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Can BlogHer Feature You and Your Recipe?
Calling all cooks! BlogHer is working on a holiday guide that includes recipes. We'd like your help with one in particular: Green bean casserole. Does your family have a special twist on this dish? Please blog, leave a comment on this newsletter with a link or vlog. If we like your idea, we'll promote your blog! Questions? Email lisa@blogher.com.
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September 19, 2007
Hi everyone,
Pinch me, I'm dreaming. Since last week's newsletter, I've surfed incontrovertible evidence that the leading fashion and beauty meme for women ages 25-54 online is one I never dared hope for: Women are blogging by the hundreds that we look good in our own skins -- at least a damn site better than mainstream images of beauty icons lead us to believe. And we're fed up with being told differently.
Just ask us:
- Jenandtonic: naked naked naked LOVE!
- Body Impolitic: A Few Choice Links
- Angry Fat Girlz: Eating With Integrity
- The Shape of a Mother: Jake & Maggie
- Queen of Spain: Bill Maher Can Suck My Tits, as cross-posted on The Huffington Post where she's racked up 126 comments so far.
- Suzanne Reisman: The Swimsuit Brigade for Honest Photos
At BlogHer, we're witnessing a self-acceptance movement that is gathering momentum. The hot viral beauty meme among influential, tech-savvy women who blog is about how we actually look every day when we face the mirror. How we're working to embrace our real selves. And how sick and tired we are of being told otherwise by a media world and a vanity industry that uses computer technology to work against us by presenting increasingly distorted images of human females.
I confess, I dreamed of this day, but I couldn't have predicted so many women with everyday normal lives would use Web technology to "me-too" their outrage. These kinds of posts didn't exist when I first left CNN to join WebTV and Women.com ten years ago. At the time, I was a new mom and I joined weight-loss message boards as I tried to shed the fifty pounds I gained with my pregnancy.
Back then, questions and ideas about body image were tucked into sites like Women.com's own message boards and Prevention Magazine online. The uber-conversation was typically about a walking club, daily exercise and eating goals, etc., etc., but every once in a while someone would go off the reservation into more interesting territory: "Am I the only one who thinks women don't really look like the cover of [insert magazine name here]...." Online magazines like Salon's Mothers Who Think and Women.com's own Mary Peacock started to publish online articles on body image, with little reflection in the mainstream media.
Not anymore. Today, I see hundreds of women online publishing entire blogs devoted to their belief that women deserve to see images that look like we really do: Dimpled, wrinkled, scarred, fleshy, hairy and freckly. In July, BlogHer opened a Body Image Blog List, and in the six weeks since we have gained more than 100 blogs on the topic, one-tenth of the new blogs listed on our network during that time.
We're rolling our eyes at distorted images of women. At the same time, we're rolling our eyes at ourselves. This netroots movement about erasing and ending images that create self-doubt is rife with it. We women are struggling with the message that we must always strive to reach out to the mall, to the make-up counter, to the foundation garments department and to the plastic surgeon to achieve something other than what we are.
The younger we are and the less life experience we have, the worse our insecurity gets. I won't go into all the stories about the insecurity of young women about their bodies, but our expert editors cover it well on BlogHer, including Suzanne Reisman's recent report that MySpace and other sites frequented by teens and post-adolescents are undergoing a rash of airbrushing of every day pictures before they put photos on their My Space profiles or elsewhere on the internet.
This story is in progress, but the solution thus far for most bloggers on the topic seems to be not voting yourself off the fashion, beauty and bling island. Instead, we are cashing in on our life experience, all that we didn't know about our sexy selves in high school and what we've learned to celebrate in the flesh since. And we're talking to ourselves as much as we are encouraging other women online.
As BlogHer community member Jaycee wrote in response to last week's newsletter when I asked readers what advice we should give to the next generation of women to tape to their mirrors:
"Maybe instead of taping advice onto our mirrors we should tape up pictures of real women - women with curves and wrinkles. Non-Photoshopped women. And maybe we should stop buying those magazines that Photoshop women to their skeleton.
"Perhaps as well as taping these images to our mirrors, we should add them to Facebook too. We could start up a 'This is how women really look' Facebook group, or similar. I'm just saying Facebook because of the lactivist thing."
"...As for self-image advice? If you have self-confidence and self-esteem then image doesn't really matter.
"I know it's hard to build those two things and I wish I could take my own advice."
Well, I'll take your advice Jen. And pass it on, too. Given Facebook's recent ban on breastfeeding photos, I invite everyone to contribute to The Shape of A Mother, to Suzanne's Bathing Suit blog, and/or to post a favorite photo of yourself in the comments below.
Because, grrrl ... you look good.
Best,
Lisa
Lisa Stone is a BlogHer Co-founder. Her personal blog is Surfette.. She promises NOT to write about body image issues next week.
