Crystal Renn - Plus Size Model's Memoir

http://jezebel.com/5359894/lettuce-with-a-side-of-batshit-less-lucrative-than-actual-food

"Lettuce With A Side Of Batshit" Less Lucrative Than Actual Food

By Sadie, 2:00 PM on Tue Sep 15 2009, 8,805 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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'Now I'm able to tell people, "Avoid the diets, because you will gain it back, most likely, and you're just going to live in a hellish world while doing it."' Preach it, formerly-starving-now-plus-size-model-memoirist Crystal Renn:

As Margaret wrote, Crystal Renn is the highest-paid plus-sized model in America. Discovered at 14 and told to basically change her body, Renn went on to a successful modeling career - but also a serious struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Eventually, Renn - and her body - couldn't take it anymore, and with her agency's support, she segued into plus-size modeling, where she's a major star. And while I'm generally skeptical of 23-year-old's memoirs, as a Salon interview with our friend Kate Harding shows, she's got some important things to say in Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves .

Asked how the industry can change, Renn says,

I think, ideally, it starts with sample sizes. A Size 10 for the sample sizes would be a great start — up from, like, what? A 2? A 0? That's a huge step. Then they could pin the clothes to very thin girls, the ones who are naturally thin, but curvier girls, like a size 14, could get into them. I know that, because I'm a 12, and I've been able to get into sample sizes — you know, with a lot of effort [laughs] — but I do editorials all the time, and sometimes we have to work with it. And you can absolutely pin the clothes down. I have size 24s pinned to me all the time. So I think a 10 would be a great starting place so no one could say, "Oh, well, the sample sizes are the reason we don't hire bigger girls."

As to her ultimate hopes, Renn is pragmatic.

Nobody should look on the runway and see only 14s. That's ridiculous. I think there should be all different sizes on the runway, and I think that should be what's modern. Let's stop making one body type cool for a decade and start to say all shapes and sizes are accepted — and not only accepted, but absolutely ideal, the most beautiful. Health! Health is the most beautiful.

And that's a crucial point: the idea is not merely a token spread per year featuring only plus-size models (like the upcoming Glamour shoot, in which Renn features) but to showcase a range of healthy body types. It's important to remember, of course, that Renn is still a model: at size 12, she's not large by average American standards, and her proportions are, of course, "conventional." She has the genetic gift of being photogenic that few women possess. And the message to take away should not necessarily be, "ooh, I should be a model, too!" -I'd hate for this story to glamorize another unrealistic scenario - but that a few more young girls could be, and make a success, without needing to starve themselves. (And as an interview with Glamour insta-star Lizzie Miller shows, the typical plus-size experience is less exalted.) My point is, this should still not necessarily be the dream - and that's a bigger issue - but it's wonderful that she's shown one can be healthy and true to one's self, and achieve hers.

Dying To Be The Next Gisele [Salon]

Lizzie Miller's Glamour Shot [LA Times]

Related: Crystal Renn Battles Anorexia, Finds Success As "Plus-Size" Model
Coming This Fall: More Naked Fat Ladies In Glamour!

WomenCAN - online resource for women

http://www.womencan.ca/redesign/index.php

More on Caster Semenya

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/are-they-god

Are They God?

The Body Electric blog post by Page McBee, September 13, 2009 - 2:00am; tagged Caster Semenya, gender.

According to the Associated Press, Caster Semenya's father recently asked--regarding the people insinuating that his daughter is not a woman--"Are they God?" The eighteen-year-old South African world champion track star, who first drew attention because of her "masculine" appearance, has been the subject of a media shitstorm lately. Her situation highlights the absurdity of discreet gender categorization, as well as the "sympathy" of a public who would like to think themselves above the other spectators at the circus.

I love science, like most of modernity, but I don't always trust the reductionist perspective of the humanity that invented it. The reality of the intersexed, (a reality that Semenya is rumored to share), is that even almighty biology opposes the black and white sex system. We who defy easy categorization--and there are a hell of a lot of us--have known this instinctively as the shamans and Two-Spirits before us. Semenya is not an anomaly, and this will be just as true if her biology proves to transgress the arbitrary divide humanity has created "between" the sexes.

Presumably, the support for Semenya stems more from the possibility that she has a medically-recognized condition than a genuinely nuanced perspective on gender and mulitplicity. Her sex testing won't bear results until November, but the IAAF's general secretary, Pierre Weiss, noted in a stunning display of ignorance last week, "It is clear that she is a woman but maybe not 100 percent." Wow. It's a good thing we have so many real men and women out there, eliminating complication for us. Perhaps the IAAF, like everyone else, could stand to adapt to the reality of the incredible diversity of the bodies we live in, rather than expect our bodies to be defined by their regulations.

National Association of Women and The Law is looking for young women volunteers

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN BEING PART OF FEMINIST LEGAL AND POLICY ACTIVISM IN
CANADA? If so, NAWL wants YOU!!
The National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL) is looking for young
women who are engaged in thinking about and acting on issues related to
law and public policy as it affects women in this country.

If you are a law student or are engaged in public policy or legal studies
about women¡¦s equality, we invite you to apply to participate in our
Think Tank/Strategy Session on November 7-9 in Toronto, with all your
expenses paid by NAWL.

The goal of this strategy session will be to engage in focused discussions
and strategic planning regarding what it would take to re-invigorate local
and vibrant NAWL caucuses across the country. We anticipate a lot of work
¡V and a lot of fun!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------Our
History
NAWL has historically worked closely with law school caucuses, but in
recent years the capacity to facilitate and assist in organizing these
caucuses has decreased. With renewed energy and internal capacity, we are
hoping to revitalize this important part of NAWL by facilitating a focused
discussion with young women about your interests and issues. What would it
take to actively engage you in creating a vibrant NAWL caucus on your
campus?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------How
to Apply for the Think Tank/ Strategy Session
We will select 10 ¡V 12 women to participate in the strategy session along
with the young women members of NAWL¡¦s National Steering Committee.
If you are interested, please send us a letter, no longer than 2 pages,
telling us about:
„X your background in public policy/legal studies, feminist activism,
social justice or lobbying work; AND
„X what you think you would bring to this meeting, why you want to come
and how you could follow up at your own campus.
„X If you are a recent graduate, please tell us how you remain connected
to your faculty.
Please provide us with the name and contact information of someone we can
talk to so that we may learn more about your passion and involvement in
policy/legal studies, feminist activism, social justice or lobbying work.

We will be selecting women who reflect the diversity NAWL seeks to reflect
as well as who have experience with feminist organizing. Please note that
while the meeting will be held in English, we encourage Francophone women
to apply and participate in French. [While we are not able to offer
English to French interpretation services throughout the meeting, a NAWL
Steering Committee member will provide French to English interpretation
services for women who are most comfortable expressing themselves in
French. Special moments during the meeting will also be planned for
conversations in French only.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------For
more information about NAWL, visit our website: www.nawl.ca
Application deadline is: October 2, 2009
Applications from current, recent undergraduates and graduate students are
welcome!If you have any questions or to submit an application, please
contact:
Pamela Cross, Director of Strategic Planning at pcross@xplornet.com

Choosing Male Children in India

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/land-of-the-rising-son/article1285122/

Land of the rising son

A girl amongst the audience looks on during an event against female feticide organized by Delhi Commission for Women, in New Delhi, India. AP

Globe and Mail correspondent Stephanie Nolen examines India's very public battle to halt the shocking decline in the number of girls being born. Technology has made it easy for mothers to choose the gender of their babies. But why, she asks, is the obsession with boys most pronounced among those who are well off?

Caster Semenya Case: Gender-Testing and Race

http://www.feministe.us/blog/

Caster Semenya Case Opening Old Wounds

Posted by: Monica Roberts in Beauty, Body image, Gender, Guest Blogging, International Issues, Race & Ethnicity, Social pressure, Sports

I was watching the track and field championships in Berlin last month when Caster Semenya won her 800m gold medal in the fifth fastest time ever run by a woman.

But as I know from my time on planet Earth, if an African descended female athlete excels in spectacular fashion, we get accused of cheating or have ‘that’s a man’ shade hurled at us.

When you combine it with the hypercompetitive world of international sports in which national pride and prestige is on the line, it was inevitable that somebody would try to find a way knock this talented runner out of international competition, especially with the 2012 London Olympic Games on the horizon.

Gender testing for female athletes exists thanks to the blatant cheating of Nazi Germany in 1936, several former Communist bloc nations sending female athletes into competition with questionable external gender characteristics, and the East Germans feeding their female athletes steroids for more than a decade,

But in 18 year old Caster Semenya’s case, it’s ripping the scab off some old wounds. The ripple effects of this case are reverberating across the African diaspora.

For us African descended people in North America, we see it as the continued centuries old attack on the images of African descended women and our femininity.

It’s even more acute for Black women involved in sports. The Williams sisters have not only dominated the sport of tennis in the 2K’s, but these proud, statuesque ladies are making history off the court as well.

I and many other tennis fans found it quite curious when the 2009 Australian Open website omitted them from their list of the 10 Most Beautiful Women.

It wasn’t surprising that the list was full of Eastern Europeans in addition to fawning commentary about Jelena Jankovich’s ‘Number One body to go with her (then) Number One ranking’.

The old saying is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Black women have always been seen thanks to racist myths rooted in slavery as ‘unfeminine’ vis a vis the vanilla flavored beauty standard.

If you think I’m off base, here’s a challenge for you.

Go to your favorite bookstore or drug store and head to the magazine rack. See if you can find a beauty magazine aimed at a predominately white female audience that has an African-descended woman on the cover.

And no, Oprah magazine doesn’t count.

Our continental African cousins see this in the context of the European colonial powers seeking to embarrass Africa.

Despite the fact that the current president of the Monaco based IAAF, Lamine Diack is from Senegal, the IAAF leadership since its inception in 1912 has been dominated by Europeans.

Continental Africans still haven’t forgotten how 800m runner and 2000 Olympic champion Maria Mutola of Mozambique was dogged throughout her illustrious decade long career by ‘that’s a man’ accusations despite passing test after test.

The way the Semenya case has been handled by the IAAF has only crystallized that impression on the mother Continent.

It’s probably why officials in South Africa are backing her all the way. Makhenkesi Stofile, South Africa’s sports minister said that Semenya and her family maintain she was gender-tested without her consent and that lawyers were being consulted over possible action.

In addition, Stofile has written to the IAAF demanding an apology and seeking a response to those Australian reports claiming that she’s intersex.

Yes, if the IAAF had questions, they should have quietly done those tests. Somebody leaked the info in Berlin that got this hot mess started. It’s also not a coincidence that another leak in this case results in an Australian newspaper publishing those allegations that Stofile reacted to with “shock and disgust”.

You have to feel for Semenya in this case. It has not only put her personal business out there, but has been done so in the most humiliatingly public way possible

In the meantime, her athletic future rests on the results of the gender test and an IAAF Council meeting set to take place in Monaco November 20-21.

Semenya has also received some advice and support from India’s Santhi Soundajaran, the last woman to be subjected to this type of withering international scrutiny.

“She should not let them take away her medal or allow one test to determine her fate. “She is a woman and that’s it, full stop,” Soundarajan says. “A gender test cannot take away from you who you are.”

Even if the people behind this are determined to take away her 800m world championship.

History of Female Mental Illness

http://jezebel.com/5355606/mad-bad--sad-history-of-female-mental-illness-turns-into-indictment-of-psychotherapy?skyline=true&s=x

Mad, Bad & Sad: History Of Female Mental Illness Turns Into Indictment Of Psychotherapy

By Anna N., 3:40 PM on Wed Sep 9 2009, 4,445 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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From force-feeding to tooth removal to stomach surgery, mental patients throughout history — many of them women — have endured some pretty horrific therapies. In Mad, Bad & Sad, Lisa Appignanesi questions whether modern treatments are much better.

Subtitled A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, Appignanesi's book aims to trace the relationship between women's "madness, badness, and sadness" and their treatment by (usually male) professionals from the late 18th century to the present day. The book does a good job of describing the connection early physicians saw between physical and mental ailments — the "moving womb" theory of hysteria, the fits of numbness and paralysis supposedly brought on by a frightening sight or memory. The "mind doctors" of the 18th and 19th centuries were of course wrong about the specifics of these connections (breast milk, for instance, does not travel into the brain and cause insanity), but it's interesting to note that they understood what we sometimes forget — that the mind and body can influence each other, for good and ill.

Unfortunately, this awareness often led to sexism. Appignanesi notes that doctors in the second half of the 19th century believed that problems with the female reproductive system caused "nervous afflictions," and that,

Throughout this period, doctors and scientists seemed determined to raise the existing division of labor in the middle class to a universal given, and to transform women's place in the domestic sphere into a biological inevitability from which deviation of any kind would bring breakdown, not only of the mind but of the species. Women were understood as being fashioned by evolution for the home and maternity, nervously fragile, intellectually inferior. Moving away from that lesser birthright, allowing energies to be drained by intellectual or imaginative exertion would lead to nervous collapse or to that capacious list of symptoms which most often went under the catch-all diagnosis of neurasthenia or its near-neighbour hysteria.

Prejudicial theory was often matched by brutal practice. Pelvic surgery and force-feeding were common treatments, and Appignanesi tells the story of one woman fed so violently in an asylum that all her teeth were broken. Especially gruesome was early 20th-century hospital superintendent Henry Cotton, who believed psychosis was caused by "chronic pus infections" and who "treated" sufferers not only with tooth removal but with surgery on the stomach, tonsils, uterus, and colon.

There's an interesting book to be written about how fads in mental treatment have harmed and helped women's bodies and minds over the past two centuries. Mad, Bad & Sad is not that book. Appignanesi offers overlong and sometimes jumbled case histories in lieu of any real tracking of trends. Instead of a full picture of how culture has shaped women's diagnosis and treatment, we get scattershot portraits of such ailments as hysteria, neurasthenia, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder without a coherent explanation of what brought each of these conditions to the fore. It's clear that aspects of mental illness are culturally determined — there's a reason why the diagnosis and even the symptoms of hysteria were prevalent in one century, BPD in another, but Appignanesi doesn't really examine what that reason is.

She does say that "therapies [...] can create their own best patients," and she seemed nearly as skeptical of modern SSRIs and cognitive-behavioral therapy as she does of tooth removal and pelvic surgery. Despite her graphic descriptions of blood-vomiting hysterics, she sometimes seems to think that mental illness is largely illusory, something imposed by doctors on women going through normal life phases like adolescence and childbirth. The only therapies she seems to support are journaling, psychoanalysis (with some reservations), and just growing out of your problems.

Appignanesi makes good points at the beginning of her book about the inherent sexism of early psychiatric theories. She might have used these insights to examine how modern-day therapists might transcend gender stereotypes and treatment fads to give their patients the best possible care. Instead, she seems to consider almost all mental health treatments to be forms of insidious social programming. Of course, psychotherapy does tend to reinforce social norms even as it helps patients deal with their very real pain. Whether the two necessarily go hand in hand is an interesting question. It's too bad Appignanesi doesn't make a serious effort to answer it.

Mad, Bad, And Sad: A History Of Women And The Mind Doctors [Amazon]