results are adorable. More here.

2) The unrealistic body proportions of the fashion dolls gets us to the Lammily, the doll that looks like an average teenager. 

  

3) The ubiquity of whiteness among fashion dolls is such that the fact that in Nigeria the local barbie alternative - Queens of Africa - outsell the pink-obsessed blonde.

Sunday is for Horizons: Walt Disney's The Story Of Menstruation (or how not to do sexuality education)

Ever wondered how some educators managed to talk about puberty without talking about sexuality? Weird, right? Here you have an old Walt Disney gem somewhat explaining menstruation without ever talking about the intercourse and women as sexual beings...

To heal from that horror, here, have some more recent Swedish stuff, hihihi.

Sunday is for Horizons: body-fashion changes, but all bodies = good bodies

Just a reminder of how changing the fashion in women's bodies (!) has been so far. Like with the trends in clothing and pretty much everything else, the bodies that are now in were so out some time ago and vice versa.

So the only alternative to stay sane is to spit on trends from the third floor and go do your business!

See larger here

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Million Dollar Baby (2004)

#inspirationalmovies

This one might be too harsh to be inspirational. But you will have to judge that on your own. Million Dollar Baby (2004, Clint Eastwood) is a sports movie. A boxing movie. About hurt and suffering people.

As sports movie it goes pretty much as expected: we have a heroine who through hard work - mental and physical - gets to prove everybody how they were wrong about her abilities and character. Inspirational so far.

Even more, you get a story about several lives so empty and broken that the fight and success in the ring is the only way she perceives that allows self-realization and freedom. Then again, it's still brutal (and dangerous) fighting in men's world with other women... but who are we to question the dreams of well informed adults?

+ A movie where a woman in a central role is neither expect or made look conventionally pretty at any moment. Also, the sexist structures of the society (and sports!) are laid very bare.

+ The extremely multifaceted and talented Hilary Swank. Breathtaking!

- If you are sensitive to violence and not that into people having fist fights for fun (and money), the whole boxing context might result very crude and overwhelming.

Thinking bit: the Empowering Advertisement, the oxymoron

Depending on where you live and what media you consume, you may have seen more or less of this rather confusing genre of advertisement. But they are all over the social media the next day causing a debate among allies over their pros and cons...

Below you can find three examples that came out quite recently and can serve as good enough illustrations to the puzzle that they are.

+ They call attention on a topic - how gendering character traits, hobbies, and professions hurt people (and knowledge driven societies) - to audiences that never venture to read the latest outrage in the feminist blogosphere. Therefore, much good may be had if viewing such an ad would lead to a reconsideration of the behavior of parents, teachers, etc.

- They serve to sell the products, obviously. And even in this very small sample the relevance of the products varies greatly. All menstrual hygiene products  - no matter the brand, the type, or even if they are industrially made (see this great practice from Nepal) - are crucial for women to be able to get out of the house and lead an active and participatory life (google "dignity packs" for this).
Still, it's mostly Always toying with what it means to be girly without ever linking it to the product. Then the shampoo and shiny hair would still actually playing into the "be (even more) perfect (with our product) (because people may discriminate you less if your hair is shiny)" dynamics. And then Verizon who tries to get you to buy their wireless because they are concerned about the proportion of women in STEM. Slightly confusing. I'm all for corporate responsibility, but I don't need corporations telling me the status quo of the structural discrimination of women.
The action - apart from better perception of the products - that they offer are "inspire more kids to get involved with STEM" and "ban bossy [from your vocabulary as an adult qualifying the behavior of girls]". Nice, but far from revolutionary. And nothing for the already grown-up shampoo users, from what I gather.

- If they invert the traditional, discriminatory narrative, telling us - once again - that all the stakes are against them, the this is a stereotype ridden world where you will be called either girly or bossy, pushy, vain, and pretty over smart or brilliant. Much more emphasis put on that instead of alternatives. Not fun. At all.

- There are accuracy gaps. The truth is not all rosy, of course, but there are ways how - without inventing stuff - all these ads could've been made using a positive narrative of different femininities, different ideas of success (including interest for science, leadership roles, and careers in STEM for those passionate in that direction) instead of clashing traditional feminine with traditional masculine, insisting that the traditional masculine is much more valuable and perceived as more valuable... and promising an eternal fight (and frustration) for equality. Thank you very much, I already get that from the news!

+ On the other hand, provided that we live bombarded by advertisments, most of them extremely toxic and sexist, I much prefer any of the below than any disgusting Snickers BS on the "natural" sexism of a well eaten builder.

 

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Frida (2002)

#inspirationalmovies

There are many reasons to be obsessed with Frida Khalo. Her paintings, her life story, her activism, her style, her resilience... Frida (2002, Julie Taymor) offers a taste for all of it. It's a high-budget Hollywood interpretation, of course, and bound to be an interpretation after what's known about her life and what can be seen in her paintings through the prism of the director and many other people. And through the Frida Kahlo myth too, of course.

Nevertheless there are certain aspects of her life that are very clear.

• The use of personal, painful, often gendered experiences in creative expression, working through and with them (very similarly as Sylvia Plath, by the way). 
• The courage to embrace her roots and go beyond them at the same time. Her way of both painting and dress is clearly based on Mexican imagery, but then she takes it a step farther and makes it her very own.
• The wish to follow her desires, to act upon them. While this is not supposed to be always easy, there's no doubt that Frida's journey was an authentic one.  

Etc, etc... the internets are full of people - including us, of course - swooning over Frida's work and icon that the popular culture has turned her. Go, read some! But, whatever you read, keep in mind that, as somebody on tumblr said:

"Frida Kahlo was a disabled politically active woman of color who deliberately fucked with gender roles and don’t you ever forget it."

P.S. For the dessert, here's the story on her dresses: 1, 2.

Thinking bit: Bodies (the summer edition)

Again and again... We are bombarded with images of unattainable beauty standards and quite toxic ideas of beauty all day long. And just time by time somebody comes along and offers a (at least slightly) different message.

Meghan does not go as far as I'd like, though. There's still the wish to cash in on antagonizing skinny vs. curvy, implying that there's something wrong with being slim, using dancers of color as props, the fact that she is still conventionally pretty just bigger, and the pastel colors may just not be for you... But well, it's a pop video! Every little step towards a more diverse body-scene out there is welcome.

The tag line - Every inch of you is perfect, from the bottom to the top! - can, of course, be criticized due to the fact that it is exactly the pursuit of unattainable perfection that keeps many of us down, that the real win here would actually be accepting that each body is different and be happy and loving with the one you've got.

But take for what it is - a bouncy summery pop song - that may be just right for the moment when you decide to stop worrying and complaining about the body you live in. The moment to put on something you feel comfortable in and that's adequate for the temperature out there and have fun. Yes, with bikinis*, shorts, ice cream, and all of that jazz!

 * A great source of fatkini inspiration can be found reading Virgie Tovar and GabiFresh.
All bodies = bikini bodies. Have a swimsuit and a body? Put one on the other. Voilà, enjoy!

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Her (2013)

#inspirationalmovies  

There's (at least) two ways to interpret and watch Her (2013, Spike Jonze). The first one would be the anthropocentric obvious approach: for two hours your screen is filled with Joaquin Phoenix living a quite lonely life and experimenting with the first operating system with artificial intelligence. A bittersweet futuristic story for everybody concerned about the ways we use technology and build our lives around it.

But then there's the other side. A much more entangled and complex side. If you look closely enough  - as with everything, we all consume culture in an interested and biased way, not necessarily seeing and hearing the same message - there's a lot to be taken away from it. There's a whole conundrum of issues on body-ness (although in this case it's not about type of body but about absolute lack of it), on inequalities in relationship (imagine being with someone so much more intellectually capable that you cannot even imagine how they do the things that they do), on what having sex means, on jealousy and on wishing to be assured that our beloved are ours, on being with somebody very different than you are... and on what is to be considered a happy ending.

People at Feministing have had a lengthy conversation on this, claiming Her to be the most feminist film of 2013. Here's a quote just to entice you to both see the movie and read the whole thing, and in this order preferably.

"I’m a proud cyborg feminist, and part of what the means for me is that to be the authors of our own embodiment means thinking about technology as expanding what it means to be “real” rather than the ultimate artificiality. Samantha is a real person– and the fact that the very premise of the Slate article hinges on the fact that she isn’t really troubled me. Her resounding “fuck you!” to Theodore when he waxed insecure about Samantha’s personhood was a strikingly feminist moment, a cyborg-feminist one even, and one that ought to dispel most doubts in the viewer about her sapience.

I was also worried in the first half of the movie that Samantha would feel permanently inferior because she lacked a traditional human body; imagine my transhumanist heart soaring when she realized that her data-based corporeality was not only just as good as, say, Theodore’s body, but perhaps even better. It’s redolent of the way that people with body stigmas–be they trans, fat, PWD, or people of color–come to recognize our own inherent beauty and transcend the hegemony of, say, white/cis/thin beauty norms."  

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Tomboy (2011)

#inspirationalmovies

It may be very difficult for older people to admit, but the life of young - and very young - can be extremely complex. Classical literature is full of examples, but today's one is a recent French cinema gem.

Tomboy (2011, Céline Sciamma) offers a moving story about trying to fit in better in your own body while living in an extremely gendered world.

It will (well, it could, if you'll let it) get you thinking about:
- How little external appearance tells you about people. And how - at the same time - you should respect the signals people are sending. Even if that takes you into an uncharted territory (even beyond gender binary, uh oh).
- How much inner drama and struggle is brought up when you realize that you should make serious adjustments in order to fit in. Especially if you feel that you cannot share that with anybody. Especially if people assume that you are too young to have any coherent idea about what's going on.
- How beyond the "oh, children are so cruel" stands nothing more than the boxed thinking of the adults transmitting certain notions. You cannot expect little children - those people still just ordering basic ideas about human life - to question and bend the old toxic ideas right away. Adults should lead by example.

It's bittersweet, short, and very touching. What else do you need?

Thinking bit: Strip the (beauty) pressure

Our very good friend Smaranda (the one most responsible for the Inspirations e-book ) suggested that we share this here, and we salute the tip-off!

So, what this experienced and professional lady named Tracey Spicer is suggesting is... yes, taking it off! And not in pole-dancing-will-empower-you way, no. Instead it's about acknowledging how much time women (and men to some extent, yes, but that's a lesser order of magnitude) spend preparing their exteriors before they go and do things. And how many more things you can do if you decide to dedicate your time to things that actually bring pleasure, knowledge, fun, whatever...

The empowerment recipe here: rethink your time spent on grooming, ask why you do what you do and is it worth it, and then reclaim a bit of your utterly human freedom by shedding the unnecessary.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Girls (2012-)

#inspirationalmovies

This goes in the same way as Sex and the City (1998-2004). While you would like to hate it and tell everybody how shallow and untrue it is, you find yourself glued to the monitor. And being thankful that each episode is just about 20 min.

Again, this is mostly a story of how not to. And how we all do stupid things. And we all are somewhat anxious at times. While Girls (2012-) caused various storms in the US media bla-bla (well, see here where the series is compared with a 1925 hipster essay on emancipation and cliche formation, here, and here; and that's just one magazine that prides itself on going deep into pop phenomena), take it for what it is.
A story on being structurally privileged - go, google the whole thing about Girls lack of racial diversity, like this - and still very insecure. On being confused and very weird. Very weird.

Again and again, and it's impossible to repeat it too much, this is not role-model show. There are no such, btw. Watch it as an anthropological study on some girls in some place. I doesn't have to be representative. It doesn't have to be healthy. But it may take some stigma off from being weird, having mental health issues, dealing with your own body, being entangled in relationships that you know are no good, etc. The usual stuff.

The obvious bonus is that the creator of the series is a girl (Lena Dunham was born in 1986), so we can just relax and listen to her stuff. As an anthropology piece, we said.
Just to realize that the problem is not only the perfection, the girls that Courtney Martin describes as

"We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving… We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins… We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers… We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything." (from this book)

We also have the other end of the messiness and anxiety spectrum. Plus all the shades in between.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

#inspirationalmovies

OK, so this one has to be explained.

So, do we suggest that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks) can be a feminist inspiration? Yes. Is it that obvious? No.

First of all, the title of this musical and feel-good-fun-piece is totally misleading. It's not about gentlemen and what they prefer. This is a feature of what do girls want and how they get it.

Obviously, exaggerated and containing some not that inspirational puns (thinks of the 1950's gender ethos in general), but still it's them - the amazing and beautiful Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe - who move the script. And the solutions of the difficulties (there had to be, because no difficulties = no plot) come from their resourcefulness and intelligence. And their erotic capital, too, yes.

It is just anthropologically how a message of female supremacy emerges in a totally sexist setting. Not that we agree with any gender-based supremacies, but you have to admit the weirdness of the message. So here you have a wrongly wrapped anthem to blondes and brunettes getting what they want, both honestly and with some cunning. And almost never engaging in mutual slut-shaming while doing it, bravo!

Plus, of course the fact the both of them are curvy and believable-bodied. And below you can find an excerpt of some of the objectification of the male body going on in the movie, for a change.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

#InspirationalMovie

This week's offer is a growing-up feel-good. What you have in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008, Peter Sollett) is two rather marginalized young people melomaniacs stuck in toxic relationships (not with each other). And what it does is to follow them through a one night road trip around New York City in a capricious Yugo dealing with exes, friends, and strangers, and looking for a mysterious indie band.

Sweet? Yes. Cute? Yes. Believable? Well... Relatable? Defintely.

Empowerment lesson? It is completely OK much better being single than being stuck with people who hurt you. And while it doesn't mean waiting for the right one and such, it means that spending time with people that treat you well and appreciate you for who you are is the path to happiness.

A little + : Kat Dennings is not as skinny as most of the young actresses around, so, yay for at least some body diversity! 

Sex on the Map (from RFSU with love)

Sex on the map from RFSU on Vimeo.

"RFSU (Swedish Association for Sexuality Education) is the biggest organization in Sweden working with sexual and reproductive health and rights. The organization was founded 1933 by Elise Ottesen-Jensen and the purpose has always been a rights based approach on sexuality. RFSU is also focusing a lot on pleasure, for people to be able and have a chance to enjoy sex. With that in mind, it's important to work with issues around contraception, the right to abortion, sex education, STI's and so on.
In 2011 RFSU made this film, Sex on the Map, after having years of experience working with sex education in schools. The target group for the film is teenagers, mainly between 13-15 years old. This movie really captures how "the RFSU way" of seeing sex and sexuality. The film is 30 min of sex education. It's about everything from anatomy and the human body to feelings and emotions regarding sex. It focuses on the many types of sex you can have, not only penetrative vaginal sex. Throughout the film, there's a perspective on lust trying to communicate that sex is something good as long as it's consensual. I hope you enjoy it! Feel free to share (: "

Tove Larsson, board member RFSU
If you have any questions, e-mail me at tove.larsson (a) rfsu.se

As an additional material on anatomies and "normalities", the best explication of those things in a correct and understandable we have ever seen: Pussypedia (pdf) and Dicktionary (pdf). 

Bodies: Coming Out!

#bodypositive

If you would treat your friends as you treat your body,

you wouldn't have any left. 

The radical idea to come out about your body, letting everybody know that you know it's there, that you acknowledge it and that you will live with it. Just let that idea explode in your mind!

And, although both videos featured are about fatness, this coming out can be about any feature that you might have felt like keeping in closet, hoping nobody sees it. Let it out, love and embrace it!

Yes, that is hard. Yes, we have been brainwashed since forever. But try babysteps: 1, 2.

Both videos were found via It Gets Fatter!