Monday 11 June 2007

dollymixedup spits from the heart

We're not going to make a habit of this, but dolly has something to say. The usual bile will resume shortly.

"I am a flat-chested size 16 with more cellulite than dover cliffs.

I have sailor tattoos on my right arm, breasts and pussy.

My left arm and right leg, torso and head are covered in scars.

I am a self-harmer in many different ways.

I cut, burn and beat myself, take overdoses.

I have more diagnoses than a Bernard Matthews turkey has sneezes.

I am a woman. I am a woman with many qualities, many talents many skills. And I'm a bit mad. I know I am.

If I were to cut off my breasts, inject toxins into my face, try to revert to puberty, look 30 years younger than my age and spend obscene amounts of money in chasing those rainbows; if I were to deny my gender, despise my gender, then I would be admitted.

And it wouldn't be nice.

I can't stand the way these women want to encourage other women to deface their bodies: the bodies of women. Observer Women.

I might be mad, but I do love being a woman. I am proud to be a woman. I love every fucking scar, every fucking wobble, every fucking crease on my body. Including the ones under my arms.

Self-harm is self-harm is self-harm, however you do it. It is about loathing, and that is not something to be bragging about. It is not pretty, it's not glamorous, it's not fashionable. It doesn't belong alongside handbags and shoes as a lifestyle choice. Whether operations and injections, diets and poisons or 69p razor blades from Netto - it is all self-harm.

When I'm ill, I damage myself. I engage in risky behaviour. I drink, self-medicate and hate myself.

But I don't glamourise it through a national Sunday newspaper. I refuse to be ashamed of who I am - but I do know that self-harm is no solution.

Observer Woman Magazine has the influence to make us as women feel better about ourselves. It could celebrate women as we are. It could love women for infinite reasons. Instead, it tells us that what we are, how we look, what a woman actually IS... is shocking.

Observer Woman is Self-loathing Woman.

Observer Woman - you are much more fucking mad than I am."




Some quotes from OWM:

Liz Jones

"I found big breasts revolting as well as terrifying: pendulous, covered in blue veins. I was scared of everything in those days - talking to boys, swimming lessons where others might glimpse my body or I might drown - and so I thought, it will be far easier to opt out. I starved myself, and so of course I didn't grow breasts; my adolescence consisted of precisely one period

/snip/

I was in my early twenties, working on a glossy magazine in London, and the starvation thing had got a bit out of hand. At a particularly arduous ballet class one Saturday morning (I did four hours of classes on Saturday, seven hours during the week), I caught sight of my emaciated frame in its pink tights in the mirror and knew I needed help, which I got (eating-disorder clinics, steroids, peanut-butter sandwiches), but no one told me that one of the side effects was that I would grow breasts. Oh God how I hated them. They meant I couldn't run properly each evening, they meant men looked at me, they meant clothes (Azzedine Alaïa bodies, Katharine Hamnett stretchy dresses) looked obscene. I started to hide my breasts (bear in mind that up to, and way beyond this point, no man had ever touched them or seen them);

/snip/

But then one day, on the bus, I had a revelation. I was reading the very first issue of British Elle magazine (the gloriously flat-chested Yasmin not-yet-Le Bon was on the cover), in which there was a feature that seemed to answer my prayers. It was about the fact that women in Paris were getting breast reductions to achieve that boyish, gamine, high-fashion look, and I thought, of course! Why didn't I think of this? And so, at the age of 29, I had my breasts removed

/snip/

I can't feel anything in my breasts, and I will never be able to breast-feed (a bit of a moot point, given my two-decade-long sabbatical from men due to my breast phobia), and the scars mean I have never felt liberated by my flatchestedness; I have never been able to sunbathe topless, for example, or wear Versace gowns slashed to the waist, but how often do those situations arise? When I was finally, fleetingly married, my poor husband never got to see or touch my breasts;

/snip/

Now that I am on my own again I can go back to not being a woman any more. I am alone, I no longer have to play netball or hockey. I no longer have to be seen naked. It's fine, really."



Kathryn Flett:

"I've lost two stones in 12 weeks on a diet not endorsed by any doctor, dietician, scary TV food guru or indeed anybody with half a brain. It amounts to a combination of stress, not eating very much and smoking like a volcano. Happily, Observer Woman readers are far too clever to follow such a patently idiotic prescription for rapid weight loss.

Whatever! This week I am prancing around reacquainting myself with my cheekbones and jaw line while wearing ballet pumps with skinny jeans"



Rosie Boycott,
(Founder, Spare Rib.)

"Two years ago, I was offered the chance to try out non-surgical face treatments for a newspaper article. Even though I hate the pressure that women are under to look good, there's no point in denying how much I try.

/snip/

I submitted my face to a course of microdermabrasion (a high-powered exfoliation), IPL (intense pulsed light), Restylane injections and Botox. The IPL hurt as it zapped laser-strength light into the skin on my cheeks and round my nose, burning away thread veins that cause uneven, blotchy colour. The Restylane was injected into the grooves on either side of my nose and into the wrinkle between my eyes."




From 'The Next Big Thing'
"We watched our models, Kate Smith and Elizabeth Satherlund, get transformed, made-up, and styled. We watched them pose. We studied early Polaroids. But still, we were shocked by the finished product. The photographs seemed illicit, transgressive. They seemed overtly sexual. Fetishistic, almost. They certainly seemed contrary to today's rules on glossy-magazine aesthetics. So much bosom! So much bottom! Such luscious rolls of back fat! Such extravagant thighs! Aren't there laws against this?

/snip/

Elizabeth and Kate are in fact both a size 16 - the dress size of the average British woman. They're (young, beautiful, statuesque versions of) us. They're the majority of women that pass us on the street every day. They're the most realistic representation of beauty in town. So of course, their image shouldn't be shocking at all. These photographs shouldn't be a statement, shouldn't be remarkable in any way. But they are."

39 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hm, I've never thought about dieting and cosmetic surgery as self-harm before, but you know, you're absolutely right. This magazine is encouraging women to hate themselves and harm themselves.

I'm an ex-self-harmer too, and I like my scars - they're part of who I am and where I've come from. I've lost track of whether they're fashionable or not, though - perhaps OWM can set us straight on that?

To the others who suggested writing letters to OWM - there's no need, just keep commenting here and they'll take notice soon enough.

Bowleserised said...

From the next post, and their note about blogging, it looks like they already have noticed.

Urban Chick said...

phew - forgot to buy it again

sian and crooked rib said...

well said dolly and anonymous.
i used to self harm and always believed that surgery is a form of self harm too. i also feel that my scars are a part of me, but i no longer see them as an improvement on me, which is what liz jones seems to think.
i thought the most striking thing wasshe no longer has feeling in her breasts. i remember seeing a picture of tara reid, completely oblivious to the fact her dress had left her tits exposed, becasue she had no feeling. now, as far as im concerned, having feeling in my breasts is important! taknig that away is surely a way of repressing women - taking their sexuality away to be replaced by a false ideal? or am i digging too deep here.
and i don't want to be encouraged to diet so i can 'reconnect' with my cheekbones and skinny jans thank you very much.
it is funny, how two types of self harm, both dangerous, can be so differently approached by the "establishment". i can pay some guy to leave big scars over my stomach, and get committed if i do it myself.
i am in no way advocating self harm. it is a terribel thing to do to yourself. im just saying, that it isn't so different to what people are parised for doing.

Interval Drinks said...

This issue peaked new levels of anger, before I was able to fling the magazine away with a weary, resigned sigh and read the arts section, but this month there was actual fuming and fist-shaking. The blurb that accompanied the cover story was one of the vilest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read and the whole body image feature was just bizarre. If Liz Jones actually feels about her body the way she says she does, she’s clearly ill. Yet the piece was presented in a jocular, light-hearted fashion. Absurd crash diets and the slicing up of one’s body for aesthetic reasons are a form of self harm, especially in the some of the ways presented in this feature, but there’s no attempt to question, or delve into the reasons behind, some of this behaviour – it’s just presented as ‘the things we women do.’ Gah. Grr.*Loses ability to make coherent arguments.*

Yvonne said...

I read those articles on Sunday, and I just felt really sorry for Liz Jones. It sounds like she has a really shitty life, hating her body like that. For as much as I look at myself in the mirror and suck in my stomach, I could never hate my body, it is who I am. But I don't think the article was glamourising Liz Jones' attitude; I pity her. And no-one wants to be pitied, do they?

Misssy M said...

The whole plastic surgery-as-a-norm in all magazines targeted at women is getting out of hand.

On the one hand they have token articles about embracing women of a certain size,(eg: Tyra Banks' rant about being criticised for her size in THAT swimsuit photo) and then you turn the page to see the fetishising of the Size O women.

I fear for my daughter. How bad is it going to be for her when she is teen in ten years?

Spitting Mad said...

Thanks for your comments everyone.

Hellojed - that's an interesting point - are OWM actively endorsing Liz Jones's craziness?

I think the first thing to look at is the context - sitting alongside witty little bon mots from Ariel Levy, Will Self and the rest. They give the impression that they are presenting the wide range of emotion. By including Liz Jones's piece in their I think they are implying that it is within the 'normal' range. I don't believe they would have commissioned someone like dolly to talk about her scarification in the way they indulge Liz Jones. Because cutting yourself with a razor blade is bad but having your own breasts cut off in Harley Street is apparently normal.

The next point is that this is not a one off. OWM regularly carries pieces by and about women who clearly hate their own bodies (see also Christa d'Souza last month, but there's at least one every month). This is a magazine that routinely addresses its readers as 'we' - eg We know it's common but we love it anyway - and regularly says things like 'but admit it, you feel like this too, don't you?' It is really hard to escape the conclusion that they see this type of self-loathing as normal, if not actually desirable. They really do seem to think that extreme body modification is normal behaviour, to be discussed alongside make-up and fashion tips.

We've given them the benefit of the doubt in the past, but this issue took the biscuit.

And then vomited it up afterwards of course.

Anonymous said...

Hello, i don't know how i've ended up here - through a series of links in people's blogs i think.
Now don't get me wrong, I found the OWM "big thing" article pretty ridiculous. But i just thought i'd add something re the suggestion that they are saying the image of a woman is shocking. It didn't come across like that to me. More that they are saying we have been conditioned and desensitised into accepting super skinny models as the norm. Therefore, on seeing a, comparatively speaking, super large model, we are shocked. But that we don't need to be and nor should we be.
Or have i got that wrong?

Spitting Mad said...

Hello man, aged 31!

The reason so many of us hated this comment is that we are not actually shocked by photos of Size 16 women. Not at all. To quote someone on the Guardian talkboards who had written to complain... "I cannot begin to describe how not shocked I am." We, the real people who inhabit planet Earth, are actually much more shocked by many of the unhealthily ultra-thin models they normally show. THAT is shocking.

The reality of the situation is that the journalists at OWM, as you describe, really have become conditioned and desensitised into accepting super skinny models as the norm.

But they extrapolate from their that because they only ever look at skinny women, because they only ever encounter Size 16 women when they "pass them in the street" then the same must be true of their readers.

And we all know that after that they will go back to an endless parade of Size 0 anorexics for the next six months until they do another token fat bird to show how right-on they are.

If the article concluded "Oh my God, what have we become? The horror, the horror" then we could forgive them. But no - it concludes by saying "we shouldn't be shocked. But we are." End of story.

The person writing that blurb on the Size 16 feature wants us to be complicit, to agree that we are shocked by larger models. To which our response is

Fuck.
Right.
Off.

Spitting Mad said...

I appear to have lost the ability to differentiate between 'there' and 'their' today. Sorry about that.

It seems we now need a fluffer AND a sub-editor.

lasoti said...

I'll sub for you! Not that you need it, unlike the Guardian/Observer, but that's another story.

On the size 16 thing, the whole "pass them in the street" thing is hilarious when you realise that it means that the fattest writer on that rag is size 14. Has to be, logically. So the whole bunch of them are much closer to the y-axis on the normally-distributed graph of adult female body size than any other group of women you'd care to choose at random, yet they feel supremely qualified to yak on in the first person plural, as this blog so incisively points out.

Well, Observer Woman, guess what? "We" average women are NOT "shocked " to see a picture of some size-16 model - "we" are only surprised at your surprise, as it were.

Now, how about they print some pictures of average-*looking* women to end the hegemony of beauty in OWM? You're not thin and beautiful/size 16 (clearly equated with "fat" in their tiny little skulls) and a model? Sorry, *you* simply don't exist.

Sorry once again for the rant; your excellent post touched a nerve.

felicity said...

i got directed to this blog via my myspace blog which in a similar vein was disgusted at observer woman's treatment of those lucious ladies at the weekend. the magazine seems to be elle/marieclaire/glamour etc etc in disguise, simultaneously saying look at us having these large ladies glamour modelling, yet within the same mag lauding the thin skinny look. it was the only reason that i deliberately picked up the observer last weekend. i think i'll stick to my random purchases and indulge in the cookery section more often!

Yvonne said...

Spitting Mad, thanks for your thought-provoking response to my comment, I have to say I don't have much experience with OWM...I read the article on the net so I missed out on the layout, photos etc. Glad that you are pulling them up on their promotion of self-loathing. I'm shocked to be honest - I couldn't imagine a sensible woman thinking that Liz Jones' attitude is something to aspire to...even if OWM promote it as an acceptable example of women's lib or however they spin it. Keep up the good work, hope you win POW.

Anonymous said...

Just a logical progression, starting with Smash Hits and moving ever onwards. Fight back. Don't buy the effing things. Don't let your kids buy "teen mags" either, with their thinly-veiled misogyny. And remember - all they ever want is your money.

Anonymous said...

The reason these magazines will never change is because it wouldn't suit them to do so, at least from a financial point of view. Most of them pay beJuicyTubed lip service to female empowerment, but we all knew that.

Not buying them is my way of opting out of being told how inadequate I am, and the moment I turned my back on them, I felt better immediately.

I'd never seen dieting or cosmetic surgery as self-harm before. I feel that extreme dieting and eating disorders would definitely come under that category; joiningg a slimming club, perhaps not so much. As with plastic surgery, which I myself considered not long ago, it's more to do with the mindset of the individual. I never thought a nose job would make me a better person, just one with slightly more balanced features. Liz Jones, on the other hand, is a tragic, tragic case, clearly with more issues than Reader's Digest. The fact that she no longer sees herself as a woman... there are no words.

Great post - thank you for the honesty.

Spitting Mad said...

Dolly here.

Thanks for all your comments and the honesty in them.

China Blue - I agree joining a slimming club is not self harm (even something I should do) and I realise for some people plastic surgery can be positive.But it is also tied up with self loathing and I believe that a large number of people use surgery as an alternative to accepting themselves and for me accepting yourself is a foundation to happiness.

I have been self harming for over 22 years and spent much of that feeling ashamed of and hiding my scars. After a particulary nasty bout of illness I now have visible scars on my head, face and hands - impossible to hide without loads of gunk (which i just can't be arsed with although I have social objections as well).

I am proud that I live a useful life, whilst living with serious mental health problems just like people are proud of living successfully with cancer, spina bifida etc. When I'm well I get out and do things like run clubs, dj, run playschemes and have fun with my friends.

Strangely though lots of other people feel I should be ashamed of my disability or at least keep quiet about. Some people don't even see it as a disability and are happy to label me as mad, bad and possibly dangerous, definately unreliable.

I am none and all of those things - just like every body bloody else.

I too feel a bit sorry for Liz she is deeply diturbed and in denial. She has surrounded herself with yes women and men who feed off her unhappiness. When i do mad or bad stuff my friends point it out and support me to get through it (no easy feat sometimes I can be scarily stubborn and drive them to moments of SHITTING FUCKERY frequently) but Liz's friends pay her to do it more.

OWM is the best/worst example of media selling fools gold. I'm glad we have struck a chord with the non buyers.

excuse spelling punctuation errors - the jumped up strumpet that is Ally Mc Bile had the nerve to go to work. I'll be having words later.

Spitting Mad said...

"Some people don't even see it as a disability and are happy to label me as mad, bad and possibly dangerous, definately unreliable."

Some of us DO see it as a disability and are STILL happy to label you as mad, bad, possibly dangerous, definitely unreliable.

Jumped up strumpet indeed.

Axx

Spitting Mad said...

You call that work?

I was appreciating your skills hon. Run along now though, there's a dear.

;)xx
dolly

Anonymous said...

I have stopped reading women's magazines altogether because they are patronising drivel. I used to enjoy Marie Claire as it used to have good articles (the rise in eating disorders among Tongan women after television was introduced to their island is one story that I remember off the top of my head). I would like to see interviews with women from across the country and from all the socio-economic groups. Their views on sex, politics, and life in the noughties would be far more interesting. OWM, like all magazines now, seems to work on the premise that all women are gasping,sado-masochistic bitches who just, you know, can't help being crazy. I loathe the solipsism of the thing; I loathe the London-centric nature of it; I am sick of the pointless navel-gazing articles that I have wasted minutes of my life reading. I fucking hate it. I am a 24 year old woman with post-graduate qualifications and a decently paid job, so I guess I'm at the core of their demographic, which seems to be aimed at dead-eyed, career-obsessed, self-loathing fembots. It is outrageously regressive. The size 16 models were presented as if they were freaks, things to be fetishized. In truth they were just pleasantly zaftig. There was nothing ground-breaking about it, because they were still models. How about a naked 5'1" size 14-16 woman, or a 5'6" size 12-14, both of which would represent a good proportion of women. The Liz Jones piece was shocking. It was just thrown in with a bunch of articles about people wibbling on about how much they hate their feet. She had her breasts cut off for Christ's sake.
The whole magazine appears to be written by the kind of twittering, self-congratulatory egoists that even Nathan Barley would cross the street to avoid. It is vile.

Anonymous said...

I found the Liz Jones piece genuinely distressing. I've always thought she was a bit weird, a bit silly, but this showed that she really does have some serious mental problems. I was shocked that she could find someone who was willing to perform surgery on her. If ever a woman needed to see a good psychotherapist, it's her.

One more thought. Forget this business about "celebrating women's bodies as they are". Why not just forget the whole body stuff altogether and print some articles about things that are, you know, genuinely interesting?

Anonymous said...

Dollymixedup,

I feel what you say is right about Observer woman. How it seeks to breed self loathing amongst women is disgusting but it is not the only culprit. You however should not get on your high horse, as you feel entitled to destroy others that you see fit for your own personal gain, there are many examples. Have you ever heard the expression "that people in glass houses should not throw stones".

You support wrong do'ers and protect those who seek to destroy others, including those who attack women. You validate this as part of some SM game even though you witness the actual damage your blindness and malicious lies cause.

You, as anyone who knows you, are a self centered person who see's fit to ruin others lives for the benefit of your own, thus a hypocrite of the highest order.

You accuse others of rape and yet defend rapists. You lie that your parents abused you in order to get attention from those around you, so in turn you can use them, etc, etc,.

I hope you find happiness eventually, but stop abusing others in your search for it.

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