The important thing is that we accept ourselves. When we accept ourselves, the rest of the world will too. Or they won’t – but that will be their problem. Throughout my entire life, I have been a full figured woman. I will never be a size 0, 4, or even a 10, but that does not stop me from looking my best, like Amber Riley from Glee. As the weather heats up, I grab the opportunity to wear sexy clothing, break out my great summer accessories, and flaunt my full hourglass-and-a-half figure in yet another season.

 2. Gabi of Young, Fat, and Fabulous is a finalist in MTV’s Twitter Jockey contest!

As much as I love fashion, I also love social media and popular culture; this is an amazing opportunity, and I truly need all of your support! How great would it be if there was a fashionable, body-positive plus size girl working in mainstream media (and MTV at that)? Plus, if I win, I can guarantee A LOT more outfit posts…can you imagine my wardrobe if I actually had steady income? Man.

The main thing I need you guys to do is FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER IF YOU ARE NOT ALREADY (my username is @gabifresh). There will be a series of challenges and you will have to follow me there in order to help! The more followers and interaction I have with you guys, the better. Secondly, PLEASE help spread the word and tell your friends to follow me. Post on your blogs, facebook, twitter pages, youtube channels, or anything else you can think of.

I’m not entirely sure what a “Twitter jockey” is (back in my day, MTV ran videos! And we liked it!), but I know I love the idea of Gabi winning. Go, Gabi, go! Jockey the hell out of that Twitter!

3. Via Salon’s Broadsheet: This is beautiful, very cool, and nerdy, but it also appeals to my sense of comedy: a pin-up calendar featuring ladies so skinny, they’re all bones. Literally. IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT, AMERICA?

Japanese manufacturer Eizo has put together pictorials of 12 skeletons showing off their fibulas, tailbones and rib cages in classic car model poses — and, damn, these skele-girls got femurs for daaays.

4. Fashionista covers a British retailer with a major gimmick for their new swimwear campaign: All of their models are totally unPhotoshopped.  Which sounds awesome–except it’s not like they’re dragging regular women out of bed and throwing them head-first and uncombed into bikinis:

It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that showcasing clothes on already perfect bodies will make the rest of us any more comfortable with the idea of buying THAT bikini. As in all of the highly hyped makeup-free magazine features we’ve seen (and Britney and Demi’s ‘before’ ad shots), the model is still meticulously made up, lit, styled, toned, etc.
Still, we have to applaud any move that challenges industry-wide assumptions and spurs on conversation.

I think I feel pretty much the same—I still struggle with the idea that these are perfect bodies to which we ought to aspire (obviously a flawed and troubling assumption), but I love that these are real women, not  creepily “perfected” lies forced upon us by a fashion hivemind! Viva la revolucion! In my heart, it’s hope that it’s a start.

Huge is an upcoming ABC Family network television series based on [the] young-adult novel of the same name by Sasha Paley. The hour-long drama series revolves around seven teens sent to a summer weight-loss camp called Wellness Canyon. Savannah Dooley and Winnie Holzman (creator of My So-Called Life and scriptwriter for Wicked) wrote the pilot. The series has been described as Glee meets Ugly Betty.

Well, I haven’t read the young adult novel (anyone?) but my first thought is that’s quite a pedigree. The descriptions of the characters on Wikipedia are interesting too: there’s apparently a clique of “thinner” girls, indicating a pecking order based on weight. I’m hoping the emphasis will be on those interpersonal relationships rather than any kind of “transformations” ala The Biggest Loser. But I guess we’ll see on June 28, when the series premieres.

But has Huge been using Photoshop to make Nikki Blonsky look huger? That’s the question asked in an email from Eve C.:

While reading the July issue of O Magazine, I came across a print ad for the show. There is a picture of Ms Blonsky in a swimsuit, and damned if it doesn’t look as though the pic has been photo shopped in order to make Ms Blonsky look larger than she actually is. It’s bad enough that women are photo-shopped to be thinner, but I’d like to know the reasoning behind making the star of the show look bigger.

I’m unable to forward the pic to you in the email, but the ad is on page 39 of “O”, and I’m sure other magazines are running it.

I found the picture that Eve is writing about, and it appears at the top of the post. But here for comparison’s sake is a photo taken of Blonsky at the Young Hollywood Awards last month, next to the swimsuit photo. To me, honestly, they look pretty plausibly the same basic shape. What do you think? And are you planning to watch the show?

1. Fat Female Celebrities vs. Fat Male Celebrities

The fat male group is more loved, less judged for their body size and more contemporary ; the fat female group has many members framed as being “bitchy” and “too opinionated,” is judged endlessly in relation to body size and is much less current in the zeitgeist (Gossip singer Beth Ditto is arguably a contemporary fat female icon, but hardly as well-known as the likes of [Jack] Black).

2. On Airbrushing Skinny Models to Look Healthy

It’s been dubbed ‘reverse retouching’ and involves using models who are cadaverously thin and then adding fake curves so they look bigger and healthier.

This deranged but increasingly common process recently hit the headlines when Jane Druker, the editor of Healthy magazine – which is sold in health food stores – admitted retouching a cover girl who pitched up at a shoot looking ‘really thin and unwell’.

It sounds crazy, but the truth is Druker is not alone. The editor of the top-selling health and fitness magazine in the U.S., Self, has admitted: ‘We retouch to make the models look bigger and healthier.’

3. Miss USA admits to strict dieting, exercise, and dehydrating to look “good on TV”.

Remember, the BFD Twitter feed is here. Happy Tweeting!

And now another one has surfaced! The company apologized for the first ad, saying it was “mistakenly released.” How can they explain this one? My guess is that someone in their art department is clinically insane.

I’m not a consipiracy theorist, I swear it. But I’ve got to tell you, it’s not hard to start thinking that maybe this isn’t an oopsie do, tee hee! Maybe Ralph Lauren is making some kind of twisted commentary about women’s bodies. Maybe Ralph Lauren and Karl Lagerfeld are best friends! Maybe someone ought to retire their Photoshop license.

Although there will be some trashing of Jennifer Love Hewitt in this post, my rant has more to do with the publishers of magazines and specifically Shape and Self. Each month on their covers these two magazines generally have a picture of a woman on the cover who looks toned and fit and perfect. I understand about photoshopping and airbrushing and that is how the game is played. Fine.

But if you are going to do that don’t run an article in your pages about the person on the cover that talks about how she got this perfect body by diet and exercise because it isn’t true. Yes, Jennifer Love Hewitt diets and exercises but she doesn’t look like the person you have put on your cover and I especially hate it when you have a sample diet inside that makes it seem like you will look like her when you have completed the diet.

The picture on the cover is not Jennifer Love Hewitt. Yes it is technically her, but the parts that most people find difficult to look at in the mirror are not her own. She is not flawless but the cover and the article make it seem like you will look flawless if you follow the diet or do what Jennifer does. You won’t though because even the subject of the article doesn’t look like the image portrayed on the cover.

Jennifer Love Hewitt famously exploded two years ago when people said she was fat in her bikini. She wasn’t fat at all. She looked great. She said the whole thing was unfair and that people should be judged for who they are and not what they look like. Fine. From now on when you agree to do a cover of a magazine in a bikini, make sure as part of your agreement that no airbrushing or photoshopping is done to your picture because if you do, then you are being a hypocrite and not having people focus on you but some imagined perception and feeding the stereotype that you said was wrong. Be proud of who you are and if you want the world to change, then you need to be part of the solution and not adding to the problem.

Of course, this rant does say she “wasn’t fat” and therefore “looked great” (fat people can look great too, even in bikinis) but makes some good points otherwise, I think.

So I saw this link in my referral logs, to a site that seems to be… Norwegian? Swedish? Finnish? Anyway, whoever they are, they link BFD in their sidebar, so thank you, people of Snorwinnland!

Scrolling down the home page, I spotted this entry, with the arresting image of a fat Superman. I have no idea what it portends, but I liked looking at it, and thought you might too.

Happy Friday!

On the new cover…the editors did everything they could to obscure what her body actually looks like. Her right arm is totally invisible and much of her left arm has been cropped out. A yellow dot strategically obscures the area where her butt meets her lower back and white pants against a white background make her legs almost invisible.

According to Jezebel, SELF admitted the photoshopping… while also touting Clarkson as “a great role model for women of all sizes.” Nice hypocrisy there, SELF! Here is the quote from the editor in chief (brackets mine):

“Kelly Clarkson exudes confidence [despite the fact that she is not skinny enough for our cover], and is a great role model for women of all sizes [including you, fattie, so buy our magazine] and stages of their life [sic]. She works out and is strong and healthy [which means she should be skinnier, so we fixed that], and our picture shows her confidence [that media outlets like us are doing our damndest to erase] and beauty. She literally [not literally] glows from within. That is the feeling we’d all want to have. We love this cover [buy our magazine] and we love Kelly Clarkson [more when she is skinny].”

Kelly herself, inside the magazine, says “My happy weight changes… Sometimes I eat more; sometimes I play more. I’ll be different sizes all the time. When people talk about my weight, I’m like, ‘You seem to have a problem with it; I don’t. I’m fine!’ I’ve never felt uncomfortable on the red carpet or anything.” I hope she can keep that mentality going in the face of crap like this from the likes of SELF. And Margaret at Jezebel sums it up well:

Danziger is is right: Kelly Clarkson is a “great role model for women of all sizes.” When the press goes after celebrities for gaining weight many apologize to the public, like Oprah Winfrey or Kirstie Alley, or frantically exercise and appear on the cover of Us flaunting their slimmed down selves like Jennifer Love Hewitt. So far Clarkson has only declared that she’s OK with her body and backed her statements up by performing in clothing that exposes her figure, rather than hiding under billowy outfits. Of course, now Clarkson has appeared with a newly-slim body on the cover of Self, but it’s a decision the editors made for her, rather than a message she wanted to put out herself.

I wonder if Kelly minds the photoshopping this time?

Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly
Originally uploaded by mo pie

But not only did they photoshop the album cover, she doesn’t mind. She even says so on her blog:

we decided the cover of the album and just in case you haven’t seen it i’ll post it! it’s very colorful and they have definitely photo-shopped the crap out of me but i don’t care haha! whoever she is, she looks great ha!

Oh dear. I mean it’s nice that she’s saying “hey, this isn’t me” but at the same time, I wish she wasn’t being put in that position in the first place. mamaVISION points out one of the other downsides:

Wouldn’t you feel weird cruising around town having people see you in real life and think ing”Wow, she doesn’t look like that cover? She sure as hell is not as pretty.”

Allowing this fake-ery (if that is even a word) is just asking for it. Asking for criticism. Inviting public analysis. And generally just, well, an unwise move.

I lived this crap and it sucks. As a model, you have these amazing pictures produced of yourself. It made me feel like an impostor. The model version becomes your evil twin. The one everyone thinks you are…but are then disappointed when they see the real you.

I mean don’t get me wrong, I love Kelly and am going to buy the hell out of this album immediately. And a certain degree of photoshopping is of course inevitable. But my god people, can we let a gorgeous and curvy girl be gorgeously curvy for once?

1. Improving Aphrodite, a post with a great title and (even greater pictures) about reproductions of classic art that make its subjects, such as Botticelli’s Venus, thinner:

This is hilarious: it’s revisionist art history, as done by the Photoshop-happy editors of Vogue.

2. A fascinating discussion of how, for fat people, every picture (especially an unflattering one) comes across as a “before” picture waiting for an “after” to happen:

This polaroid was to be my “before” picture. The counselor took it with an impressive measure of enthusiasm, with an absolute wide-eyed assurance that someday soon I would look at this picture and shake my head and say “I cannot believe I ever looked like that!

And 3. A side-by-side comparison of ten celebrities who have gotten much thinner in recent years. (Jennifer Aniston would totally qualify for this, but she isn’t included.)

The point I want to make is that these women have ALWAYS been beautiful. They were considered beautiful enough to be stars with their curves, so what made them think they needed to lose them?

Speaking of pictures, back to the Photoshop diet. The idea behind the “diet” is that you take a photo of yourself and manipulate it into an “ideal” state of skinnyness via Photoshop, and are thusly motivated to lose a bunch of weight. If you can’t do it yourself, a website will apparently do it for you!

Within 48 hours of uploading your “before” photograph, [the site] will produce an “after” photograph for you based on your stated weight loss goal of from 5 to 50 pounds — perfect for sticking on the refrigerator door to motivate you not to eat those leftovers.

Fortunately, looking at the “before” photos of all of those celebrities, not to mention the “before” photo of Aphrodite, not to mention thinking about the bullshit concept of the “before” photo in the first place, provides the perfect antidote to the Photoshop diet. Oh, and if anyone wants to see my own personal “before” picture… here it is.