Love Your Body, a campaign of the NOW Foundation, “challenges the message that a woman’s value is best measured through her willingness and ability to embody current beauty standards.” Women and girls are told, every day and in so many ways,that being admired, envied and desired based on their looks is a primary function of true womanhood. The beauty standards enforced by our society are rigid, narrow, unrealistic, and very, very white.
The media tells women, communities of color, and LGBTQIA individuals that they are not worthy of being anything other than a sidekick because no one like them is ever the protagonist of a story worth telling. Rather than being representative and producing an inclusive culture, visual media outlets are constructing a culture of exclusion dominated by the thin, the white, and the male.
First publicized over thirty years ago, the lack of women in clinical trial research of drugs and devices is still a serious problem. As CBS’s Sixty Minutes reported on May 25, we now know that women sometimes respond very differently to prescription drugs than men.
I felt that my body had betrayed me: It gained weight. It gained flab. I was hurt, angry, and embarrassed. During my time at college, I got active in a sorority. It was here that I first learned about National Eating Disorder Awareness Week and End Fat Talk Week.
Today we are hosting a Love Your Body Day blog carnival, featuring voices from across the Internet.