eating disorders

A common trope about models is that we don't eat. Well, I’m a model and I love food. I eat often and during all parts of the day—the spicier the dish, the better. Most models—at least the ones I work with in Los Angeles—do eat, with fewer exceptions than one might expect.

I wish I’d known this when I was younger. 

Here's the latest of what we're reading up on.

• Advertising in men's magazines try to convince dudes what really "makes a man."  And who are the targets of these ads? Most often, it's young, low-income men. [XX Factor]
• Misogyny and violence are unfortunately all too common in the lyrics of rap and hip hop.  Lil Wayne's latest song, though, compares having sex with the beating of Emmett Till. *Trigger Warning.*  [Crunk Feminist Collective]
• Although minister of women's affairs, Sihem Badi, admits things should've happened much sooner, Tunisia has opened their very first domestic violence shelter. [Ms. Magazine]
• At 58, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, has died. [BBC]
• Teenage and pregnant? Well "shame on you" says the politicians behind New York City's latest advertising campaigns to discourage teen pregnancy rates. Nevermind that those rates have seen a drop of over 25 percent over the past decade. [RH Reality Check]
• While the notion of poverty in the U.S. is nothing new, here's a video, with commentary by Feministing, on the current rates of poverty in the country. [Feministing]
• Here are a few graphs on the discrepancies between the rates of published male and female authors, as well as reviewers. As if we needed another reminder as to how real the gender gap still is... [VIDA]
• The good folks over at Racialicious tackle the White straight privilege of rapper Macklemore of "Thrift Shop" fame. [Raciailicious]
• Although National Eating Disorder Awareness Week came to an end a few days ago, that doesn't mean we should stop our efforts to bring awareness to the issue.  Here's a raw and eye-opening video about the realities of living with an eating disorder. (For more info or support, visit NEDA.) [YouTube]

Did we miss something? Let us know in the comments!

Before I got too much farther in "Isn't He Lovely," I figured it would be a good idea to chat with a male about this whole "male beauty" business. Hugo Schwyzer is a proud feminist, the Gender and Sexuality Editor over at The Good Men Project, and a professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College. Schwyzer fielded questions about how the beauty myth applies to young men these days, how body image standards affect non-white and non-straight men, the intersection of male grooming and dress, and the modern male's latent fear of developing "man boobs."

I don't play many video or computer games (unlike, say, the amazingly knowledgeable Ouyang Dan) but I was recently thrilled when Swag Bucks, a search engine with which users earn free items, introduced their panel of games. Get store credit and entertain myself? Yes, please!

Sadly, the gift cards take some time to earn, while two of the new games' fat-shaming is immediate. Most of the simple, PopCap-esque staples one might expect are there, though nothing similar to my favorite game, Feeding Frenzy... and the programs that do involve eating kill my gaming appetite.

I’ve watched America’s Next Top Model intermittently over the years. I can’t really say why. I was never that interested in fashion magazines, which seemed to me to depict another planet altogether, accessible only to the very rich. I have, furthermore, never much understood the fascination with models. Understand that when I say that I am not trying to make any claims about the difficulty of the work they do - I don’t "hate models" or anything so broad as that. It’s just that they don’t seem to hold for me the kind of visceral fascination they do for other people.

I admit I do have one philosophical objection to modeling. I simply do not know how we are going to build a world where everyone is valued if we keep insisting that no, really, some people are more valuable than others. Particularly if we do so on bases over which they have little individual control - such as being socially "attractive," meeting the critical mass of "pretty" that will get you on magazine covers and sigh-ingly acknowledged, by almost everyone, as "gorgeous." I don’t see how that strain of the cultural conversation benefits anyone in the slightest.