America: Doing Something Right?
That article I linked a few posts back about the body image issues of teenage girls was based on a survey of British teenagers. And according to this article in the London Times (written, it would seem, by an American), the situation is better in America than it is in Britain.
The American media and culture, this writer says, gives girls better tools for dealing with media images. The discussion of various differences between America and Britain as regards to weight issues is worth reading, but I will quote the part that mentions my favorite person, Kate Winslet.
"Kate Winslet elicited scorn in certain sections of the UK press after she declared that skinny beauty ideals were bad for girls. That made her a radical, in British pop-cultural terms. The same remarks — especially her public declaration that her legs had been artificially elongated on a magazine cover — made her a beloved character in America."
Speaking of Katie and the UK, she is going to be in Ricky Gervais's next project. Ricky Gervais was the creator of the brilliant sitcom The Office and I am ridiculously excited about this. Hence my mentioning it here, apropos of nothing.
The American media and culture, this writer says, gives girls better tools for dealing with media images. The discussion of various differences between America and Britain as regards to weight issues is worth reading, but I will quote the part that mentions my favorite person, Kate Winslet.
"Kate Winslet elicited scorn in certain sections of the UK press after she declared that skinny beauty ideals were bad for girls. That made her a radical, in British pop-cultural terms. The same remarks — especially her public declaration that her legs had been artificially elongated on a magazine cover — made her a beloved character in America."
Speaking of Katie and the UK, she is going to be in Ricky Gervais's next project. Ricky Gervais was the creator of the brilliant sitcom The Office and I am ridiculously excited about this. Hence my mentioning it here, apropos of nothing.
posted by mo pie at 10:52 AM
1 Comments:
Love it when Naomi Wolf goes on a full-fledged rant!
And she is right on the money here:
... if you create a mass culture of physical perfection that leads a young woman to hate her body and spend masses of time and energy preoccupied with her flaws, you are not just creating a girl worried about the size of her bum. You are also creating conditions in which a young woman suffers from a sufficiently lowered sense of self- respect and self-love such that she is likely to put up with other kinds of humiliations — from an atmosphere that condones harassment in the workplace to tolerating a lower wage for her work.This, I fear, is what it's all about - destroying someone's sense of self-worth. And if you can make a buck, or euro, or pound, doing so, why then all the better!!! [/snark]
We are all more than just our bodies. We need to teach our kids that. Our bodies are wonderful because we are in them!!!!
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