UN report finds girls in developing countries give birth too young. A new report from the UN has found that, in developing countries, one in five girls (19 per cent) give birth before they turn 18. Significantly, the report also found that of the 7.3 million girls who give birth every year, 2 million of…
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Sarah Field’s Centre of my Sinful Earth is a provocative installation that both fascinates and repulses. Intrigued, I spoke with Field about the work, which will soon be exhibited at the MARS Gallery, Port Melbourne. Can you tell us a little about Centre of my sinful earth? Centre of my Sinful Earth is a large…
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Do Not Want: The face-bra will (not) make you look younger. If you’re a female over the age of oh, I dunno, twelve, you probably have an extensive knowledge of the cornucopia of products, contraptions and elixirs available to make you conform to cultural ideals of beauty/youth/sexiness. Well, here’s another thingamybob to add to the…
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This post was first published on Zoya’s blog, The Coconut Chronicles, where she muses on the difficulties of toeing the line between two cultures as an Indian-Australian. I’ll just put it out there – I’ve never been a big makeup fan. Not just for feminist reasons (and even then, my biggest issue is with hair…
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‘The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty”.’ Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth * ‘People tend to confuse the notion of aesthetics with that of beauty. The human eye desires to look at plenty that would not be termed “beautiful”, which is, of course, why so many traffic jams are…
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If life gives you lemons, a simple operation can give you melons * ‘Whether we like it or not it we live in an era in which personal modification of everything, including your person, is a possibility. We live on an overcrowded blue rock hurtling through space and your difference from the other seven…
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I am not usually one for fear tactics: for telling people what to wear, where they should feel safe, what health means for every body. However, a recent article on the dangers of commercialized beauty by injury attorneys based in the United States caught my attention. Over the past year, researchers have worked with a…
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A lot of controversy has arisen in Dove’s recent advertisements of their products. But it isn’t their body care items that are turning heads, rather, the people showing them off. One ad that really sparked my interest was The Real Beauty Campaign where women went to a studio and were sketched by a forensic artist…
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I have an irrational fear of going to the hairdresser. It’s not that I think they’re going to come after me with scissors or aggressively dye my hair ridiculous colours whilst laughing malevolently, but my hesitancy is enough to make me put off making an appointment for as long as possible. Generally I can hold…
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Confident women are bad for the economy. Think about it. Imagine a world where women felt perfectly happy with themselves. There would be no anxiety about bad hair days, weight gain, or crow’s feet. This obsession with physical perfection awakens a deep sense of inadequacy which we then try to smother through consumerism. Step outside,…
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The nature of being a woman in the 21st Century means that easy access to beauty therapists, hair salons, instructive magazines and fashion outlets warrants little or no excuse for dropping the ball in the personal maintenance department. While men were once the Knights, Gladiators and Vikings with courage and balls, it is the modern…
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Do you ever worry about how your body and/or body parts are perceived by society? Attention: People With Body Parts is a new international project that aims to address the issues of body image – to encourage us to celebrate our body parts and their connections to ourselves and to others. ‘Our bodies are filled…
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School swimming carnival, 2003. I remember this day as the day I realised that you were supposed to groom your body. I was crammed into my uniform one-size-fits-all maroon swimsuit and I kept my arms pinned down by my sides so that nobody would see the beginnings of my first armpit hairs. I felt, for…
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A couple of months ago I attended a panel discussion on Women in Film as part of the Arab Film Festival in Sydney. The chair for the session, Paula Abood, opened the discussion with a quote from Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972): A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her…
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