We got an interesting letter from a reader today in response to yesterday's Megan Fox post. She wrote that Fox-bashing for unsisterly sentiments is unfair, because the actress "has largely spoken the truth regarding women and extreme jealousy over looks."
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An interesting (but slightly limited) study was recently posted on the Pixels and Policy blog, about attitudes towards "female avatars and gender expectations." The results? For many women players, it's easier to embrace sexualization than to fight it.
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The documentary Youth Knows No Pain, which premiered on HBO last night, featured Allure editor-in-chief Linda Wells, who says it's OK that anti-aging creams don't do what they claim, since they make women feel better about losing their looks.
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"The Science of Beauty" is complicated. Says one Proctor and Gamble cosmetics researcher, "obviously you're familiar with gene expression profiling!" Um, no. [SciAm]
I remember my grandfather musing that, thanks to dentistry, medicine and relative affluence, people simply weren't "ugly" the way they had been when he was a child in early 20th century Arkansas. (It should be noted that he was known in said hamlet as "Moe Joe the Dog-Faced Boy," a name he carried for the next 80 years.) Well, The Timesclaims that whereas beauty has dominated the limelight for the past few years, now people are getting interested in the physical Other - classical "ugliness" — its societal perceptions, ramifications, and history. New ordinances protect against look discrimination. New shows claim to celebrate "ugly pretty." But...we've never defined beauty more narrowly! Can we punish this discrimination on the one hand and all tacitly celebrate it on the other? More »
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