There's a fantastic article in the Guardian today, written by Kira Cochrane who is one of my ever present girl crushes. The article is huge in scope and covers a massive variety of frightening topics including rape conviction rates, inequalities in the work place, the shocking lack of funding for women's charities (I've read the statistic a million times but it still enrages me that sick donkeys get more money than battered women on this isle of mine), the increasing prevelance of the sex trade and my own pet subject:
In gossip magazines, women's bodies are pored over - a pound gained provoking headlines that they're fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they're too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they've failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye - which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women's bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there's then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There's something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins
I suggest you go and read the whole thing, I'm already trying to work out a way of forcing everyone I come into contact with into reading and understanding it. Maybe that would make my day to day interactions bearable.
UPDATE: Apparently the ladies over at Jezebel agree with me.
