1. My Body Gallery - what real women look like.
2. If you can’t work out whether you’re an apple, a pear or an hourglass, relax. You’re none of the above.
3. 10 Reasons your “Ugly Vagina” is Normal and Gorgeous.
4. The young women at Beauty Redefined are working to promote the idea that ‘You are capable of more than being looked at’.
5. The Beheld: a feminist blogger writes about the significance of the ways we present ourselves. I especially like this post: ‘Why Hearing “You’re Beautiful” Makes Me Freeze‘.
6. Cameron Russell’s TED Talk: Looks Aren’t Everything — trust me, I’m a model, in which Cameron Russell fully acknowledges her ‘beauty privilege’. This had me thinking that when insecurity is coupled with beauty (very often) one’s own privilege probably isn’t even acknowledged.
7. Beauty Redefined, in which two sisters study beauty in sociological terms and campaign against impossible beauty standards set by the media.
8. Are Beauty Standards Higher For Men Now? from Slate (Hint: Yes, but it still doesn’t compare to what women face.)
9. Getting The Body You’ve Always Wanted from Hairpin
10. Creating The ‘Before Body’ from Sociological Images, which offers links to other sites going into the numerous ways in which the images we see have been signficantly Photoshopped. This one turns that trend on its head a little and shows us how in ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures, the ‘before-body’ has also been Photoshopped.
11. Stop Being Afraid Of Your Body from Paleo Digest
12. Adios Barbie: The body image site for every body.
13. Challenging Unrealistic Images Of Beauty from Simone Says What
While it’s nice to think everyone is beautiful, only a select few are able to be Beautiful. Denying that there is such a thing as a Western Beauty Standard means that by default you’re denying that such a thing as Beauty Privilege exists. Which means by extension you’re denying the fact that people who are not Beautiful face discrimination. And discrimination can’t be ameliorated unless we first acknowledge that it exists.
