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A post from Double X writer Greg Beato:
It didn’t take long for the Lingerie Football League to live up to the
low expectations of its critics. All spring long, LFL personnel had
been promising serious hard-hitting action among skilled players who
just happened to be sexy women. But in early September, when the
Chicago Bliss kicked off the season against the Miami Caliente, the
highlight was a new contribution to gridiron strategy: stripping the
passer. “Our QB, Anonka Dixon, had her bra top ripped off,” Caliente
running back Michelle Stevens exclaimed in a postgame interview.
“Three girls from Chicago jumped on her after the play was already over
and shredded her top to pieces. There she sat, topless on the field,
and for no other reason than she is an unbelievable player and a huge
threat to Chicago’s defense, they wanted to take her out of the game” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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It must be the season of the listicle. Too lazy to write an article, or, heck, even create a charticle, print and online writers turn to the list in an attempt to draw as many list-loving readers as possible. The latest comes from the folks at Nerve.com, who have seen fit to list: "The Twenty Sexiest Ugly People." Fair enough. I've long been enamored with the "beautiful uglies," or what the French refer to as jolie laide: "the aesthetic pleasures of the visually off kilter: a bump on the nose, eyes that are set too closely together, a jagged smear of a mouth."
Nerve's collection of the seemingly hideously sexy—or is that sexily hideous?—includes... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This transcript of an interview with Keith Lewis, the co-director of the Miss California Pageant, must be among the strangest artifacts ever produced by the creepily enthusiastic industry that is the American pageant circuit. (Miss California, you'll recall, is the contestant who believes "the way she was raised" to be sufficient justification for her policy preferences.) In the course of explaining that yes, his organization did pay for Carrie Prejean's boob job, Lewis argues that the organization did not "encourage" her to surgically restructure her chest area (but did bankroll it!), that the procedure was paid for simply so Miss California would have a positive self-image (though "of course" size matters in the competition), and that he totally agrees it's time to "look at the way we perceive real women." From an appearance with Maggie Rodriguez of the The Early Show:
LEWIS: ... it's a personal choice. Well, I think that it's about how a woman feels about herself. In terms of, for me, it's not a personal choice that I would recommend. But at the same time, I know so many women that have done the procedure and feel better about themselves and the way they present themselves.
And I think that's the question is, whether or not, when you're looking at that procedure as an option, am I going to feel better about myself? It's not about one night. It isn't about one night of competition. And doing a procedure like that for one night of competition would be foolish...
RODRIGUEZ: ... if you have a flat chest, what are you supposed to do?
LEWIS: You use chicken cutlets. You use tape. You use anything that you can to enhance the line. There's lots of tricks of the trade. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to go to that next level.
RODRIGUEZ: I wonder if you should change the rules and maybe not judge it so much on proportion.
I find both sides of this exchange deeply bizarre, perhaps because I lack the imaginative capacity to envision a swimsuit competition not premised on a certain conception of the female body. What are they going evaluate? Perkiness? Gait? The actual swimsuit?
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A team of archaeologists believe that they're on the verge of uncovering Cleopatra's tomb—a discovery that could potentially drive the whole world pyramid-mad, the way King Tut did back in the '20s and then again in the '70s.
Stacy Schiff has a fantastic essay in the New York Times
about the legend of Cleopatra—who, Shiff points out, was not just the
lover of two of the most powerful men of her time but a fearsome
monarch in her own right, a woman whose "antecedents were the
rancorous, meddlesome Macedonian queens who
routinely poisoned brothers and sent armies against sons...These
women were raised to rule."
And yet, as we all know, Cleopatra's legacy has little to do with her political prowess:
Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton seductress. She is the original bad girl, the
Monica Lewinsky of the ancient world. And all because she turns up at
one of the most dangerous intersections in history, that of women and
power.
She presides eternally over the chasm between
promiscuity and virility, the forest of connotations that separate
“adventuress” from “adventurer.” Women schemed while men strategized in
the ancient world, too.
So
is a double standard simply inevitable when it comes to female leaders?
Cleo herself is mum on the topic. As Schiff notes, "No matter what the
tombs of Taposiris yield, they are unlikely to offer
up an answer to the vexed question of women and power." (Though in Shakespeare's version,
our queen has some choice words on the subject, perceptively declaring
that future dramatists would chalk up Antony's indiscretions to
drunkenness, while she herself would have to suffer seeing "some
squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore.")
But according to the BBC, the dig may solve another eternally vexing question:
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, said the coins found at the
temple refuted "what some scholars have said about Cleopatra being very
ugly".
"The finds from Taposiris reflect a charm... and indicate that Cleopatra was in no way unattractive," he said.
Well, thank Amun-Ra for that.
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Just wanted to flag this great piece in The Root about Venus and Serena Williams—not simply because my sister and I played competitive tennis as youngsters, and were constantly being compared to the Compton-born phenoms—but because author Jewel Edwards is preaching hard truths about standards of beauty when it comes to athletics. Extra points to this piece for subtlety; it took me a while to realize that Edwards is male! His awesome point:
Black female athletes, on the other hand, are put in the unique position where developing their bodies makes them the object of spectacle. For female athletes, the perennial insult is, "You look like a man." As a result, any girl—black or white—involved in sports has to make choices that a boy never has to make.
That’s a very important insight; and the tough calls faced by female athletes extend not just to physical appearance but to lifestyle choices, such as when to have a baby, get hitched, or embark upon puberty.
Samantha brought up Michelle Obama’s guns getting lots of attention on Tuesday evening. (I thought that going sleeveless in February was a bit gauche—but that’s another tale.) Obama looks great, but that kind of positive reinforcement is a stark counterpoint to the ogling and snark that attends the biceps of the decorated Williams sisters. It’s clearly hurtful:
Serena, when asked about her body yet again, said, "Just because I have large bosoms, and I have a big ass [laughter], I swear, my waist is 30 inches, 29 to 30 inches, it’s really small! I have the smallest waist, but just because I have those two assets, it looks like I’m not fit."
Imagine that! You are the most dominant person in your sport in the world, but you consistently have to defend having your curves. Listening to commentators persistently speculate and scrutinize Serena about her weight and fitness—which are metaphors for her body—is like having the buttocks and breasts of Hottentot Venus debated for public consumption.
Yes, imagine that. More extra points for bringing up Saartje Bartman—made famous once more by inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander in this phenomenal work. But in terms of beauty norms: Really, what’s the difference between upscale yoga arms and those that can bench 200?
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Susannah, I so agree with you. If only the dismal economy really did persuade lots of women to forgo botox injections and plastic surgery and opt instead for more natural alternative beauty therapies. I have to admit that while I am all for going au naturale and aging gracefully, I never heard of, but am definitely intrigued by, cosmetic acupuncture and other therapies that don't require a sharp knife to the face. Imagine how a widespread rejection of the plastic surgery industrial complex could cripple an industry that trades on making women falsely believe that altering their noses, chins, eyelids, cheeks, ears, etc., will make them look, and feel, perfectly beautiful. Sadly, a botox boycott is not likely to happen anytime soon; plastic surgery is more affordable than it used to be, and American women are even going abroad to have work done for less. The whole thing is so darn "Unpretty."
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Now the Times suggests the recession may spell the end of beauty as we know it, particularly the 21st-century plastic kind. Apparently, the economic downturn has resulted in fewer women getting elective boob jobs and sushi-party Botox injections. God forbid that on top of a skyrocketing unemployment rate, America will be further reduced to suffer the return of sagging breasts and smile lines. Will this recession stop at nothing? As a marketing adviser to plastic surgeons queries rhetorically, "If you are going for buttock implants, do you really need that?” For some, the answer may increasingly be: "No. I do not need those buttock implants." While I'm saddened to think that women who dream of looking like the bolted-on-breasted and frozen-faced cast members of The Real Housewives of Orange County may have their dreams deferred, perhaps more women will turn to alternative beauty therapies, instead—yoga to combat gravity's pull, cosmetic acupuncture treatments that have been used since the Sung Dynasty—and grow old gracefully for less.
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