What's "real", anyway?

I'm somewhat amused at this little kerfluffle over photo retouching in Dove's famous "real beauty" campaign, which, after all, is used to sell smoothing lotions among other things.

Photo retouching is part of our everyday life in a way it hasn't been in years past. Yes, everything you see on a billboard or in a magazine has been heavily retouched -- but so have lots of family photos. Removing red-eye, fixing colour balance -- that kind of thing is easier than it's ever been, thanks to Photoshop and the like. We're getting to a point where there's no such thing as an un-retouched picture.

My outrage is probably lessened, too, because I never thought the Dove campaign was a messianic emanation come to save us from unrealistic body image issues. It is -- it has always been -- an ad campaign, first and foremost. It's a good one, because it gets people talking, and it's certainly nice to see a wider range of female bodies than we're used to -- but it's still just an ad campaign. I mean, for all the claims that it's expanding the definition of beauty, there have never been Dove models who weren't conventionally attractive (even if slightly larger, or older, or of different skin colours than we usually see).

And I think on some level, I always assumed that there was a little bit of retouching going on. It didn't change my feelings about the campaign (which were, and continue to be, mildly positive).

So, do I believe this denial that "oh no, actually, there was no retouching going on"? Not really. But I don't think it matters. We're still asked to judge the picture that's out there, and whether it succeeds or fails as a picture, as an ad. How it got there is a little beside the point.

What's next? A "lady professor"?

CBC Ottawa's headline writer is apparently astonished by the idea that women can, you know, run things. Like universities.

Carleton U names woman as president

Because the story isn't that Carleton has a new president... it's that she's a girl!

New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year again. New Year's Resolution time. And what's the most common resolution in North America? I don't have any scientific evidence to back me up, but I'd lay money on "losing weight" being resolution #1.

You can't open a newspaper or magazine these days without coming across a story about how to lose weight "sustainably", or a profile of someone embarking on a resolution to lose a dramatic number of pounds in order to "feel better" about herself (it's usually a woman, of course), and "be healthier".

This isn't to say that the media isn't obsessed with weight loss the rest of the time -- they certainly are. But there's an intensification of the obsession at this time of the year, as well as (I'm guessing again, entirely non-scientifically) an increased likelihood on the part of "ordinary people" to act on the obsession. You can't step into a gym in the first few weeks of a new year without tripping over enthusiastic new resolutionists (much to the annoyance of the regulars, I'm sure).

What there isn't in the media is any follow-up coverage: we don't see stories about the people who, after losing huge amounts of weight, gain it all back (and more), damaging their health in a neverending yo-yo cycle. We don't hear about the people who suffer horrifying side effects as the result of weight-loss surgeries and diet pills. We don't hear about the people who live shorter, less happy lives than they would have if they'd just been satisfied with their natural weight.

Nor do we hear about the people who resolve NOT to lose weight. But that's my challenge for this year, both for myself and for you. Eat well, because it's better for you, and it's more enjoyable. Exercise, for the joy of moving your body and reach a goal (completing a race, hiking a trail, lifting a certain weight, whatever), but not to lose weight. Don't look at a scale. Don't obsess. Feel good about yourself and what you can do. Resolve not to feel guilty for eating a cookie. Celebrate being alive.

That's my resolution for '08.

Oh yeah -- and I resolve to blog more regularly. No, really. I mean it.

National Day of the Obesity Panic

Today is National Child Day, and UNICEF Canada has released an appropriately-timed report.

And among the many ways we as a country are failing our children (the most vulnerable), they list obesity rates. Canada has too many fat kids, according to UNICEF.

And, you know, when the same report goes on to say that life expectancy is increasing and that infant mortality is decreasing (albeit not as quickly here as elsewhere), I have a hard time being overly concerned about fat kids. And it saddens me that UNICEF Canada felt they had to include obesity rates. Because it's far too easy for people to focus on the fat kid problem and ignore the real problems: the many kids who live in poverty, seven years after we were supposed to have eliminated child poverty (remember that?); the kids in isolated communities or on reserves who don't have access to the resources and the health care that they need; the kids who really need our help.

Childhood obesity -- hell, obesity in general -- is an aesthetic panic. It's not some dire end-of-the-world problem that we need to throw resources at. There are plenty of resources being directed towards making affluent people of all ages skinnier.

How's about we throw some resources at the child poverty thing instead? Or the issue of kids with untreated mental illnesses? How's that for an idea?

Children raping children

I can imagine few things as horrifying and disturbing as this story, in which an 11-year-old girl accuses three boys, aged eight and nine, of rape.

It's disturbing on so many levels. They're so young, all of them. It's hard to conceive of children that age being the perpetrators of a rape. At that age, how can they even imagine it? Who's sexualized those boys to the extent that they would even think to link sex and violence like this? How can we possibly consider charging eight and nine-year-olds as adults for something like this? Why can't we find whoever hurt them or whoever taught them that this was a thing to do, and charge them instead?

But I think what disturbs me most is to read that the boys' defense -- at least as portrayed in this story -- is that the sexual activity was consensual. How is it possible that an 11-year-old girl could consent to sex? How have we gotten to this state, as a society, that we take a case like this, and think "well, she just didn't want to get in trouble with her parents, so she made up the part about the rock"?

Some days, I just want to give up on our society altogether.

Denial

What's depressing about this news story is not that the mother thinks her son is innocent of sexual assault. We all tend to assume that the people we know and love are innocent, unless we have irrefutable proof otherwise. It's a natural human instint to think the best of the people in our inner circle. So it doesn't bother me that the mother is coming up with reasons why her son must, surely, be innocent.

What's depressing is that this is an actual news story. We don't generally get news stories about all the relatives of the accused insisting that the accused is innocent. Oh sure, they'll often get a line or two in stories about particularly dramatic murders. But for what other crime can you imagine a news story about how the mother of the defendant is sure the crime never happened?

This kind of thing only happens in sexual assault cases. And that's depressing.

It's also pretty depressing that the victim's religion is considered an important fact. I suppose it's supposed to make the crime seem worse, somehow. Because sexually assaulting a "regular" girl... well, that's just normal behaviour. But when it's a girl who's been marked as unavailable... that's just heinous.

Hope for the human race yet

An update to my previous post:

Discharge refused in soldier's sex-assault conviction

Judge Carol St.-Cyr of Quebec Court yesterday refused to grant Private Pier-Olivier Boulet an absolute discharge. The judge said the soldier may have had a promising career in uniform, but giving him a court discharge would have rendered his crime "banal."

Thank you, Judge St.-Cyr.

A Very Good Soldier

From the annals of "news articles that really tick me off".

"Should convict serve time or country?"

That the Globe and Mail thinks this is even a question is repulsive. If someone's convicted of a crime, we generally assume they ought to go to jail (or whatever other legal remedies are deemed appropriate, of course).

Why is this case any different?

Because it's a rape case. And, apparently, rape is something we might consider excusing if the perpetrator is a 'nice boy'.

The whole article makes me really angry. It clearly works from the assumption that the victim is "crying rape" and that the perpetrator -- the convicted perpetrator, let me add -- has just been caught up in this case through no fault of his own.

She was so drunk she couldn't stand on her own.

She let him into her room because she thought of him as a friend.

They didn't "have sexual relations". He raped her. He raped a drunk 18-year-old who trusted him.

And yet the article pretends there's any question about whether he should serve time.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.