Salon.com > Body Image

Old ladies who didn’t love me

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Isn’t it soon for me to be getting arthritis?” I asked my orthopedist. I assumed I had a young person’s pain: an injury, or maybe a cyst.

“No,” he said, then checked my chart again for my age. “No, not at all.”

At 36, I had been preoccupied by my age, and this didn’t help. I’d been looking at every woman’s neck to see when the accordion stretch of the chin would kick in. Could I stave it off a few more years? Had I blown it by not being skinny, so that I couldn’t later gain five pounds to smooth out my wrinkles?

But it wasn’t just about my appearance. With each passing year, I counted all the things I could no longer do: be an athlete, be a model, be a ballerina. It didn’t matter that I never aspired to these things. The things I had aspired to do, like write a novel and be a young mother, were also undone. (I am a mother, but not a young one.) The world and its opportunities were closing like a window. I felt like I was choking.

And even as I thought of this, I knew the basic existential dilemma: Thinking about age wouldn’t make me young. And worse, I would never be younger than I was now. I was fairly accomplished for my age: I’d traveled and known many interesting people. I’d been in love with the wrong guy. I’d been in love with the right guy. Everything seemed right on schedule. But I was weighed down by the truth of time, that it’s coming for all of us.

The mainstream myth about eating disorders

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:28:00 +0000

For National Eating Disorders Awareness Week—which starts today—the Renfrew Center, one of the best-known eating disorder treatment facilities in the United States,is sponsoring a new campaign. Called “Barefaced and Beautiful,” it's encouraging women to post photos of themselves on various social media without any makeup. The point is to ... well, they sort of lost me on that. I think the idea is to display pride in one’s natural, unadorned self, the idea being that ... you don't need to ... adorn yourself ... with an eating disorder?

I’m being intentionally dense here. Obviously the idea was to touch on the role of appearance dissatisfaction in eating disorders, using something plenty of people wear — makeup — as an entry point for talking about the larger issue. (Certainly it’s more on target than cryptically posting the color of your bra on Facebook for breast cancer awareness.) And for something like a week designed to raise awareness about eating disorders, you need a campaign that's simple, accessible and attention-grabbing. But not only does the no-makeup rally willfully ignore the myriad reasons women wear makeup in favor of a one-dimensional shame-based explanation, it treats bodily dissatisfaction as the cause, not a symptom, of eating disorders. And if we keep the focus of eating disorder conversations on women’s bodies, we’re doing exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves.

Naked models offer a body image reality check

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Nothing like the sight of two beautiful naked women in an embrace to get attention. And the message is powerful. In a pictorial for Plus Model magazine, the lushly gorgeous Katya Zharkova entwines with a far thinner female whose face is obscured. The caption reads, "Most runway models meet the body mass index physical criteria for anorexia."

There's more. As the magazine asks, "What's wrong with our bodies anyway?" it flaunts some sobering statistics. "Twenty years ago the average fashion model weighed 8 percent less than the average woman. Today she weighs 23 percent less," and "Ten years ago, plus sized models averaged between size 12 and 18. Today, the majority of plus-sized models on the agency boards are between a 6 and 14." With figures like that -- both the numeric and female kind -- it's not surprising the story became an instant meme.

Why women need fat

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

On any given day, more than half of women in the U.S. are on a diet. In hopes of slimming their figures, millions take on Atkins, South Beach, Lean for Life or Hollywood 48. Some never eat after 5 p.m.; others only eat Subway sandwiches. While the diet industry has a less than noble reputation, it's clear that American women, far more than men, remain obsessed with dieting. But what can evolutionary biology tell us about gender difference and eating habits?

In a new book called "Why Women Need Fat," Steven J.C. Gaulin, an evolutionary biologist, and William D. Lassek, a retired doctor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh, explain the science behind women’s unique relationship to their diet. In the book, Lassek and Gaulin make a surprising argument for a more positive outlook on fat and illustrate the differences between the ways women and men gain weight. Think of it as the evolutionary biology diet.

What I learned as a nude model

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

My naked pelvis was 3 feet away from an 80-year-old grandfather wearing a sweater vest. Men who attend art classes must be the world’s primary consumers of sweater vests; it’s like they’re in Joseph Gordon Levitt costumes all the time. The muscle in my leg twitched as the old man squinted at me, stared at his drawing and then turned to the instructor. “I can’t get it," he said. "I just can’t quite do the lines of the elbow.”

No surprise there. These are the body parts 80-year-old men in life drawing sessions will admit they don't know how to draw: elbows, noses, foreheads, earlobes, shoulders, collarbone.

These are anatomical parts 80-year-old men will not admit they don’t know how to draw: everything else.

After a few weeks, this man, or any number like him, would come up to me on a break and tell me, very tentatively, that I reminded him of his dead wife, or an old girlfriend, or a nurse in Korea. The art classes I modeled for were largely populated by retired seniors -- probably because they spanned hours right in the middle of the workday -- so this interaction happened enough times that you would think I’d have worked out a response. The response is that there is no right answer. My inclination was always to say, “I bet you saw her naked a lot, buddy!” and then elbow him jovially in the ribs. I did not do that – mostly because you don’t know how sturdy 80-year-olds' ribs really are. Instead I tried to smile and be polite.

Why bigger breasts eased my cancer recovery

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“What size are you thinking?” the plastic surgeon asked.

I sat shirtless in the oversize, faux leather examining chair as he eyed the twin slits remaining on my chest four weeks after the mastectomy. I slipped a C-cup silicone breast prosthesis out of one side of the bra I’d worn into the office. “I used to be an A-cup. Can you match this?”

He palmed the three-dimensional, triangular blob and then pressed it against one of my incisions using the tips of his fingers to hold it in place. “I don’t see why not. You’re tall – you can carry any volume you want. Let’s go with a 350cc.”

He wheeled backward on his stool, opened a drawer and pulled out a crescent-shaped expander. I liked him immediately. He seemed practical, matter-of-fact in the wake of my cancer, the way I hoped in my best moments to be. He explained the surgery would involve placing two of these filled with saline in my chest to begin stretching the skin and muscle to shape mounds that would eventually house the implants.

Are models too thin? Or are you just too fat?

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:20:00 +0000

In this weekend's Washington Post, Robin Givhan considers the outcry over the prevalence of extremely thin models on the runways, and comes up with an interesting conclusion: It wouldn't be a problem if we weren't all so fat.

The argument is more complex than that, of course. “All those emaciated models have to be seen against the backdrop of a population that is overwhelmingly afflicted with obesity,” she writes. And later: “The fatter the general population, the thinner the idealized woman.”

It's true that fashion is about fantasy, and that includes the beauty of the models. They're hired to look better in clothing than most of us ever will. It's also true that beauty changes in response to cultural norms, and that it's always been somewhat unattainable. Victorian women who wore corsets or Medieval women who bled themselves white weren't doing so because they thought all the other women had wasp waists or naturally ghostly skin, but because corsets and paleness both signified a delicate, upper-class femininity. Whatever beauty is, it's never the norm.

The surprise Spanx make-out

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000

On Saturday afternoon, I bought a darling bra-and-panty set, the kind with sweet, swirly black lace and pale-pink bows. It's the sort of coquettish ensemble you always hope you'll be wearing when a gentleman caller happens to separate you from your polka-dot swing dress -- not the raggedy underwear from Target, the elastic spazzing out the hems, not the cheap bra with one clasp missing and a mysterious rip around the areola, but proper vixen attire, clean and comely.

But that's not what I was wearing on Friday night. On Friday night, I was wearing Spanx.

For the uninitiated, Spanx is a brand of control-top undergarment, similar to ye olde girdle but with a 21st-century, you-go-girl wink. Oprah loves Spanx. Tyra loves Spanx. And what's not to love? It's a brilliantly engineered fabric that disappears your period bloat and your pregnancy weight and your beer belly, that helps a woman bridge that frustrating divide between who she is and who she'd like to be. Like so many of these modern contraptions, it's three parts miracle, one part torture: You may feel like your crotch is in shrink-wrap, but damn, look at your silhouette.

Who you calling fat? Nicole Eggert strikes back

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:09:00 +0000

If it’s difficult to look trim standing at the bar in Spanx and heels, imagine how hard it is to pull off a bikini while running in slow motion. Nicole Eggert spent years on “Baywatch” ensuring that both the coastline and the high-cut one-piece were safe.

Since her days as Roberta “Summer” Quinn, Eggert put on some weight, and in the grand tradition of tabloids, was recently criticized for it. But in a new tradition -- thanks to celebrities like Tyra Banks, Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Love Hewitt -- she shot back. Eggert took to the beach armed with a red two-piece and the comedy website FunnyOrDie.com.

The video (below) shows two notably doughy guys attempting to pull off the hot lifeguard-CPR plot that has entertained male psyches from “The Sandlot” onward. Eggert jogs toward the boys as the camera zooms in on every trans fat and neglected ab workout. The result? The boys ditch their plan -- see, cause she's not hot anymore -- and the audience gets an eyeful of an actress who isn't nearly as obese as the closeups try to make her appear.