Six is the New Fourteen

Every so often some reporter writes an article citing research that showing that every woman in the Western World has a poor body image (except for Heidi Klum) and these articles and reports are all followed by much teeth gnashing and wailing from normal women and duplicitous and defensive rejoinders from fashion and advertising land. Researchers point out that even very young girls are worried about dieting, and the fashion industry counters with a model over size zero. (Look, she has flesh on her bones! It must be the token normal woman!) Remember when Stanley Tucci tells Andy that Six is the new fourteen? Didn't we all laugh in recognition?
Ma'am, do you have this in the next size up?
Saleslady: Sorry, we only carry sizes 1, 3, and 5. You could try Sears. (SEARS! Oh the horror of that comment.)
I have had co-workers tell me that they were told in fashionable New York boutiques that, "we have nothing for you here." They were size 16. I wonder, how is that really any different than being told to leave because of their race or ethnicity?
When Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, one of the studies his team cited was Clark's doll studies, which showed how African American children had developed feelings of inferiority that caused life-long and lasting damage. There were no pictures of children like them in textbooks or class materials. There were no dolls or toys that looked like them. They were always made to feel invisible and second-best.
Even now there aren't enough faces from different races and backgrounds in our media. I'm sure this has an effect.
Now flash forward to 2010. When you watch television, or look at a magazine, the majority of faces are young, slender and attractive. While you occasionally see a plump man on a sitcom, he is almost always paired with a younger, much hotter spouse. Notice on 24, how everyone at CTU is more attractive than the norm, and never even slightly overweight. In the movies the fat, plump loser guy always gets the hot skinny girl. There are very few movies that feature women over size zero, and even fewer that show women over thirty. If you don't have a strong self-image yourself, you certainly aren't going to see a reflection back from TV, movies or magazine ads. If you are in your forties and over size ten, you might as well be invisible.
The fashion people pay lip service to diversity, but they don't do much to achieve even token diversity. Take a look at Burda- how many models of color do you see? Not very many - they barely even include brunettes in some issues! You know that this is a real problem by the fuss that was made when Italian Vogue did an issue with all women of color. It was so unusual.
In a perfect world, we'd see magazine issues where every single model was not size zero. And I'd be happy if I never saw the term "plus size" again. To me that means that those sizes are outside the "normal" range of sizes. They are "extra", they are "different", in some stores they aren't even there. "Oh those sizes? those are available only on the website." Why is that? Do they think they will get size 14 cooties on the size zeroes? (I don't mean to pick on my size zero sisters. They have their problems too, Everything is too big and too long on them.)( A digression -I recently lost 40 plus pounds, but no matter - size 16 is still plus size to our fashion friends! And I don't think it would be humanly possible for me to ever be a size 0-6, I'd have to have surgery to remove some bones.)
A fellow blogger commented that it bothered her when she saw the ads that said that real women have curves, because she felt like she was just as real, even though she was curve-challenged.
Since both men and women come in a variety of shapes and sizes, it would be refreshing to see that variety reflected back at us in our media.
What examples of size discrimation have you seen? Do you think we can ever get beyond it?

You're invited...

One of my guilty pleasures of our new technological world is the evite invitation. Proof that while the world may be going to hell in a handbasket, some new things are fun. This morning Mr. Hunting Creek was looking up the details of a party we were invited to, and he confessed that he always looks to see who else is coming, who isn't coming and what their excuses are. "I do that too!" I said. Which just shows two things: we are both Nosey Parkers, and are meant for each other (who else could stand us?)
The excuses for not attending were mostly the usual: attending graduation party or visiting relatives. Some people wrote that they'd be lying on a beach somewhere, others made sure to imply high level, Very Important Business Trips (this is Washington, D.C., after all.) But my favorite excuse was: Going to Cleveland to attend the unveiling of my uncle's stone. (Tomb or kidney? was my unworthy thought)
Am I the only one (besides Mr.Hunting Creek) who reads the guest list? Tell me I'm not alone in enjoying the excuses. I won't tell your mom.

Grumpy Muppets

While I was waiting at the eye Doctor today, I sat across from the two grumpiest people on the planet. They were complaining about everything. I know I'm not supposed to eavesdrop, but I couldn't help it, they had never learned about Inside Voices.
Should I have spoken up? Told them they were intolerant old geezers, and not everyone felt as they did? Or just memorized everything they said to repeat to Mr. Hunting Creek later (which is what I did.)
What would you do?

Changing Sizes

I'd like to say thank you to pattern companies for printing patterns in multiple sizes. In the last two years I have gone from size 22 to size 16, and most of my patterns have that 16 option - or 18, which is easy to size down. Before you congratulate me on my strength of character and moral superiority, please note that this weight loss was achieved with no effort on my part. Part of my disease affects my appetite - therefore I am losing weight. (Proof positive that exercise does nothing! I never exercise willingly.) If you ever want people to say to your face that they hate you, just try dropping that fact in conversation. My daughter and I have often discussed how we think that every woman in America has an eating disorder, by which we mean that not one woman of our acquaintance eats normally. Everyone is either on a diet, or just became a vegetarian, or just quit being a vegetarian, or in some way is obsessed over what they eat. When I worked in an office I was always amazed by people who literally ate all day long. There would be co-workers on Atkins, or low-carb or all carb. One co-worker was spotted eating chocolate birthday cake while drinking a Slim-Fast. (You know, they don't cancel each other out!) If you are a shy person, and need a conversation topic, just try talking about diets. You'll never have to say another word; everyone has a firmly held opinion, and all of their diets are better than your diet.
(Now that I am newly thinner, I have sworn to never give other people diet advice, since the only way I have ever lost weight was by getting an incurable disease. This is not a viable option for most people.)
Back to Simplicity 4076. I have made this one many times, but as a larger me. To make one for a smaller me, I taped my pattern pieces to my giant dining room window (AKA free light box) and traced the smaller size.When doing experiments I like to trace so I still have the original pattern to go back to. I use inexpensive gift tissue, available everywhere. Then I do an FBA which in the gathered front means doing a quick pivot slide to add to the top bust area at the side and also add a schosh more room in the front gathering at the center (that gathering is the pivoted dart). Easy as pie. Now I will make a test top in inexpensive knit and see how it looks before I cut my fancy Gorgeous Fabrics retro print jersey.
Once I get the fit right again I'll make a few tops out of the new altered pattern. I don't understand people who would only make a pattern once. Once I get it right, I'll do a theme and variations and do multiple versions. But I also like listening to my favorite songs over again too. Maybe the different pattern every time people are like Mr. Hunting Creek, who will never willingly watch a movie he has seen before, and constantly flips channels seeking new stuff.
Are you a pattern repeater? Or a one time only person? (Are you now or have you ever been on a diet?)

Menu Planning

Every week for the past thirty years or so, I make a menu plan. I look at cookbooks and cooking magazines, consult with Mr. Hunting Creek and make my menu. Then we look in the pantry and see what we need, I make my list and the week is laid out for me. We don't always stick exactly to it, but it is nice knowing that I have all of the ingredients to make those seven meals on the list. I started making a plan because I discovered that I was completely capable of buying a weeks worth of groceries and having nothing to eat for dinner after two days. Then back to the store I went. This gets expensive. Recently, while going through fabric in my cave, and making plans to have a dedicated sewing room (now that my daughter has her own place). I had one of those uncomfortable epiphanies: I had been buying fabric all wrong my whole life.
I would go through a fabric store or online store and just pick out what I liked. No list. No plan, just a sailor on leave with a month's pay going crazy. What I have ended up with is the most beautiful, impractical collection of unmatched fabric a sewista could have. Vintage kimono? Check! Silk suiting? Check! ( I no longer work in an office, either). Charmeuse, silk velvet...you name it, I have it. And in all of my favorite colors. But, if I considered what I actually wore every day, I'd be challenged to find three things that matched in the whole collection. I could never do a SWAP, I realized, because I never once bought fabric with a plan!
My daughter has offered to help arrange my new sewing room (she is a demon organizer. I sometimes wonder if she is really related to me, since I come from a long line of messy hoarding women, and she is neat, organized and most emphatically NOT a collector of anything. Kids today!) She has forbidden me to buy any fabric until what I have is all folded on shelves and organized. (Of course she knows that once she is finished I'll mess it all up.)
But at least I'll be sewing with a plan. Do you suppose it's too late to learn?

P.s. to the persons who emailed me saying that they couldn't read my handwriting: don't feel bad, sometimes I can't read it either! The menu reads: Asian Chicken Noodle soup with Chile; Carnitas Burritos, rice and beans; Steak and Snowpea Stir-fry; Chicken Sausage Calzone; Baked Potato Soup, salad; Fish, quinoa pilaf, roasted vegetables. (Yes, we really do cook like this every day. It's not difficult, once you get the hang of it.)

Uncovered Once More

I'd like to think that being roundly scorned on Little Hunting Creek caused Ken Cuccinelli to cave. ( I can dream, can't I?)
Virginia once again proudly flaunts the naked breast of freedom.

American Taliban

To those who say that study of women's clothing is a trivial pursuit, I counter with the evidence that it is actually of the very first interest politically and culturally. A great many people are very interested in telling women what not to wear, and not just in places that are repressive regimes. Western governments roundly criticized the Taliban for requiring that women wear burqas and noiseless shoes, but here in the United States there are people who constantly enforce their own restrictive moral views on other people's wardrobes.
Just consider the school districts that said that they would paddle girls who wore "inappropriate" clothing to prom. Let's even review our corporate work dress codes, which mandate no sleeveless tops, no shorts and no bare legs, no "too-short" skirts. (My daughter and I knew that Dana Walsh was suspicious on 24, when she was at work wearing a sleeveless top.) Most of these strictures involve what women should wear. We are very concerned that women dress "appropriately".(Because incorrectly dressed women drive men mad with lust, so they they are not responsible for their actions. That's the historical reasoning. I was told as a girl to dress modestly, or boys would get the "wrong idea" about me. I'm sure you were too. In rape trials the defense still sometimes tries to show that the victim was dressed suggestively.) These Clothing and Morals Police will even apply their strict code to history. Just this week Virginia Attorney General covered up the Goddess on Virginia's State Seal. As Mr. Hunting Creek observed, "Ken wants to be the only boob in Richmond."

What examples have you seen lately of social control through wardrobe enforcement?