Plenty of women would kill to look like Jenifer Ringer. The 37-year-old ballerina is slim, toned and healthy, with a million-watt smile, and something about her that just seems to sparkle. But according to New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay, this beautiful woman ‘looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many’ in her…
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One of the things I value most about my life is that I have options. I have the luxury of choosing what I want to do, where I want to live, who I want to date, in a way that many people around the world don’t. But the trouble with having choices is having to…
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The SCAR Project takes an unflinching look at breast cancer, celebrating the courage of survivors, paying tribute to the lives that have been lost, and bringing hope to the more than 10,000 women under the age of 40 who will be diagnosed this year alone. This is a series of large-scale portraits of young breast…
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Whenever I tell people now that I didn’t have the best time at high school, they make a weird sort of face and say, ‘What was so bad about it?’ They dismiss my painful memories as melodrama; they don’t believe for a second that life was really as bad as I say. Someone even said…
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I think I was Googling something rather pathetic like ‘why do men lie’ (which speaks volumes either about the men I foolishly fall in love with, or the pitiful level of desperation I’ve succumbed to) when I somehow came across Dick Masterson’s Men are Better Than Women blog. Now, I’m going on the assumption that…
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Do you wear makeup every day? I do, and I’m definitely not alone. A survey for Bobbi Brown Cosmetics of over 1800 young women aged 16 to 19 showed that two-thirds of respondents wore makeup five or more days a week — and just 7 per cent said they wore makeup only on special occasions. To…
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The male gaze and its relationship with the objectified female body is one of the most common tropes throughout art history. Sylvia Sleigh tried to reverse this tradition, turning conventional portraiture on its head by painting male nudes in poses that recalled the female subjects of artists such as Velazquez, Titian and Ingres, challenging not…
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Career, love, family, beauty. We’ve grown up in a time where we’ve been told we can have it all. But Gloria Steinem says the feminist ideal of perfection is a myth, and women need to be careful of trying to do everything. At a conference for eating disorder clinicians in the US a few weeks…
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We used to call it the f-word. The formal took over the whole year in year 11. It was all anyone talked about, the only thing anyone was planning for. And for a lot of girls, it was a source of constant panic. * I was lucky that I had a long-term boyfriend, so I…
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Everyone from Cindy Crawford to Christina Aguillera has done it. Ever since Demi Moore appeared naked and seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, it’s been a common trend for celebrities to pose for nude photos when they’re expecting. This week, Miranda Kerr has joined the hall of fame and stripped…
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The fashion industry is bored with its own air-brushed perfectionism. Now, gap-toothed models are all the rage, moving away from traditional ideals of beauty to celebrate the authentic and quirky. Open up a recent issue of Vogue, and you’re likely to see Georgia May Jagger, the full-lipped, goddess-haired daughter of Mick, flashing her gap-toothed smile….
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An inspiring new exhibition on display at the Arts Centre on St Kilda Rd takes a backstage look at the women who helped shape Australia’s music heritage. From the women of vaudeville, all-girl jazz groups and singers of the 30s and 40s, right through to contemporary artists such as Missy Higgins and Katy Steele,…
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Oh, Stephen Fry. Just because everybody loves you, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to think before you speak. In fact, I’d suggest that being so revered by so many people means he should be especially careful. In particular, when he’s suggesting that women don’t actually enjoy sex; they just put up with it “because…
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I suppose it’s the Bill Henson effect, but it seems like lately everyone has been particularly on edge about the lines between art and porn, especially when it comes to photography. I’ve written about a few different instances of this in the past few months, and the issues are always pretty similar. This time, the…
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