body image

Not content to just Photoshop its models to look thinner and younger, megaretailer Forever 21 is now airbrushing out their kneecaps. Kneecaps! Sooo gross right?

H&M is taking fashion douchebaggery to the next level this week by using computer-generated models in its holiday lingerie campaign. As if the photo shopping, airbrushing, pushing up, and sucking in that goes on in a typical yuletide bra commercial wasn't enough to make the average shopper want to throw on a snuggie and call it a day, now the models selling us our delicates are actually virtual.


Ahahaha! We're just hanging out, having the exact same body! What, you don't look like this?

Alas, it's time for the "Isn't He Lovely" guest blogging series to come to an end, and I hope you've enjoyed the past eight weeks as much as I have.

In the U.S., food marketing and consumption is highly gendered. In the funny pages, Cathy gobbles down chocolate and Dagwood constructs towering, meaty sandwiches. On the Internet, the Women Laughing Alone With Salad is an exemplary (and hilarious) meme. Guy vegans seemed like such a quaint anomaly that a Boston Globe reporter tried to make "hegan" happen in 2010. I say "in the U.S." because the nation apparently has an extreme case of food gendering, thanks to our robust and omnipresent advertising industry and a steady, though not necessarily high-quality or healthy, food supply. In a Salon article exploring gendered representations and connotations of food, Riddhi Shah writes "In the U.S., instead, it was an extension of one’s identity, a phenomenon made possible by the United States’ unique history of unrivaled luxury." Put another way: you are what you eat.

It's Love Your Body Day!

Yashar Ali is the founder of The Current Conscience, which examines "politics and the personal, culture and relationship" from a progressive, feminist viewpoint. Particularly after reading his post The Key to Success: Be a Man, I was curious to mine his thoughts on how beauty and body image standards apply to men today and whether modern "masculinity" has truly reached a crisis point in Western culture.

The first time I really paused to consider the naked male body happened circa age 9 while watching Blossom on the floor of my parents' bedroom, where I ironically snuck in all of my parent-disapproved TV programming. I can’t remember what plot twist provoked it, but at some point, Six explains to Blossom that naked men look like "half-decorated Christmas trees." Conjuring up an image of a Ken doll in a Santa hat, my sheltered developing brain didn’t get the humor. But I did get the feeling that whatever Six really meant about the unclothed penis, it wasn't exactly complimentary. Boys naked, who wants to see that?

Advertisers have long used handsome men to hawk their wares. In the 20th century, marketers who realized that women did a majority of the household shopping created dashing spokesmen, such as the Arrow Shirt Man, to appeal more to the ladies than the menfolk. And certainly advertising has played an integral role in the male beauty culture that has skyrocketed in the past 20 years, too. In fact, some scholars and experts trace men's heightened attention to self and—more importantly—how they appear to others back to a single, revolutionary image from 1982. 

Talk to a group of teen boys, and they'll probably tell you that, sure, they'd like to have the swoon-inducing sex appeal of Justin Bieber, Taylor Lautner, or whomever is playing the newest iteration of the Degrassi High heartthrob. But do they want to look like them, immaculately styled and toned to the max? No way, bro.

While mulling over the male quest for muscularity a few posts ago, I brought up the notion of the "sanitized ideal" that has recently become de rigueur for the mainstream masculine body image. We’re talking hair-free, sweat-free, odor-free; in other words, the same unrealistic standards peddled to women for so long, à la leg and underarm shaving. And like the hairless female ideal, it isn't just the most visible fur that men are tending to these days; statistically, men groom their pubic hair more than any other type of body hair (sans beards).