Beauty with No Booty

            Models – the ever-discussed topic in the realm of fashion. Are they too skinny or too fat? Do they really eat? Or are the myths about the triple C diet (cocaine, coffee, cigarettes) true?  Unnatural bodies may be a common topic when discussing virtual realities and Barbie, but the reality is we see them on a daily basis – on magazine covers. 

            Photographs have since their birth had a big influence on peoples’ way of life. Photos have not only fixed and delimited time, but also started the creation of the visual culture we live in today. Marshall McLuhan definitely had a point when he stated that photos mirror the world (190). Never have designers’ ideals and models’ bodies been as questioned as they are today. The average American model was 5’11” and 117 lbs in 2008 (NEDA). However, I would like to twist and turn McLuhan’s argument slightly. These models are not merely photographs reflecting what people look like in society, but are at the same time advertisements trying to sell a brand and its’ accompanying ideology. This ideology is often something such as “thin is in”, or if you wear our clothes this and that is going to follow. As they show us what we ought to look like, we get skinnier, they once again show us how much skinnier should get, and many of us abide. As a result, an evil circle of representation of ideals is constructed. Young girls then, reach new weight extremes shown in the ramping statistics of both obesity and eating disorders (Stop Obesity; NEDA). This fact shows that we have become more self-critical and changed our “inner lives” to comply with our new set of standards (197). 

            I think it is time for us to question whether this kind of idealization in society is reasonable? We ask wherefrom the sudden increase in eating disorders comes, when all we need to do is look to  visual media’s daily ubiquity (Women’s Health). The frustration of not being able to relate to what media shows us leaves us with this desperate urge to become able to identify. This frustration leads to an obsession, obsession with weighing as little as possible. Now, in a society where fitting into the two number weight categories is a merit, it is hard to consider as something natural. All of our bodies and these bodies in particular, are hence what Meirzoff would call Virtual bodies (116). They are bodies that undergo some kind of transformation from their once fundamental state. Mierzoff’s theory emphasizes the fact that media, and therefore our culture, influence our perceptions of beauty and its definition. “None of us inhabit a purely natural body and no one’s body is complete,” he further states (117). Suggested is then that not only virtual bodies, as found in online gaming worlds or better yet Second Life, are virtual per se. Rather, with today’s access to make-up, gyms, plastic-surgery and diets – we all virtualize our bodies to become something unnatural. Where do we draw the line?

            The ubiquity of media cannot be the mere factor to the increasingly skinny models and the ideal they represent saturating our society. What made us abandon what I would like to call the “healthy virtual body” of the 50s – virtualized through make-up and hairspray at its most? The time where models represented the “average” woman with beautiful features has transformed to this below-size-zero society. I believe that the digitization of media has had a huge effect on this transition. The 50s beauties Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren are still considered beautiful women, yet what would they have looked like after Photoshop? Photos of today have taken us to an extreme where awareness of the digital modification of the original has become something natural, something original. We have “hyperrealized” our perception of ideals (Baudrillard 57); there is no longer an original. Nowadays, young women strive for the skeleton model bodies, which never seem to have a birthmark out of place or a sudden breakout. The process through which the original photo has gone through is irrelevant, because we identify with the virtualized version. Hence, Baudrillard’s point is proven, we live in a society where the copy is more real than the original. Living close to Hollywood, I saw a couple of “beautiful” actresses that indeed where as skinny, or even skinnier, than they looked on every photograph. But, they were not as “beautiful.” However, that did not stop me from having a subconscious urge to be as beautiful and skinny as they were on the pictures, not as seen in reality.  

            Another piece of “common knowledge” that we choose to surpass in our idealization with these fatless bodies, is that of the camera adding 10 pounds to one’s real weight. The models are therefore even skinnier than they look in the pictures, making the abnormality of their “weightlessness” even harder and striving for it virtual, as such. This was not a problem in the 50s, as the “natural” female was not seen as fat or skinny, merely beautiful. To clarify, it is not a coincidence that we refer to and know of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren as “timeless beauties” and not Lara Stone.

            Therefore, if the ideal is a result of a combination of ubiquitous media and digitization – what makes us young women overlook our awareness of the dangerous lifestyle of most models to fit in to this ideal? The “complete” body that Meirzoeff mentions no one has (117), if it were to be characterized today, it would be the body featured on every movie-cover and in every magazine – the thin body. The more I observe fashion magazines and ad campaigns, the more astonished I am of these girls ability to stay alive. Granted, models Ana Carolina Reston, Hila Elmalich, Maiara Galvao Vieira, Eliana and Luisel Ramos did not. They all died from, weighing as little as 60 pounds for a 5’6” body (Martin). 

In conclusion, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard and Nicholas Mierzoeff all predicted this happening and created a thesis as to why and how. Even though writing as long ago as almost 50 years and as “close” as 11 years ago, they were right – media has affected our inner perceptions as much as the level of superficiality we live after. How is it then that we, young women, are so reluctant to understand that we are being manipulated and pressured to unattainable and more importantly, unhealthy body ideals? We might look to virtual realities and other games when we speak about virtual bodies. Why bother when all we need to do is step to the closest mirror?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, 

who's the thinnest of us all?

The Night of a White Female Thug - Lil Jov

A thug – someone who kills people. Someone who fights, does drugs and drinks excessively. Someone who has tattoos and wears a due-rag. Someone black.

Or maybe Latino but definitely not white, right? Guess what? I decided to break the mold one night – Halloween night. Many girls on the streets were the “sexy convicts”, with almost butt-revealing shorts accompanied by a striped bra. After a lot of thought, I decided Sharpie was going to be my best friend in constructing “thug/gangsta Jovana.” With the re-designed-way-too-big-costume, and as mentioned in my previous entry with tattoos saying things as “thug life”, “free Weezy” and “respect” – “Lil Jov” went out hunting for the public’s reaction.

Yes, it was Halloween and there is not much one cannot get away that particular night. However, some people apparently had a problem with my costume. According to a black woman around my age I was a “white girl [that] be chasin’ after [their] men”. Why would a convict woman be appealing to black men? Is a criminal record a source of attraction? I do not think so. Even if it were, what is the problem with a biracial relationship?

My friends overheard a conversation amid a white couple sitting on a bench at Union Square engaged in some serious people watching. My friends and I decided that I would pass with my white friend dressed as a “sexy cop,” while they would listen to the couple's reaction. The man expressed his concern with today’s youth saying, “[t]hey just don’t know where the limits are nor where their place is do they?” The woman sighed and responded that she did not understand the ongoing “black-mania” or the excitement in dressing up as something “inferior”. I was the reference point of these statements.

It needs to be acknowledged that these were some of the most serious and stereotypical reactions I got that night. Some people just laughed. However, people placed these pre-constructed opinions about me because of my costume and that bothered me. Why would the target of attention of my costume have to be black men? Why was I suffering from "black-mania" (whatever that means) simply because I was dressed up as a convict? Statistics show that many more convicts in our jails today are black (Mauer and King), but how does a costume change the color of my skin to black? Can I not be a white convict? I mean, they do exist.

Thus, the abovementioned people's view of me was that of a typical white girl or a superior girl, using the possible words of the latter woman. Media has most likely taught her to separate the "black inferior" from the "white superior." More precisely, television has. Through the “stylization” and “othering” of people of color, she was probably taught to have an image of what a “black convict” was, in this case seeing a “white girl” trying to impersonate that challenged her beliefs (Caldwell 302). In her eyes, a thug or gangsta was probably someone black, heavily tattooed and with prison-history. Why? Television said so. I believe that this “othering” is more pervasive than we might think. It was Halloween and I wanted to have fun and do something that did not involve the adjective sexy. I played around with what I could resulting in the creation of “Lil Jov”. No one commented on how disturbing it was that a young woman would dress up as a convict, hey it was Halloween. The “thug life” on my knuckles however, was disturbing. Remember, it is not appropriate for certain people to dress up in certain costumes. Not even on Halloween…


 

Popular Teenage TV-shows "Outwhited"?

Google searching “common phrases black people use” generates more than seven million results in less than half a minute. The first link is a Yahoo Q&A where a non-black girl is writing a novel about two black high school seniors. She needs help finding some realistic, non-stereotypical phrases that “black people of a high school education would use”. In a post scriptum, she does emphasize that they are excellent students… (Nightwishfangirl)

In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered America. Ever since, race has been an “issue” in this country. The issues, or rather problems, range from the early history genocide of the natives and slavery of blacks to the contemporary bullying in school because of skin color. Newspapers, Radio, TV, and now the Internet have affected these inequalities in various ways, some of them by raising awareness, others by using their biased opinions to naturalize the concept of race-inequality. Human beings have a tendency to compartmentalize whenever possible. From elementary school through workplace, to cemetery we wish to be buried in - we are categorized. Race is definitely one of the more prevalent factors for the division of people in society and media has, in many ways, made it happen.  

Television, for instance, changes our perception of reality and “thence also [of] each other and [of] the world” (Williams 36). In other words, race depiction on TV highly influences the way we look at our everyday lives. Mainstream teenage programming on television is one of the instances in which Williams’ point is made very clear.  

Evidence number one – Gossip Girl. Also known as, “the one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite”, the show scores an eight out of ten on the Internet Movie Database. The blindingly white show has ethnic diversity of represented by “coded brown” Vanessa (Wang and Nguyen). Seeing as Vanessa is the only representative of “colored people”, it is pretty ironic that she is the only one of the characters that works. Once again, racial stereotypes have worked their magic in dominant white programming. John D. Delmar, featured writer in the 'zine The City Review, describes Gossip Girl as depicting a New York “devoid of New Yorkers”.  He means that it is lacking everything we see every day in New York – ethnic diversity (Delmar). When I think about it, even the scenes where the characters are in public places their surroundings are overwhelmingly “white”. Yes, they are from the Upper East Side where around 80% of the population is white (Kelly), yet they spend a lot of their time close to our campus and in Brooklyn not necessarily represented by their “whiteness”.  However, Jewish producer Josh Schwartz disagrees claiming that the show depicts a “very romantic view of New York”. When asked why the cast is “uniformly white” he responded that he was “working off of the source material” (Solomon). A very neutral and cowardly answer if you ask me. Does that mean that the romantic view of the city is the upper class, stylish and very white community, as opposed to the real view of an ethnic and socioeconomic melting pot?

Moving on to evidence number two – 90210. “The virtual whiteout” generally known as the CW airs the spoiled Caucasian brat show, 90210 (Elber). As in Gossip Girl, the spinoff of Beverly Hills, 90210, it introduces us to the world of Bev. High students with their (read ‘their parent’s’) money, parties and sexual experimenting. Responsible for the representation of ethnic diversity in the show is black Dixon. As the show proceeds, we learn that Dixon is the child of a gambling single mother and has been adopted by this warm, caring and socioeconomically stable white family. Stereotyping much?  Think about it, how often do we see a white poor child (which actually exist by the way) adopted by a middle class socioeconomic stable black couple? I believe we can all agree on that being a rarity. Instead black people are depicted as “reliant upon [the] white families” to provide with both shelter and nutrition (Coleman 79).

The shows work as telesublimes, or events that grant our wishes and "take us out of everyday life ... for a moment", in their appeal to the teenage and young adult masses (Mirzoeff 100). Today, many of us chose to watch the shows online or on our phones, which does not lessen the applicability of Mirzoeff’s aforementioned concept. We do indeed use these shows to escape and live in that immagined community promised to us (99). Nevertheless, if black people are depicted as reliant on white people, or just non-existent in an upper-class culture, whom and what are they going to identify with? Has this lead to a division in programming where whites have there shows and blacks theirs? Baudrillard carefully points to McLuhan’s argument of the medium being the massage when saying that the producers behind the medium also become the producers of reality (Baudrillard 56). The ongoing ethnic segregation in television makes the strain between the races in everyday life even bigger. We live in simulation. Why? We are not copies of other people, or of how media represents “us”. Or, are we? In this “hyperreality” of ours, the media produced realities have become blurred with the realities we live through our physical selves. In other words, "the medium and the real are … in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable” (Baudrillard 57). If hegemonic practices of the media dominators work to blurr these "realities" – how are non-white teenagers to see themselves when they do not have Serena's "beautiful blond hair" or Naomi's trustfund? BET and channels similar to this have emerged through this underrepresentation of black people in mainstream television. The fact that this has happened has probably not helped society when it comes to racial issues, but further divided it into "us and them".

To try out society’s stereotypes for myself, I used Halloween to my advantage – a perfect opportunity to dress up as what is perceived to be the “complete opposite” of what I am. Thus, I dressed up as a convict. To make it more fun and provocative, I was a “gangsta” convict. With “thug life” tattooed on my knuckles, three tears under my eyes and “free Weezy” on my back I was ready to hit the town. Did I feel like I was pushing it with my costume? Seen from a stereotypical point of view – I was. I was portraying the stereotype of what is often understood as the character of a low-class, black man’s character, not one of a European girl in her early twenties. However, why should it not be? Why is it that every time the word "gangsta" is pronounced, we all see a "tatted" black man with jewelry and a prominent penitentiary record, while the stereotypical snob would be a blond caucasian woman with well-manicured hands driving a Bentley? Why should my hair- and skin color prevent me from being a “gangsta” or a "snob" if I wanted to? Because the medium is the massage.

This is not odd because the child is caucasian.

It is weird because he is a child and that is what he is,

prior to fitting into any other category.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Implosion of Meaning in Media." Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1994. 55-60. Simulacra and Simulation. 30 Oct. 2010 <http://files.meetup.com/328570/Simulacra_and%20Simulation.pdf>.

Delmar, John D. "Television: John D. Delmar views "Gossip Girl" and "Dirty Sexy Money"" The City Review. 18 Sept. 2007. 30 Oct. 2010 <http://www.thecityreview.com/gossipgl.html>.

Elber, Lynn. "NAACP Report Find TV Networks Lagging in Diversity." Black America Web. 18 Dec. 2008. 30 Oct. 2010 <http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/entertainment/gossip/4564>.

Gossip Girl. Prod. Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. Perf. Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, and Penn Badgley. 17th Street Productions, Alloy Entertainment, and CBS Paramount Network Television, 2007-. IMDb. 31 Oct. 2010 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397442/>.

"Gossip Guy." Interview by Deborah Solomon. New York Times. 14 Oct. 2007. The New York Times Company. 31 Oct. 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/magazine/14wwln-q4-t.html>.

Kelly. "Is Gossip Girl “Too White”? «." Web log post. Crushable - Crushable gives you the celebrity news, style and scoop on the stuff you care about. 7 Aug. 2008. 01 Nov. 2010 <http://crushable.com/entertainment/is-gossip-girl-too-white/>.

Means Coleman, Robin R. "7 - Black Sitcom Portrayals." Gender, race, and class in media: a text-reader. By Gail Dines and Jean McMahon Humez. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. 79-88.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Telesublime." An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. 96-101.

"Nightwishfangirl" "Common phrases black people use? - Yahoo! Answers." Yahoo! Answers - Home. Jan. 2010. 01 Nov. 2010 <http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091123143247AAuOKzg>.

Wang, Jen, and Diana Nguyen. "Disgrasian: Gossip Girl Goes Over to the Dark Side (Again)." Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post. 11 Dec. 2008. 31 Oct. 2010 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/disgrasian/emgossip-girlem-goes-over_b_150033.html>.

Williams, Raymond. ""The Technology and Society"" Electronic Media and Technoculture. By John Thornton Caldwell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. 35-50.