• The Dr. Biden love continues in this interview, where we learn how she influences her husband (Scotch-taping articles and opinions to the bathroom mirror) and her reasons for working ("I think it's very important for a woman to have her own money and be independent"). • A recent study shows that those who witness bullying may experience just as many problems afterward as the victims themselves. A survey of 2,002 students from the UK found that those who reported seeing bullying were more likely to report psychological distress than either the bullies or the victims. •  Italian officials have made it illegal to perform breast enhancement surgery on girls under the age of 18. While there are many good reasons to wait a few more years for surgery, they are primarily concerned with the number of under-qualified doctors. They claim that the legislation is aimed primarily at girls who go under the knife "purely for fashion reasons and have no idea of the risks involved." •  On Sunday, the New York Times reported on Mar/Com, a company that is making a killing fighting gay rights. The San Francisco-based company has worked against human rights in both California and Maine. Residents in Maine payed Mar/Com about $1.6 million to produce anti-gay marriage television and radio ads. • Amanda Knox spoke with reporters from the Associated Press in her jail cell in Perugia. She says she is "waiting and always hoping," and recalls feeling "horrendous" after her conviction. "The guards helped me out, they held me all night," she says. Knox also says she is continuing her studies from prison, and remains in contact with her former professors. •  Investigators announced on Monday that two Muslim women, whose deaths sparked independence rallies and riots in Kashmir, were not actually murdered. The Central Bureau of Investigation says that the two young women were drowned and have taken action against doctors for fabricating evidence. However, the victims' relatives reject the CBI's findings. • The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has called for an investigation into college admission procedures to determine whether or not women are being discriminated against. Many schools apparently do not want to have a female-heavy population, yet receive far more applications from females than their male peers. In attempts to keep a balance, some schools have ended up making it much easier for men to be accepted than women. •  Pregnancy hormones may give women superpowers, according to a new study. When pregnant, women display a heightened ability to read faces, especially threatening or angry expressions. •  Police have combed the journals of Mitrice Richardson for clues to explain her disappearance three months ago. While her family holds onto the hope that Richardson is still alive, officials believe the most likely scenario is that she wandered into the mountains and "succumbed to the elements" after being arrested for skipping out on a check. • Two female players from the University of Missouri's basketball team were arrested on Friday after they allegedly beat up a 21-year-old male cheerleader at a party. Both women have been suspended from the team. • R.I.P. Rose Kaufman, co-screenwriter of the first NC-17 rated film Henry & June. Kaufman passed away on December 7th at the age of 70. • 

Kendra, who became one of Hugh Hefner's girlfriends at 18, recently married Hank Baskett, and the two are expecting a child. Kendra says that she plans on being a strict Christian mother after she recently found God. We wonder if she found him in the skydiving room.

Kendra Wilkinson Plans To Be Strict Christian Mother [FoxNews]

Freeman specifically mentions Christa D'Souza's Daily Mail article about her increasingly harrowing experiences with breast implants, and of course Liz Jones's truly upsetting story (also, predictably, in the Daily Mail) of trying to treat lifelong anorexia with three weeks of scones and brie and — shocker — still feeling bad about her body afterwards. But she has a larger point: a genre has sprung up in contemporary lifestyle journalism, in which "a female journalist describes her obsession with her weight/breasts/ageing face/food or alcohol problems/inability to have a happy relationship" and usually ends up "sufficiently unhappy to be commissionable for another very similar piece."

As Sadie pointed out in her coverage of Jones's piece (Jones is pictured above), this kind of writing is bad for everybody. It's bad for the writers, who — if they're not totally manufacturing their distress for the reader's benefit — probably need therapy. But Freeman argues that it's actually worse for readers. For them, she writes, articles like Jones's "are surely just as dangerous and potentially influential as the photos of the skinny models the journalist professes to abhor."

Liz Jones is certainly troubling as thinspo, but Christa D'Souza is more complicated. Her experience with scar tissue, lopsided breasts, cancer, pain, and the total absence of any self-esteem boost from her new breasts isn't going to convince anybody to get implants. But it might convince some readers — male and female — that women are "self-hating, self-obsessed," and that it's normal to be like this.

One of the best pieces of feminist advice I've ever gotten is not to insult my own body in front of others. It perpetuates the idea that women should hate our bodies — that our inevitable physical flaws are worth valuable brain-space and conversational time. But pieces like Jones's and D'Souza's aren't just body-snark, they're self-snark: public expressions of low self-esteem so intractable that it lingers for years, harms relationships, and even endangers physical health. Freeman says editors assign these pieces because they have a "misogynistic image of what women are like," and that may well be true, but it's a vicious cycle. The more "boom and bust boob" stories we read, the more it seems that women are like D'Souza or Jones — irrevocably fucked up by aesthetic or social strictures they recognize are unhealthy but can't seem to escape. And the easier it is to assume that we, the female readers, can't escape them either.

These strictures aren't just about beauty — Zoe Lewis's I-chose-a-career-and-now-I'm-miserable screed and Lori Gottlieb's cautionary tale about how failing to "settle" caused her lifelong loneliness are basically cut from the same cloth, maybe just a little more highbrow. All these sob stories basically promulgate the notion that women can't have it all, or even much of anything, because even smart ladies who write for newspapers and magazines are basically unfulfilled and miserable.

The truth, of course, is much more complicated than that — even the disturbing Liz Jones is probably happier, at least at times, than she seems in her anorexia piece. Freeman is correct that most confessional journalism of the Jones/D'Souza variety is likely conceived with the goal of "getting a reaction from readers," and female misery seems to get hits. But editors who rely on self-loathing for numbers (and we're looking at ladymags too here) need to recognize that they're exploiting their female writers and giving their readers a twisted view of what it means to be a woman.

The New Confessional Journalism Turns Female Writers Into Tedious, Self-Hating Semi-Celebrities [Guardian]

Related: My Boom And Bust Boobs: What It's Like To Suffer The Agony Of Enlargement Surgery - Only To Realise You've Made A Terrible Mistake [Daily Mail]

Earlier: Lifelong Anorexic "Forced" To Eat Normally For 3 Weeks
Settle For Mr. "Just OK" - While Your "Marital Value Is Still At Its Peak!"
Feminism Is The Supposed Key To Women's Unhappiness
The Self-Flagellation Of The First-Person Beauty Piece

Sarah Blewden, a former model, had surgery to pump up her 32Bs to 32Cs in 2003. The ABAE believes that Blewden's implants put her at a greater health risk, and argue that in asking her not to compete they are only following international rules, which currently ban anyone from boxing who has undergone breast enhancement surgery. At first glance, the ABAE's actions seem pretty reasonable, but Blewden is not going to take this lying down. She has volunteered to pay for any corrective surgery required to repair the damage to her breasts, but she doesn't anticipate this being a problem: "My surgeon said they make me no more vulnerable than any other woman. They are not enormous ones - they are in proportion. They are gel implants and not liquid so they won't burst," she said. She also asked to wear a breast protector, but was told that it may not provide sufficient protection. Blewden has only been boxing for two years, but had so much natural talent that she had hoped to be among the first women to compete in boxing in the 2012 Olympics. [Telegraph & Mirror]

• According to a recent mall survey in the UK, 4 out of 10 women wear Spanx-like underpants to look slim and 1 out of 10 women admitted to using "chicken filet" breast-enchancers. • A recent study found that the name-dropping of brands in rap videos causes viewers to transfer their feelings of the rappers (both positive and negative) onto the product. • Many Chinese lawyers representing clients who were effected by the milk-contamination scandal are claiming that they have been warned by the Chinese government to drop their cases due to "government sensitivity" about the scandal. • Researchers say that they are developing a urine test for breast cancer risk in women. • A Florida man is charged with beating and stabbing to death his wife, who had experienced a lifetime of physical spousal abuse from her former husband, whom she also killed. • A 99-year-old woman from Corte Madera, California plans to keep her driver's license when she turns 100. • An 18-year-old boy in Colorado hired men to attack and kill his mother (who escaped the attack) so he could use her money to buy breast implants for his girlfriend.•

• Tyra Banks is taken seriously enough by this country to host Presidential candidates.
  
• But Anna Wintour is not! Also, Tyra would totally win in a cage match.
  
• A photo agency posted pictures of Britney's menses, and we wondered if the paparazzi have gone too far.
  
• They've gone so far that non-celebrities like Heidi Montag grace the covers of multiple magazines, talking about her boob job.
  
• Then we got you to tell us about your implants, which were 10 times more interesting than Heidi's.
  
• But still not as entertaining as Slut Machine's queefs.
  
• Or her long weekend in Vegas!
  
• Or Judy Blume's awesome book containing a ton of embarrassing erections, Then Again, Maybe I Won't.
  
• You know what was also entertaining? When Diane Keaton said the F-word on national television.
  
• So grab some Rachael Ray endorsed Dunkin' Donuts coffee, crack open a bag of dainty 100 calorie snacks, and go watch the darling Katie Heigl in the resoundingly shitty 27 Dresses. You're worth it!

And not all of you breasty babes got implants because of "conditions" or "asymmetries." "I'm 5'11 190lbs and they are 38D from a 38AA. They are proportioned and look swell," said one enthusiast. "They feel great. I Love 'em. He loves 'em. That is all." But it's not all sunshine and lollipops for women with under the skin strap-ons!

I got mine courtesy of an abusive ex boyfriend who REALLY wanted me to have them. I was against them and had previously made fun of people with them, but at the time he had me feeling about one-inch tall and also had me under the impression that he was my only friend in the world. After 4 months of mentioning it to me daily, I agreed to go to a consult just to get him to shut up about it. The doctor (also Dolly Parton & Cher's doc), was really nice, but also convinced me that I had (previously un-noticed) assymetry by an entire cup size. Long story short, the ex wanted them so bad he agreed to pay for them if I would get them - I agreed because at the time I would have done anything to make him happy (what was WRONG with me!?), and now I have fake tits. They're not so bad. If I had a ton of money, I would remove them just because of the horrible person who's suggestion this was for me to have them. But overall, they're not bad. I was blown away (horrified) by the difference in positive attention I started getting from men from the second I got my new boobs.

Do My Breast Implants Have A Warranty? [New York Times]

Earlier: Heidi Montag Explains What It's Really Like Having Breast Implants

Although doctors had previously injected silicone directly into women's breasts (resulting in massive inflammatory reactions, ugh), Timmie Jean became the first woman ever to have silicone-filled bags implanted into her chest cavity. At first, her breasts "looked beautiful," Timmie Jean says. But ten years after the operation, Timmie Jean's breasts began to harden, she began to experience shooting pains and then "hurting everywhere." Still, her sister-in law and one of her daughters also opted for implants. And when a class-action lawsuit was filed against implant manufacturer Dow Corning, Timmie Jean testified that she had no complaints. (She admits she was paid "a minimal amount" by Dow.) Now, 45 years after her operation, Timmie Jean is afraid to have her implants removed, even though one of them has a small tear in the shell and she experiences pains in her chest that can last for weeks and feel like she's broken a rib.

'I'm a sissy now, she said. 'I'm afraid of what might happen if I go under.'

'I Had The World's First Breast Job - And Endured Years Of Misery,' Says Texan Great-Grandmother [Daily Mail]