Last week, Versace’s PR team released a single of image of the newest addition to Versace’s stable of models. Her name is Kaia Gerber and she is Cindy Crawford’s daughter. She is 10 years old.

For now, Kaia is the face of Versace’s junior line, but if the fashion industry’s long-running trend of using pre-pubescent models in its biggest campaigns and shows is anything to go by, it won’t be long before Kaia is walking the runway for world’s biggest fashion houses, modeling clothes marketed to women more than twice her age.

There has been plenty of debate about the effect modeling at such a young age has on girls, with touted effects ranging from lowered self-esteem to early sexualisation.

But it’s not just young models suffering. When the girls used to sell clothes to adult women are not just pre-pubescent, but in many cases young enough to be our daughters, the collective effect on women is highly damaging to our self esteem, sense of self and the way we perceive attractiveness.

The use of young models by fashion houses is by no means a recent phenomenon, but it is one I believe is becoming increasingly fraught and less willingly accepted by women outside the fashion industry.

In 1980, Brooke Shields became the youngest ever fashion model to appear on the cover of Vogue. She was 14. Later, at 15, she became the face of Calvin Klein, uttering the famous line “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Nude photographs of a 10-year-old Shields were banned from being exhibited and she raised controversy playing a child prostitute in “Pretty Baby”. None of that seemed to matter to the millions of women who bought Calvin Klein jeans after she appeared in the ad campaign. Calvin Klein went on to attract criticism in the mid 1990’s when he used 15-year-old models in a shoot designed to mimic a pornography set.

More recently, we have witnessed the fashion industry becoming increasingly brazen in its attempts to push the boundaries, with male Australian model Andrej Pejic modeling women’s clothes for Jean Paul Gaultier and becoming the face of a push-up-bra.

As a woman, it disturbs me enormously that for an huge section of the fashion industry, “normal” and “attractive” equates to a body that is devoid of any and all of the hallmarks of womanhood, in all its beauty and diversity.

I’m not trying to incite debate about the use of “plus-size” versus thin models, however, I believe that when the “women” modeling women’s clothing are not women at all, but are children or men, there is a problem.

Women come in an a huge array of shapes and sizes, but the fashion industry has thus far been slow to accept and recognize this, as exemplified by Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld’s take on the increasing demand for diversity in fashion:

“These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly,” Lagerfeld said in a 2009 interview.

“(Fashion is all about) dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women”.

What do you think? Should the use of models under 16 be banned? Would you like to see more diversity in the fashion industry?

Last week, I saw David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. To be honest, it’s the type of movie I usually avoid. The reason for that is that over the past few years I have become hyper-sensitised to violent scenes in movies and basically these days I can’t watch anything other than romantic comedies without feeling sick to my stomach and wracked with anxiety (yep, makes movie nights with my boyfriend super fun).

Being so averse to on-screen violence has made me extremely aware of just how much there is out there; not to mention how difficult it can be to avoid in a world obsessed with sex and violence, which in film often go hand-in-hand.

So it was with extreme reluctance that I agreed to see Dragon Tattoo. I knew from a vague reference in a review that there was a rape scene. I didn’t know that basically the entire plot centered around graphic and extreme acts of rape, torture, mutilation and murder of women. I coped remarkably well, despite having to leave the cinema twice, but it got me thinking about how desensitised our society has become to extreme violence, and in particular the type of sexualized violence Dragon Tattoo portrays, as well as how little dialogue there actually is in our society about sexual violence, despite how regularly we see it on screen.

I have found it very interesting that there is a huge discrepancy between what we see in the film and what the media will talk about. The film’s star Rooney Mara (who plays Lisbeth Salander) expressed exasperation about the way journalists framed their questions about the savage rape scene, saying ”…People really need to up their game with the question. Everyone is like, ‘So, the rape scene. Was that hard?’ You’re just like, ‘No, it was really fun. It was really titillating’.”

Dragon Tattoo features two scenes graphically depicting rape, one scene depicting sodomy, and several featuring images of mutilated women. One of the film’s core plot lines involves a woman who has orchestrated her own disappearance because her father and brother repeatedly and systematically raped her and murdered women known to her. Sexual violence, whether graphic or implied, underpins the entire plot from start to finish.

And yet members of the press who have interviewed the stars of the movie and written reviews in its wake (with the exception of several feminist bloggers) have largely ignored the enormous implications of the sexual violence depicted in the film. The scenes and themes have rated a token, passing mention, sure- but the vast majority of the interviews with Rooney Mara have focussed on her piercings, haircut and weight rather than the brutal sexual abuse that she is and has been subjected to.

In short: we can show sexual violence at its most gruesome and hardcore in film, but it is still such a taboo topic that any meaningful discussion about it remains off-limits.

It seems to me that the culture of silence that surrounds sexual violence is very much alive and well. This film actually provides an amazing opportunity to deconstruct the messages at its heart- to discuss the implications of rape, incest and misogyny, to humanise its victims and to open up a dialogue about the kind of situations and systems in which sexual abuse flourishes.

It’s an opportunity to delve into a female character who has much more to offer than the vacuous, one-dimensional women usually portrayed in popular culture. Lisbeth Salander is both victim and hero, sexual plaything and sexual aggressor. She is damaged, multi-layered, fiercely intelligent and quite frankly, fascinating. Salander’s character provides an opportunity to explore the many realities of female sexuality- a subject far more complex than popular culture would have any of us believe.

I can’t help but feel the opportunity to learn something has been lost here. Without discussion and deconstruction, without the de-stigmatisation of sexual violence and without meaningful conversation about its darkest themes, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo simply becomes one more movie packed with the kind of violence that slowly eats away at the viewers’ ability to empathise and feel the kind of shock and horror that such themes truly deserve.

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” 

― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

“The Women’s Weekly cover of Deborah Hutton, naked at 50, is my early vote for Cover of the Year. I adore it. Yes, it has been air brushed but to my eye (and having seen Deb Hutton in a cossie in real life), it’s minimal. There are lines on her face, there is texture to her skin… She looks beautiful and portraying a 50yo woman like this was a brave and exciting decision for editor Helen McCabe to take.”

Comments on the post immediately began pouring in, with many readers expressing their anger and disappointment that Mia, who has in the past been a staunch anti-photoshop spokesperson, has called for full magazine and advertising disclosure of photoshopping and was an outspoken member of a Government body image advisory group, seemed to be backflipping on her anti-photoshop stance. At the same time, commenters also voiced their outrage that the AWW images, which appeared alongside a story written by Deborah Hutton about her good relationship with her body after years of low self esteem, had been photoshopped in the first place. The overwhelming feeling among the 500-odd comments was one of disappointment; disappointment that women feel they need to pose naked to prove their attractiveness and contentment with their body, disappointment that one of Australia’s most respected anti-photoshop advocates was supporting the AWW cover, and disappointment that despite the positive words Deborah had shared inside the issue, the accompanying images and their heavy photoshopping did not support the body-acceptance message Deborah had espoused in print.

The mainstream media picked up on the issue a couple of days ago, with News Ltd opinion writer Susie O’Brien writing:

Hutton is right that she’s “doing OK for 50″. In fact, she looks totally amazing. So why, then, did she agree to have the images Photoshopped at all? As Hutton explains it, the airbrushing was just to even out her skin tone and remove a few blemishes. But if you are really trying to celebrate your 50-year-old body and all its “imperfections” (her word, not mine), then why would you let the picture be touched up? In my mind, it just undermines the entire exercise. I love the fact that Hutton has done this photo shoot. But I don’t agree with the way she’s gone about it. Given that the widely circulated pictures don’t actually reflect the way she really looks, it makes the entire point of celebrating a 50-year-old woman’s body a little futile. By removing the sun spots and blemishes, and evening out her skin tone, Hutton is accepting that her natural body (which is miles better than just about every other woman her age) still isn’t good enough for public consumption.

“It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of (most) reality televisionand probably unsurprising that I reinforce my hatred by obsessively reading all the critical Reality TV-related studies, articles, and books I can find. I’m especially passionate on the topic right now as I’ve just finished reading Reality TV Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, by Jennifer Pozner. I admit at times I felt her criticism went a tad overboard — apparently there’s just no way to photograph a woman on ANTM thatisn’t offensive — but in general I loved the book, it added like 18,000 gallons of fuel to my fire.

And then, due to the mystical convergence of the all-knowing universe and its wily ways, just last month a new study from The Girl Scout Research Institute found that female Reality TV viewers ‘accept and expect a higher level of drama, aggression, and bullying in their own lives, and measure their worth primarily by their physical appearance’.

The cast of Extreme Makeover

72% of Reality TV watchers vs. 42% of non-viewers say they care more about and spend a lot of time on their physical appearance.

Furthermore, Reality TV watchers are more likely than non-watchers to believe that:

+ “Gossiping is a normal part of a relationship between girls” (78% vs 54%)
+ “Girls often have to compete for a guy’s attention” (74% vs 63%)
+ “Girls are happier when they have a boyfriend or significant other” (49% vs 28%).

This is bleak, my friends. This is very bleak.

Something to aspire to? Jersey Shore cast members

Once upon a time it wasn’t always like this — and by “this” I mean reality television dominating primetime network and cable schedules. It’s easy to forget that for a lot of kids growing up right now, ithas always been like this. Reality TV isn’t a thing they got into or they didn’t, it was a thing that was always there, right from the start.  This is a big problem, because reality TV is establishing new standards of interpersonal behavior that are, at best, psychotic, and at worst, insidiously abhorrent, self-obsessed, consumerist, racist, homophobic and misogynistic.

How did we get here? Well, there are missteps at every stage of reality television show development. Let’s take a journey together.

The Problem Starts With Casting

As more and more reality shows pop up, there are more and more opportunities not just to watch them, but to be IN them, or perhaps more importantly — to aspire to be in them. What was once a bizarre novelty is now, apparently, an increasingly viable and often strategically sound option for people “needing” makeovers, modeling contracts, husbands, new window treatments, a career boost, a million dollars, or, perhaps most frequently — attention.

 We used to dream of pounding the pavement and getting discovered like we were all in Fame or something. Do kids now dream of lining up for ten hours in winter with 5,000 other hopefuls to maybe earn a trip to Hollywood wherein they’ll become Ford Focus spokespeople stripped of their individuality in favor of mainstream makeovers and ridiculed nightly on national television by Simon Cowell — all for the chance of winning a record contract with the label responsible for the lackluster careers of Kris Allen, Ruben Studdard, and that gray-haired guy? My pre-teen self would’ve lined up to be in a reality show in a heartbeat, whereas my present self would rather sit on a knife. Back then, I was constantly begging my Mom to take me to Mickey Mouse Club auditions.But the benefits of appearing on a reality TV show vary dramatically, and for all the cast members who make careers out of their appearances, many other cast members practically make careers out of post-show image rehabilitation. On-air stipends generally run a few thousand for a season, but I’ve also heard estimates of $300-$750 a week (the latter for a show that required participants to leave their jobs). Afterwards, it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether or not you’ll be able to transition your fame into more fame. The fact that Tyra Banks has never produced a Top Model and The Bachelor has never led to a successful marriage doesn’t seem to bother the viewers. The giant media conglomerates help here by booking reality personalities on talk shows and putting them on magazine covers owned by the same parent company — it’s easy to create an illusion of popularity that simply isn’t reflected on the ground.If you’ve not taken a look at this standard example of a reality TV contract, you should. The fine for breaking the contract, which includes revealing “trade secrets” (for example: telling anyone that the show was scripted, that you felt manipulated/coerced/mistreated by the show, or that episodes were edited deceptively) is one million dollars, which is how many shows can get away with being exploitative or even inhumane — the repercussions are too severe for any cast member to dare complain that they were misrepresented or that the show was loosely scripted.Some key elements of the contract:

How does this affect the viewer? Well, we can’t expect the viewer to come up with more respect for the show’s subjects than the producers have themselves. In an interview published in now-defunct Radar Magazine in 2005 called “Rewriting Reality,”  Reality TV writer Todd Sharp confessed, ”…the one instance when I was on the set and the cast found out I was the story person, I did have trouble talking to them face to face knowing I was going to go back and manipulate them. I didn’t like it.”

Taking a reality TV show at face value is taking a world where micro-fame is more important than literally everything else in the world — friends, family, money, health, FREE WILL — at face value. That’s a really fucked up face.

The Problem is Now a Show

So we’ve got an inherently problematic premise — an exploited cast, a deceptive production process, crucial stealth advertising, et al. What happens when this show is then aired and passed off as “real life”?

In 2010, Sarah Coyne, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, found that reality tv shows (e.g., The Apprentice, Big Brother) featured more verbal, physical and relational aggression and showcased more acts of aggression per hour than fictional shows (e.g, ER, Torchwood). She also found that both types of programming tended to show females as relational, verbal and physical aggressors more often than males. This clashes strongly with real-life behavior: ”Real research shows that boys are just as likely as girls to be relationally aggressive. These TV shows are kind of perpetuating stereotypes.”

Reality TV’s fallback plot point is always backstabbing and gossiping — even when it’s not a competition show, tension revolves around conflicts between women who will do anything to get what they want. As fourfour so accurately spoofs, nobody is there to make friends. In real life, we theoretically should all be here to make friends, or at least to be open to making friends. It’s a fundamental life approach that’s constantly undermined by the catty Real Housewives or the Alliance-Builders of Survivor. Evaluate, degrade, attack. Over and over and over.

The cast of Jersey Shore fight it out

This is especially insidious when it comes to women and people of color. Pozner writes that these shows “are very intentionally cast, edited, and framed to amplify regressive values around gender, race, and class, underscore advertisers’ desire to get us to think less and buy more, and create a version of “reality” that erases any trace of the advances made during the women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights movements.”

What This Means For Girls:

“Brilliant from a business standpoint, this model has serious implications for programming, and for our culture,”  says Jennifer Pozner. Advertising aims to “deprive us of realistic ideas about love, sex, beauty, health, money, work, and life itself, in an attempt to convince us that only products can bring us true joy. Its practitioners are trained in psychology, sociology, argumentation, poetry, and design. These are powerful tools in the art of persuasion, more so when deployed by a multibillion-dollar industry.” Pozner doesn’t think the timing of this is a coincidence:

“Reality TV producers are diametrically opposed to women’s liberation, portraying the female population as ditzy and inept workers, wives and mothers…. reality TV isn’t simplyreflecting anachronistic social biases, it’s resurrecting them. The genre has done what the most ardent fundamentalists have never been able to acheive: They’ve created a universe in which women not onlyhave no real choices, they don’t even want any.”"

The cast of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

When I was about ten years old, my mother imparted to me a piece of wisdom that has profoundly shaped my identity, the way I view the world and my understandings of the politics of human relationships.

“Darling,” she said.
“Women are more often than not other women’s worst enemy. We call each other sluts, bitches and whores, ridicule each others appearance and judge other women on their number of sexual partners. We live in a world in which men only have to stand back and watch other women tear each other down.”

As a woman, it didn’t take me long to learn the truth of this. My mum’s words came springing back to mind when I saw this magazine cover yesterday:

I was appalled that a magazine editor, in this case ACP’s Fiona Connelly, would put something so destructive, so manipulative and so blatantly “headline grabbing” out into the public realm.

Ms Connelly seems to have no qualms treating her readers like they are complete morons- open the magazine and there is absolutely no quote whatsoever in which Simone Callaghan mentions or alludes to Liz Hurley. In fact, inside the magazine, the two women and their “beach bodies” aren’t even mentioned in the same article, let alone on the same page.

For a cover like that to successfully sell magazines, women must buy into the myth that all women are perpetually jealous, hopelessly insecure and pitted against one another. It’s a popular narrative and one that the media feeds off with horrifying voracity.

Another example of this is the glossip magazine’s Jennifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie war that has been raging (according to magazine editors) for a good six or seven years now.

Again, for these magazines to sell, women must buy into a narrative in which women are jealous, jilted, angry, desperately in search of a man and on an eternal quest to be better, hotter and more desirable than their “competition”.

The media doesn’t construct this narrative around men, by the way. How many times have we seen Brad Pitt’s face on a mag cover next to Justin Theroux’s, accompanied by the headline “Brad’s Jealous Breakdown”? Uh, never, that’s how many times. Or how about Warney on the cover of Woman’s Day challenging Toby to out-six-pack him in a pair of Speedos? Again, um, never.

The women I know and love have no time to be crazed, jealous, man-eating, insecure anorexics. Most of them are too busy being amazing friends, generous partners and ambitious, self assured individuals with rich, full lives.

Where are THOSE narratives in the mainstream media?

“I think you make some good points in this article but I have a question. What is really so bad about the Kelly Osbournes, Ricki Lee’s etc of the world showing off the results of their hard work? It’s their bodies and they can do whatever they want with them, and the fact that we buy so many of these magazines shows that we want to read this stuff and it inspires others to do better and achieve their goals. Just a different point of view I wanted to share.”

Pip’s comment basically sums up the liberal feminist argument that it is a women’s right to choose what she does with her body and with who she shares her body with. I agree with that to an extent; part of feminism’s gift to this generation is an unprecedented level of freedom to engage with the feminine experience in whatever capacity and to whatever degree you desire. But there are four key reasons I believe this type of “I was miserable fat and now I’m happy thin” narrative is so damaging and counter-productive:

1. It makes it OK for us as a society to judge women’s bodies: Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the issue of judgement. It is normal to judge; it is a hallmark of human experience.  But I don’t think it is helpful or useful to judge women’s bodies. At all. Every time a celebrity puts themselves out there by selling their “before and after” pictures, they are participating in and perpetuating a culture in which it is OK to judge women’s bodies. We marvel at the fat before pictures. We make the assessment that the woman in question is now more attractive, more worthy and more womanly  for having lost body fat.

It increases scrutiny of women’s bodies everywhere- in advertising, in the public sphere, in the bedroom. It is damaging, not least to the celebrity who posed for the pics in the first place, who I’m sure would come to feel some sense of loathing for who she once was, and fears ever being again.

2. It makes it OK for us to judge our OWN bodies against an unrealistic standard of beauty: Putting these types of “before and after” features out into the world encourages women everywhere to compare themselves to other women. We should be regarding OURSELVES as our body icon. These types of stories place niggling doubts in women’s minds about their own value and attractiveness and reinforce an emphasis on the exterior as being the sum total of your value as a woman. The reality is, many of the “after” pics you see have been photoshopped, meaning we are judging ourselves against something that ACTUALLY DOESN”T EXIST.

3. It homogenizes what society considers “attractive”: If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, clearly magazine editors all share a very clear vision about what beauty is- and there sure isn’t much divergence from the status quo anywhere in the mainstream media. Beauty is so much more than the exterior and making the “body” such a focus detracts from that truth.

4. It reinforces the “male gaze”: Laura Mulvey first wrote about the male gaze in 1975 when she made the observation that women’s bodies were so readily and frequently put out in the public domain for the benefit of a male audience. We can see this concept played out to a point of saturation in today’s media and advertising-heavy world. Putting women’s bodies “out there” all the time only further reinforces the message that women’s bodies are there to be judged, commented on, consumed and used to make money.

The "male gaze" at work- using women's bodies to sell products.

Ultimately, I don’t want to judge other women’s bodies and I don’t want other women to judge mine. Putting women’s bodies out there to be judged, scrutinised and endlessly discussed just reinforces a culture in which all of us struggle to love ourselves… just the way we are.

Cool huh? It’s from an ad campaign which you can read more about here.

Amelia xx

As Hollywood scandals go, at first glance this one didn’t look too out-there. Until, that is, it was revealed that the bride in question was a 16-year-old beauty pageant queen called Courtney Stodden, who was marrying 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison, a man three years older than her own father and best-known for his work in the 1999 movie The Green Mile.

Courtney and Doug on their wedding day

The marriage was made legally possible by Courtney’s mother-slash-manager, Krista Keller, who orchestrated the meeting between her daughter and Hutchison, fostered their burgeoning relationship by encouraging the pair to email regularly, and finally, suggested they get married in order for Hutchison to avoid statutory rape charges should he and Courtney have sex outside of wedlock.

Courtney and her husband

Our culture and its emphasis on youth, sex and fame, has created Courtney Stodden, with her big hair, preternaturally pursed lips and dreams of a reality show. How? By collectively worshipping at a vacuous alter of reality TV “stars” that include such role models as Snooki, the Kardashians and Heidi Montag (most famous for 10 plastic surgeries in one day- she was 23. I’ve written about that here). Stodden is the personification of the Paris Hilton generation of Stupid Girls, famed for their looks and wholeheartedly embraced despite their lack of any discernible skills and talents.

Reality TV alumni Heidi Montag

Stodden, at just 16, is perhaps the first truly visible product of the reality TV/famous for being famous generation. She was just three when stars of Big Brother, arguably the first mainstream incarnation of the “famous for being famous” mould of reality TV, burst onto screens around the world. She was seven years old when MTV’s monster “reality” hit Laguna Beach (“the real Orange County”) produced its first crop of famous-for-doing-nothing teens, of which Heidi Montag is notable alumni.

Stodden is like a caricature of the women she has clearly sought to emulate. Her ambitions are to be famous, to be an actress and to have her own reality show. Perhaps the saddest thing to witness as an onlooker to the whole circus is the intense sexualisation of her persona, which is clearly displayed in her Twitter feed:

As well as in her staged photo opportunities, captured by pre-arranged paparazzi:

And in her home-made “music video”:

As a woman, I find it tragically sad to watch such a young person define herself so voraciously and so publicly by her sexuality- which, at 16, is surely still fragile, developing and open to exploitation.

Stodden’s mother, Krista, had this to say on the subject of her daughter’s sexuality:

“Several major networks have expressed interest in a story about a town that’s so small they couldn’t handle the sexuality and beauty of one of the residents.”

And this:

“I could really tell my daughter had the kind of love when you want to marry a man or be with a man. Even though she was just 16, I knew it was going to take a pretty big man to handle her because of her sexuality and because of the attention she gets.”

A photo Courtney posted on her website

As for Courtney’s take, she has discussed her sex life with her husband in a number of media interviews, calling him a “tiger in bed” and telling Radar Online she was “aroused for 24 hours” on her wedding night.

Society has failed Courtney Stodden, as it has failed all young women who look up to the ever-increasing number of  women in the public eye who have nothing more to offer than one-dimensional, sexualised representations of femininity.

Courtney Stodden is liberal feminism- with it’s pole-dancing-for-fun, stripper-heel-wearing version of empowerment- hijacked and gone horribly awry. She is a child playing at adulthood, and the only representation of adulthood she is seeking to emulate is the one that society has become increasingly obsessed with- a barbie, a porn-star, a woman who is valued for little more than the sum of her surgically enhanced parts.

If the role models we serve up to young girls are most famous for binge drinking, releasing a sex tape, having really good hair and being able to pour themselves into a size zero dress, we can’t be surprised at stories like Courtney Stodden’s. When popular culture values funny, intelligent, socially aware and ambitious less than it values D-cup boobs and a prime-time reality show, we can’t blame young girls for seeking to emulate that.

What’s next for Courtney Stodden, I wonder? What happens after the inevitable reality show? What happens when we get bored, tune out, stop guffawing at her inappropriate sex comments and lingerie pics? No doubt there will be another Courtney Stodden- our sexed-up reality TV obsessed culture doesn’t just ensure it- it demands it.