Tag Archives: Perfectly Unperfected

The Timeless Anxiety of Acne

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My short Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny is up: Acne, the One Consistent Fear. Excerpt:

In many of my past columns at Healthy is the New Skinny, I’ve traced the history of our cultural obsession with thinness. When you read that so many of our contemporary worries (like losing weight, or being toned, or judgment and competitiveness) are less than a hundred years old, you may find yourself wishing you lived “back in the day”, when things were easier. Sure, women didn’t have the same rights or opportunities they do now, but they also didn’t have to worry about their body image, right?

Not quite. In American history, fashions have moved from extremely modest to quite revealing. But unlike in some parts of the world, we’ve never had a significant number of women who covered their faces. And because the face was always exposed, it’s the one body part about which American girls have always worried. As body historian Joan Brumberg has shown, teen girls in the 19th century didn’t worry about their weight; they never wrote in their diaries about how much they hated they thighs or hips or legs or tummies. But they did write about one familiar worry: their complexion.

Acne – pimples, zits, blackheads – has been the one great insecurity American girls have always had about their appearance. In countless ways, girls a century or so ago had it worse than we do now. They had none of the effective oral or topical medications we have to treat acne. And very few girls were allowed to wear make-up, as make-up was associated with prostitutes and actresses – or at least with adult women. There were far fewer options for concealing a bad breakout.

It was worse than you think.

Read the whole thing.

Beauty, effortlesssness, guilt and vanity

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My regular Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny is up: Guilt & Vanity. Excerpt:

Our culture raises girls with two totally contradictory messages.

On the one hand, young women learn very early that prettiness matters. Long before most girls hit puberty, they’ve learned that “cute” gets rewarded with attention and validation. No matter how reassuring well-meaning parents and teachers try and be with the message that “beauty is on the inside”, girls figure out that what’s on the outside really seems to count for a lot.

At the same time, girls are taught not to focus too heavily on themselves, or at least not to let it slip that they care very deeply about their looks. “She’s so vain”, or “She thinks she’s all that” are common accusations in school hallways (and, apparently, on the staircases at my college). Make it too obvious that you worry about your appearance, and someone will accuse you of being “shallow”. Sometimes, no one else needs to accuse you. When you find yourself obsessing on some aspect of your body (your hair, your weight, your skin, etc), you may beat yourself up not only for your imperfections but for caring so desperately about them….

Strong is Beautiful: a note on the WTA campaign

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A few people have written me about the Women’s Tennis Association Strong is Beautiful campaign. Featuring stylized action images of a variety of current and rising tennis stars, the Strong is Beautiful initiative both reinforces and challenges our stereotypes about women’s bodies.

On the one hand, these are athletes photographed in motion, doing what they do best, often drenched in sweat with faces fixed in concentration. These are powerful women; there isn’t a passive pose to be found. On the other hand, the players chosen are perhaps less than fully representative of the upper echelons of the WTA. The Williams sisters are conspicuous by their absence, and the Strong is Beautiful campaign seems heavy on long-limbed, high cheek-boned Eastern Europeans. (Then again, the Russian invasion of women’s tennis shows no sign of losing steam. This may not be as unrepresentative a group as first appears.)

In a post on Monday, Jeff at Feminist Allies admits to some ambivalence about the ads.

All of (this) could be a small step in the right direction. There is a stereotyped idea of what a beautiful woman should be, and “strong” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind–wouldn’t it be cool if we lived in a world where “strong woman” and “beautiful woman” were more intertwined conceptually? And yet: Why the emphasis on beauty at all?

The answer, of course, is that beauty matters. While culture shapes what it is we find beautiful, the fascination with beauty (in all sexes) is a human universal — there is no civilization that hasn’t valued physical appearance in one way or another. Telling young women not to care about their appearance (and suggesting that if they do, they are either “shallow” or “victims of a misogynistic cultural discourse”) isn’t helpful. Rather, we should be working to expand the spectrum of what is considered beautiful while making sure that beauty, for all its importance, is joined by other equally important priorities in young women’s lives.

Jeff briefly mentions my work with Healthy is the New Skinny and Natural Models LA. (Thanks, Jeff!) He’s right about what we’re trying to do, which is to create a more diverse understanding of beauty. That means producing new images and new sources of inspiration. It means rejecting the suggestion that the search for beauty is invariably a source of misery in women’s lives. The misery, we argue is linked not to the longing to be beautiful itself but to the particularly unattainable ideal that dominates our culture.

Obviously, being a world-class tennis player is also an unattainable ideal. But the glamorizing of strength, the celebration of sweat that has nothing particular to do with sex — that’s tangible progress. These were not images we had a generation ago. And it is an unmistakably good thing that we (and the young women we love) have them now.

Judgment and gossip and cruelty: new post at HNS

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My weekly piece is up one day late at Healthy is the New Skinny: Taming the Tongue.

Here’s the bottom line truth: we can’t build a better world for women if we don’t like women. Seriously. If you want to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you need to stop judging. If you can’t stop the thoughts, start with what comes out of your mouth. In your head and on your lips, trade the snarky remarks for compliments.

It’s not easy to be a teen. It’s not easy to deal with the crushing pressure from parents and teachers, the mixed messages about beauty and the body and sex and love. But you know what makes it 1000 times easier? Warm, supportive friendships with other women. What makes high school 1000 times harder? Rumors, gossip, and the petty cruelty…

Look, this doesn’t mean you have to be close to every girl in your school, or even like all of them.

But it does mean that you need to stop the judging. Start now.

You’re not vain — or if you are, that needs to be okay

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My Thursday post is up at Healthy is the New Skinny: You’re Not Vain. Excerpt:

In more than twenty years of teaching and mentoring teens around issues of self-image, I’ve seen that sometimes the biggest battle young people fight isn’t just to love and appreciate their bodies. Often, the biggest battle is to accept that we care so intensely about our appearance in the first place. We imagine, wrongly, that if we were “better” people we wouldn’t be concerned about what we look like. We imagine that we should somehow be magically immune from all the pressure from peers, parents, pop culture, and the fashion industry.

It’s an understatement to say that’s an unrealistic expectation!

Here’s the bottom line: part of loving yourself for who you are is accepting your feelings. And if sometimes you spend more time thinking about your weight and your looks than you do about the starving children in Africa, or about your faith, or about your English homework, that needs to be okay. Feeling guilty for how you feel is part of the problem we’re fighting against.

Yes, we all want to create a world where young people love themselves and love their bodies. We want to create a culture in which young people feel empowered to live out their dreams. We all want teens to be able to spend less time worrying about their bodies and how they look to others. But we’re not going to get there by dismissing the very real, very powerful desires so many of us have to be beautiful, to be desirable, or just to be accepted.

The Beauty Spectrum: changing how we talk about the body ideal

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I wrote last week about my work with Natural Models LA, Healthy is the New Skinny, and the Perfectly Unperfected Project. We debuted our PUP program at Placer High School up north last Wednesday morning. Featuring stories and images designed to inspire young people to think differently about beauty and the body, it was very well-received by the students on the Auburn, California campus.

In the comments below last week’s post, and in feedback I’ve had from many quarters since coming on board with the PUP Project and Natural Models, there’s been concern that we’re simply reinforcing beauty culture rather than dismantling it. There are echoes of an old argument in this, one that continues to rage in feminist circles even now. How should we talk to girls about their appearance? Should we who care deeply about young women’s self-worth encourage them to resist beauty culture entirely? Ask them to turn off “America’s Next Top Model” and throw away their subscriptions to Vogue and In Style? Should we make the case that the pursuit of beauty is guaranteed to end in tears, and redirect that energy towards worthwhile pursuits? Or should we recognize that like it or not, we live in a culture where appearance matters deeply to young women? Shouldn’t we be working to expand and broaden the understanding of what beauty is — and can be — rather than simply dissuading young people from doing what we know damn well most of them will do anyway?

I’ve chosen to work with an industry about which I have many deep and well-founded misgivings. But I’m doing so because I believe that fashion models are role models to millions of young women, and that it is through models themselves that we have a unique opportunity to reach girls with a message of self-acceptance. When you’re working with teens, credibility is everything; deservedly or not, models have a powerful credibility with that audience. Models tell us what beauty looks like, they tell us how beauty stands and walks and dresses and speaks. The obsession with thinness grows ever more extreme, and the bodies of models today ever more at odds with the reality of women’s frames. (Cindy Crawford, one of the iconic faces of the supermodel era, recently mused that she would never have been able to be a top model had the standards in place today been around in the 1980s.) But while some of us are deeply concerned by the emaciated images we see, a generation of young women is coming of age longing for the very bodies we find repulsive. (We did our own survey at Placer High School in advance of our visit. At this “average American” semi-rural high school, 80% of the female students expressed a desire to lose weight, and almost all rated the “ideal size” for a girl as between 0 and 4. Other studies show similar results).

In the face of this, we need models with counter-stories and counter-images. And we need a counter-language to go with it. Continue reading →

The “Perfectly Unperfected Project” comes to Placer

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I’m in a Holiday Inn Express in Roseville, California, a few miles outside of Sacramento. It’s almost 11:00PM, and I’m getting up in five hours to get myself to Sacramento airport, catch the first flight down to Burbank, and get to my 9:00AM conference time at Pasadena City College. I got three hours of sleep last night and three hours the night before. I’ll be catching up this weekend!

I’ve been up here for the last 36 hours to participate in the exciting launch of Healthy is the New Skinny, the latest initiative to take on the enduring (and worsening) problem of young women’s poor self-image. What makes HITNS unusual is that it’s a program that comes from within the modeling industry itself, growing out of a brand-new Southern California agency, Natural Models LA. The first program to come out of Natural Models and HITNS is the Perfectly Unperfected Project (PUP), which carries to high school students a powerful and inspirational message of hope, transformation, and practical tools for combatting the culture of destructive perfectionism.

I am a co-founder and co-director of PUP, and also serve as a professional consultant to both Natural Models and HITNS.

One of the co-owners of Natural Models, Katie Halchishick (herself a successful plus-sized model) was contacted a few months ago by a student at Placer High School in Auburn, California. This student, Kristin Close, wanted to bring Katie to come and talk about her experiences as a model and as an advocate for body acceptance. Katie, her boyfriend and business partner Brad, and I were working on other projects together, and we realized that the Placer invitation represented an opportunity to design a multi-media, multi-platform program to reach out to young people — but to do it from within an industry that holds such great sway over their lives. From that, PUP was born.

Today, our team of 18 — models, consultants, musicians — held two assemblies on the Placer High campus. We did separate presentations for the boys and for the girls, sharing with them stories and images of strength and hope and offering them a “counter-story.” Counter-stories are stories that run against the grain of pop culture and received wisdom; our chief counter-story is not just that “healthy is the new skinny”, but that with effort and partnership and courage, we can fight against oppressive perfectionism and the tyranny of unattainable thinness. Katie and Bradford shared their stories and their wisdom, as did a wonderfully talented plus-size model (and mother of two) from Seattle, Angela Jones. I served as emcee of the event, framing what was happening for the two enthusiastic (indeed exuberant) audiences, and other models from Natural Models interacted with the Hillmen (Placer’s mascot here in the Sierra foothills), answering questions and engaging with the students. A great new group — Coleman and Chris, whose first record is on its way out in 2011 — performed. Tears, cheers, and all that you would expect.

I’ll have more to say about Healthy is the New Skinny and the Perfectly Unperfected Project in the near future. For now, please check out our websites, and if you’re interested in what we’re up to, follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. And if you want to see reactions from some of the Placer students, check out this Twitter hashtag: #healthynewskinny.

It’s a big week for high schools: tomorrow afternoon at 3:00PM, I’m talking about young women, perfectionism, and body image at Arcadia High School.