United front: breasts without the airbrush. The shocking thing about Laura Dodsworth's pictures of 100 women's breasts isn't the flesh on show, or the many shapes and sizes, but the realisation that images of unairbrushed, non-uniform breasts seem to be so rare.
"We see images of breasts everywhere," says the 41-year-old photographer, "but they're unreal. They create an unflattering comparison but also an unobtainable ideal. I wanted to rehumanise women through honest photography. " Dodsworth interviewed each woman at length, starting by asking them how they felt about their breasts. The interviews soon became more emotional than she anticipated. Her subjects range in age from 19 to 101, and include a priest, a lapdancer, cancer survivors and women who have had surgery. Dodsworth also took part, but will not be anonymous, which she found difficult. The impact of all 100 images together is quite mesmerising. Age: 21. 'Conversations with my mum about weight started at a very early age' Age: 33.
Age: 19. Age: 101. Age: 40. If Men Could Menstuate by Gloria Steinem. By Gloria Steinem Living in India made me understand that a white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking a white skin makes people superior, even though the only thing it really does is make them more subject to ultraviolet rays and wrinkles.
Reading Freud made me just as skeptical about penis envy. The power of giving birth makes "womb envy" more logical, and an organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men very vulnerable indeed. But listening recently to a woman describe the unexpected arrival of her menstrual period (a red stain had spread on her dress as she argued heatedly on the public stage) still made me cringe with embarrassment. That is, until she explained that, when finally informed in whispers of the obvious event, she said to the all-male audience, "and you should be proud to have a menstruating woman on your stage.
Laughter. So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? If we let them. Embodying Gender Differences. This week in my gender class, we talked about gender and embodiment — that is, the way that men and women may experience our bodies differently, and how we train our bodies to signal gender differences just as much as the clothing and accessories we wear do.
Men and women learn to use their bodies differently as part of their performance of masculinity or femininity; think of the difference in how men and women tend to hold cigarettes, how women are more likely to sit with their legs crossed (even if they’re not wearing skirts), and other ways in which we learn to use or position our bodies differently. Lindsey sent in a link to an art project, Switcheroo, posted at Sincerely Hana that illustrates a number of topics related to gender. The project, by Hana Pesut, consists of (mostly) men and women exchanging outfits. Not surprisingly, then, the images that stand out most in the collection are those with a man wearing clothing that is strongly coded as feminine. Les adolescentes et leurs règles : vers un marché noir du tampon hygiénique. Les tampons hygiéniques, c'est mortel (-Alina-/FLICKR/CC).
Dites, vous le saviez, vous, que les tampons déforment le vagin ? Si si, je vous assure : si vous renoncez aux serviettes hygiéniques pour utiliser des tampons pendant vos règles, vous allez le déformer à tout jamais. Votre vagin. C'est Julia, 12 ans et demi, qui l'a dit à Léa, qui l'a répété à Marion, qui s'est fait un plaisir d'en informer ma fille. Laquelle est venue m'en parler, mi-amusée mi-consternée. Des "infos" comme celle-là, il y en a beaucoup.
Les règles, on ne sait pas trop ce que c'est et on s'en fout un peu Ces gamines anxieuses n'ont pas forcément glané les inepties qu'elles profèrent au sujet de leurs règles sur internet-ce-fléau. Boy, 4, Chooses Long Locks and Is Suspended From Class.