#it seems like I get completely disproportionate performance anxiety every time

[canisalbus]

Not quite sure how to politely phrase this so I'll just be blunt, sorry, but would you ever open commissions? I'd pay big bux to get my priest mouse drawn by you

I do commissions extremely rarely, I'm afraid. It's not that I don't like drawing for people (or that I have no use for that extra income), I just can't handle the additional pressure and deadlines that well at all at the moment. Sorry!

#full disclosure #I've been struggling with severe depression and anxiety for over a decade now #it seems like I get completely disproportionate performance anxiety every time #it tends to make me lowkey freak out to be frank #I'd love to be able to do commissions at least a little bit more regularly in the future #but think I have to somehow get my mental health situation under control first #if I want to reach the level of professionalism and reliability that is necessary and required for the job #thank you for the interest though! It's good to hear there would be takers if I actually did the thing #answered #cawsket

[soft-and-certain]

That Unwanted Animal: An Analysis of Feeling Trapped

This is a theory I haven’t seen anywhere yet (after a cursory, surface-level check through the tags) and I feel like it’s worth sharing. I’ll be going pretty much line by line, which means this’ll be long. Trigger warning for discussion of toxic relationships, and their emotional and physical aspects.

So many of the posts I’ve seen about That Unwanted Animal focus on the raw sexual energy and feral quality of the song, which is definitely worth talking about - I mean, have you heard Madeleine Hyland’s voice? It’s a wonder I don’t drop dead because my heart ceases beating. But the first time I listened to it, my mind took me in quite a different direction. To me, it tells the story of a person trapped in an emotionally draining - possibly even abusive - relationship.

The song opens quietly, but it has an undercurrent of frantic energy behind it. Her whispering vocals carry this along, almost sounding like she doesn’t want to be heard, at least at first. 

You try so loud to love me, I cannot seem to hear ‘Cause you, you touch, my skin peels off like paint But beneath all of our panting, there’s this noise I cannot shake Can’t you hear the scratching, there’s something at the door

No matter how satisfying physical love can be, it  won’t replace the feeling that comes with communication and intimacy. Her lover seems to be unaware of her discomfort, the disconnect between them. Perhaps she is good at hiding her feelings, or he is just oblivious. He could also be ignoring it, which would add a whole other layer of unease.

And as you grip me like an animal that you’re about to spear “Be good to me,” I whisper. And you say, “What?” And I say, “Nothing, dear”

This line hits particularly hard. Not being able to voice your needs, desires, and concerns in a relationship (regardless of the type of relationship) is terrifying, and is one of the reasons for the anxiety that I felt the first time I listened to the song. 

The fact that he “grips her like an animal” is also indicative of the situation. Perhaps the first thought of many would be passion, but that is definitely not what came across for me. 

While we’re at it, let’s talk about her tone as she says this. Across the album, she proves that her voice can convey a multitude of emotions; here, to me, she almost sounds afraid.

Can’t you hear it? It can hear you It wants me to Throw the plate at the wall

Now she’s reached her breaking point. She’s finally had enough, and all that bottled up emotion has to let itself out. Shit’s about to get real. (Let’s have a moment of silence for the absolute power in her voice during the break. My gay heart.)

I’m the paper cut that kills you, I’m the priest that you ignored I’m the touch you crave, I’m the plans that you made, but fuck all your plans I’m bored And can’t you hear that scratching? I ask your eyes

Her lover truly loves her, planned his life around her, but she wants nothing to do with his plans anymore. Maybe she never did in the first place, or she’s only just realized that what she wants and what he wants out of life is very different. Their relationship has stagnated, and she’s begging him to realize what he’s doing to her. Can’t he hear that scratching? Can’t he see how she feels?

I’ve got knuckle burn from typing all these lines into your chest And as the belt from your buckle is tightening  I make shipwrecks out of my dress And the door below it splinters, and the creature creeps inside

Ah, emotional labor. In a healthy relationship, this labor would be performed equally by both parties in a give-and-take situation. Sadly, as happens so many times in real life, that does not seem to be the case here. The creature - her unexpressed frustration, anger, and discomfort - has finally been realized.

And we fall into each other, the scratching grows so loud Because that unwanted animal wants nothing more than to get out And I scream “What’s the time, Mister Wolf?” But you, you’re blind, you bleat, you bear your claws

Wow. This part of the song is what makes me go completely feral, there’s so much ragged emotion in the music. They think that maybe, just maybe, if they ignore the problem and try to fix it with sex, it’ll just go away. (Spoiler alert - that never works).

Her “unwanted animal” grows stronger and stronger, and she tries to reason with it, to bargain and deny and shove it down. But it refuses to be reasoned with, and only grows worse. 

This could also, again, be referencing her lover’s insensitivity (he’s blind, he bears his claws; he senses a fight but not the reasons why).

And you rip my ribcage open and devour what’s truly yours And our screaming joins in unison, I cry out to the lord Cos if we join our hands in prayer enough To God I imagine it all starts to sound like applause

Another hint at the more.. toxic physical aspects of their relationship. Maybe it’s just a metaphor! Who knows? But it certainly sounds scary. 

Though she is angry, her heart is still “truly [his]” and they still love each other. They’re just tearing each other apart. Her cynicism towards prayer is something I and many of my friends have experienced firsthand, especially the mentality of “Why doesn’t God fix this? Why does he allow it to go on?” That’s the energy I get from this.

But that second wind is coming love, it’s coming for all we own And on the creature scratches, it doesn’t know how to get out

She knows that the dissonance between them is destroying their relationship, and she’s desperate to make it out in one piece. But she doesn’t know how to bring it up with her lover, to explain to him that this can’t last, and she’s afraid of the disruption such a confession could unleash between them. This song serves as an aside to the audience, I think. An outlet for her creature.  And yet, the confrontation is inevitable. 

And you, you follow philosophies, but me, I laugh I choke “Well hello, my hollow Holofernes.” I wink but you don’t get the joke “Hold the hand of the god-child,” they said, “as he falls from the sky”

I’m going to be honest, I also don’t get the joke. Is it about the historical figure or the Shakespearean character? What is she implying? Clarifications welcome! 

I’ve done a lot of choking over philosophies, myself. If you can’t understand why a person believes what they do, or how they could ever come to such a conclusion in the first place, it’s definitely going to put extra strain on an already tense relationship. Combined with the societal expectation for women to perform a disproportionate amount of emotional labor in romantic relationships (holding the hand of the “god-child,” so to speak) and you get a very, very unhealthy situation.

Be good to me I beg of him Be good to me I beg of him Be good be good be good be good be good be good be good And he replies… “No no, not I.”

The rawness of her voice as she sings this is what breaks me. She’s literally begging him to be good to her. And he won’t. This is the moment when my stomach sank and my heart went pounding and it’s so good and yet so awful at the same time. It’s releasing a breath I didn’t know I had been holding for the whole song. It’s realizing that this relationship will end up ripping her to shreds if she can’t get out. If the creature doesn’t get out.

But, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, they’re trapped.

________________________________________________________________

Huge thanks to everyone who read the entire thing. Discussion is welcomed and appreciated! This song is beautifully written, beautifully composed, and I am absolutely in love with it! Exploring every aspect of a piece of media is one of my favorite activities, especially for such a labor of love as this album.

#the amazing devil #the horror and the wild #that unwanted animal #joey batey #madeleine hyland #music #lyrics #analysis #theory #emotional labor #emotional abuse #physical violence #kinda #toxic relationship #mine

[ifeveristoday]

we have always sent children into war

Something I’ve appreciated about Jordie’s writing for the Boom!verse is how consistent she’s been with building on characters and themes - when I think she’s dropped a plot point, it asserts itself in the next issue. While there have definitely been threads that are a little too exposition happy, or heavy-handed attempts at Whedonesque dialogue, on the whole - she understands and sees the earnest heartbeat of the show and infuses her own spin on Sunnydale and its inhabitants. Buffy was a show about human fears and anxieties given form as monsters and curses and a hero’s journey paralleled with a coming of age story.

But it was also a story about a war - the Slayer versus the darkness. Over seven years, Buffy and her friends and family fought and tested their own boundaries and capabilities for darkness and the pursuit of power.

In the Boom!verse, the idea of legacy has been stated from issue one - Buffy has her obvious calling, and Giles has his life long training to be a Watcher, and then Buffy’s watcher. Neither of them is automatically good at it and they’re still figuring what their legacies will ultimately be.

In issue 11, legacy comes back in the form of a conversation between Rose, Kendra and Robin.

Rose is a military brat from a military family - her father and her grandfather both chose it as a career. She shrugs off Kendra’s admiration for her family history by saying that it’s all become second nature and there’s really nothing special about it.

Then she asks Kendra about her father - and Kendra dismisses him as a deadbeat that she doesn’t care about because he didn’t care about her. That she’s discovered there are more important things that concern her - namely her calling as a Slayer.

Robin’s sudden interjection that if there are more important things, why are Rose and Kendra chatting away like besties on a date than - getting to the bottom of the fuckery that’s beset Sunnydale?

Rude, Robin. Also sometimes people just want to live and not dwell on the horrors of life, okay?

It’s also clearly projection: Robin has a loving dad who cares deeply about him - but he also has an apparently long-festering resentment over 1) his mom dying because of her Calling and leaving him, 2) despite ‘Slayer blood running through his veins,’ none of his training matters because the Council didn’t choose him to be a Slayer (is that even possible? #releasethelorejordie) and instead he’s...settled into being a Watcher. His legacy isn’t to follow his mother’s path, and his second nature doesn’t make him ‘special’ enough to do so. So to listen to Rose and Kendra being so casual about their own legacies --- well, it triggers his insecurities, which I’m sure is not helped by the evil toxic masculinity Rage Sweats that have been infecting all the men lately.

Is it a super heavy-handed metaphor for how performative/peer pressured ideals of masculinity is damaging to everyone? and to have the Hellmouth emit evil pheromones causing this a gloss over for real societal problems? 

Probably.

But also TVBuffy fought a literal penis headed monster and Xander ate part of his school mascot while under the influence of a wild hyena spirit and also split into two selves trying to figure out which one was the real him and whatever the fuck the episode Billy was, so I’m going to give Jordie a pass here.

When Kendra calls him out on his overreaction, yet still calling him Mr. Wood (acknowledging her more traditional character and respect for the Council), he loses it completely when she tells him to not go off on his own - it’s dark and also it’s Sunnydale where people die in inexplicable evil-adjacent ways.

He retorts that he doesn’t need a mother and that he doesn’t need you -

hello, Parental issues. It wouldn’t be a Whedonverse adjacent property without someone’s parental issues. Robin is wrong of course - he does need Kendra because he’s her Watcher, and he’s (understandably) mad about his mother.

Rose and Kendra puzzle over Robin’s sudden hulk rage, but go back to figuring out what’s rotten in Sunnydale and how much Buffy’s absence is felt - even though they’re auxiliary Scoobies at this point, Buffy is what brought them together. Kendra brings up the general loneliness of a Slayer - she has to keep her identity secret, she doesn’t generally ask for help re: Life things, and the regimented nature of Slayerhood really makes me think about the similarities to a soldier’s life.

And Rose being a soldier’s child would be the perfect person to empathize with. I don’t have personal experience, but I do have friends who have served in different branches - and when I was living overseas, the country I lived in had mandatory army service for the men. 

I’m not going to get in too deep about the whole troubling military complex that America has and how the business of war built this country or how it preys disproportionately on POC and lower-income people, or how when veterans come back, the services in place for them are lacking and how in general soldiers are good people who believed in the ideals of peace and protection while the realities don’t often match up with the propaganda...but you know. 

Slayers are child soldiers who are sworn to protect a world at large that doesn’t know they exist or what they really do. But it also goes along with the real-world tradition of sending children into war - in the US [currently], you can legally join at 18 without a parent’s permission or 17 with a parent’s permission.

Think about back in history, before 18 was considered a legal adult.

So we have always sent children into war - but Jordie really emphasizes that the Scoobies are children fighting something they don’t really understand, and there are no adults around (hello, Show also did this but also because Adults are not actually people in the 90s) to guide them, which adds to the anxiety.

Giles is all Rage Sweated out, Jenny is probably taking well deserved time for grading papers and chilling with her cat (h/t @jenny-calendar) and it’s up to Xander and Willow, as the OG Scoobies to figure out what to do, now that Buffy’s disappeared.

And oh, her disappearance has taken an emotional and physical toll - Xander’s been patrolling every night, with some assistance from Willow - it doesn’t seem like she’s been doing it nightly though. He’s tired and upset, and Willow’s upset she didn’t get to say goodbye to Buffy and they’re both hurting in their own ways and also not talking about what’s really bothering them, which is only tangentially connected to Buffy’s disappearance.

Willow and Xander’s bond has always been a key element to their characterizations and relationships with others - they’ve been ride or die from childhood, and now that they’re sharing a soul has made this closeness even more significant.

Which means when they fight, it’s to the bone. Xander’s previous issues of feeling lonely and ignored by others - and not being listened to manifests itself against Willow’s need to share and vent, but not actually listen - it gets ugly really fast.

Xander accuses Willow of being selfish and the reason she broke up with Rose is that she couldn’t handle the mundane realities of working hard at a relationship when she had the more exciting side-gig of fighting at Buffy’s side - which Willow angrily denies. Xander then rips into Willow’s need to be praised and liked, and suddenly brings up the possibility that she’s doing this to impress Buffy, which is stupid because she’s not here and also, she won’t ever make the gay love with you -

and Willow calls him out on his need for love and validation, that he falls for any girl who’ll give him ‘the least amount of attention.’

And Xander vamps out - if this is what Willow really thinks, that she’s always seen him something pathetic

which snaps both of them out of their fight.

Xander admits he only goes vampface when he’s really angry and he can’t always control it, but when he is - he feels better. Which is really concerning.

Xander goes on to say when he’s human, the anger has been harder to ignore, that there’s something dark calling to him and it makes him want to hurt Willow - and she confesses that she’s been feeling weird all the time as well.

Is their soul tie working against them? 

And the fact that Xander in vampface feels more comfortable than when he’s being human and more prone to Rage Sweats -- that’s gotta be significant.

Kendra interrupts their heart to heart and tackles Xander to the ground, which leads to a few bits of hilarious misunderstandings, but also the bombshell that Buffy is dead.

According to Robin, a new Slayer is only called when the previous one dies - which means Buffy must have died.

There goes my whole ‘they are a slayer theory’ but I was expecting it to go that way. In an earlier post - or possibly just a conversation with @jenny-calendar, I was thinking out loud that because Buffy has passed into the Hellmouth, she is no longer of the living plane, so she’s considered ‘dead’ aboveground. Obviously, she is not dead no matter what the misleading summaries future comics say, but she is not among the living.

Semantics aside, everyone is fucked up from hearing this - Willow and Xander turn on Robin, insisting he’s wrong and that it’s a sick joke, which causes Robin’s final form: teary-eyed Rage Hulk Hellmouth McGuffin. He says he didn’t ask for any of this, that he’s already lost so much - his mother, Buffy (which seems rather strange considering he was blanking her the whole time after he infiltrated her friend group and there didn’t seem to be any more flirting/sparkage in the lead up to Hellmouth) and more importantly - his chance to be a Slayer.

He’s railing against the fact he’s stuck with a Slayer that doesn’t know what a real vampire is, that there’s nothing special about her - and it’s obvious that even though his words are coming from a dark ugly place, there’s the feeling that Robin feels entitled to his rage and disappointment.

Kendra’s aware something’s gravely wrong with Robin and tells him calmly that she doesn’t want to hurt him but like every villain at the peak of missed-redemption moment, he says he feels perfect. And the last bits of rationality exit his body and he calls on the Evil Bro Squad to surround the Scoobies.

And triggers Xander’s kill switch - apparently the darkness that Xander’s human side was feeling? That’s because his demon soul is tied to the soul that infected all the men of Sunnydale and turned them into misogynistic meat puppets.

Dunn dun dun -- it’s the Hellmother.

Xander pushes back, but he’s disturbed by how strong it feels and what’s keeping him from going completely evil Frat boy?

Kendra tells them they have to fight and they’ll figure out the details later - and they’re doing their last stand in some stunning colored horror-inspired panels and it doesn’t look good for our heroes when....

WHACK.

Anya brains Robin with a croquet mallet like some white-suited queen of hearts and snarks, “Great. Now I have to fight teenagers to save the world again.”

A surprise boss appears - is Anya going to be the final Adult and help the Scoobies out of the mess they’re in?

Did she even really leave? Was that rabbit that was skulking in the grass from earlier issues really her?

Once more, Jordie leaves us on a cliffhanger.

#thoughts and reactions #buffy comics #boom! studios #i have more #but this has already gotten ridiculously long #my meta #boom! verse

[evakuality]

do you think isak has anxiety???

Hello, lovely anon!  The short answer is yes I do, and the longer answer is that I’m not an expert and I have no idea what his creators thought when they wrote him.  But I have been discussing this with a friend (and tbh, we discuss this fairly often because this is a headcanon we have, so …), and these are a few of the things we think point to him having anxiety (this is by no means exhaustive):

Once again, this is a long answer so I’m hiding it as best I can.

1. Eskild when Isak comes up to ask him for guru advice and he implies with “for the LAST TIME” that Isak has spent the time since the pride speech clip apologizing for what he said (and in fact we see him making an apology in one of the extra bits surrounding that clip???  I think???) My friend’s comment: “it’s totally an anxious thing to apologize constantly for your fuck-ups and feel overblown levels of guilt for it” and I think that sums it up a lot.  That idea that he doesn’t feel satisfied by having apologized and had it accepted, but rather feels the need to come back to it over and over and over again.  I remember one fabulous time (joking; it wasn’t fabulous) when I was involved in an online participation part for a course and at one point someone said ‘stop apologizing!!!!” to me.  Which of course led to me feeling terrible about apologizing, and then apologizing for having been apologetic.  Vicious circle.  Anyway … this idea reads true to me because I know how that feels and Isak certainly displays a lot of the same behavior.

2. The conversation with Jonas at the end of episode 6.  He can’t bring himself to get right to the point, but rather circles around it.  “Guess” and “I’ll give you a hint” – he doesn’t want to have to say it.  I may be projecting a little, but I recognized that feeling too.  That idea that telling someone is going to lead to something terrible, and just the relief on his face after he says it and Jonas is completely chill (honestly, give that man a bro medal; he was awesome in that scene!) I mean, this is going to cause anyone to be worried and nervous, but coupled with the way I see him over-compensating throughout the earlier episodes, it seems like very anxious behavior.  Fellow circle-talkers unite!!

3. “I read it last week” – my friend’s comment: “doing his schoolwork so far in advance?? I know for me it was very much an anxious thing to do every page of my reading in advance but most people i knew didn’t do that” – again, this could be seen as more studious behavior and yet combine it with how obsessed he is with getting 6s, how ashamed he was to get a 5 in s4 etc etc … it just seems a lot more like it’s an anxious thing than just a wanting to get good grades thing.  Particularly if you look at it in terms of his pattern of overthinking literally everything.  I might be gay?  Well, I have to hide it because otherwise people will look at me wrong.  My mother’s religious?  Better not tell her I’m gay because she’ll probably react badly.  Even has bipolar?  Well, Sonja must be right and he must not really like me.  There’s a definite sense of “what will people think?” around his shame at getting not-so-great grades so the drive to do it all, complete it all early could be seen as part of all this.

4. the clip with Even in the locker room in episode 5 - “If you’re sad, I hope it’s not because of me” – poor kid.  He takes it all on himself.  This is part of that overthinking: Even broke up with his girlfriend.  That’s probably because of me (eg “I told her about you”) and Even looks sad.  Therefore, Even must be sad because of me.  It’s this constant state of living with the fear and worry that everything he is and does will cause other people pain and distress.  As an audience we eventually know why Even is looking down here (probably had a minor episode???) but Isak doesn’t and so he extrapolates (that lovely scientific brain of his is not playing fair with him here) and what he comes to is: this must be my fault.

5.  A final comment from my friend: “just in general the way he deals with and thinks about conversations and people, like he has a propensity to feel overblown guilt for things related to his social interactions with other people and i just feel like he has this tendency to internalize everything and overthink things to the point of unhealthiness"  – and I think that really sums it up.  It’s to his credit that he can step back from this and take on board what people say and learn from it all.  But the harsh side of that is that (as with Eskild) it can lead to a disproportionate guilt over what he feels like he’s done.

Even in the clips I’ve been looking at in my metas so far he seems to do a lot of overthinking, particularly around performing masculinity and hiding his true self.  Could that be speculation on my part?  Sure.  We really don’t have any way of knowing what was intended with this character.  But we can trace these things in him, and it resonates a lot with experiences people have.  Other people may read all these things separately and in different ways.  But basically … overall, yeah I do think he has anxiety and I think he can easily be read that way.  I don’t think I necessarily try to read him that way (I like to pretend I have an open mind when I write about his journey) but it seeps in a lot.

#my meta stuff #my ask stuff

[dalanmendonca]

Decadence & The End

Snap back to reality

So this was the final term and things started with a bang. I used the term break to go on a trip to Rajasthan.This was my first proper ISB trip. I’m a complete laggard in this matter. A lot people travelled the surrounding hillscapes like there’s no tomorrow, before placements and much more after placements. I loved campus a bit too much and didn’t want the (apparent) hassle of travelling. Rajasthan was warm and fun. It was a new experience visiting forts and palaces, seeing old weapons and finding out that the Rajas smoked a lot of hash! A Desert Safari and tent stays in Jaisalmer were fun too. The warm(er) weather was good break from the chills of Mohali. And soon I was back.

On the academic front things were as cool as they could be. Over-loading on courses earlier meant that I had to study only 3 courses and had plenty of time for socialising, fun and … co-ordinating my marriage!

My courses for Term 8 were ENVC (Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital), MFIN (Micro-Finance) and MKAN (Marketing Analytics).

ENVC was about the world of startups and venture capital. It was taught by Professor Francis Kim who is a former (successful!) entrepreneur and covered both sides of the table; we learned how to value a startup company and also about what kind of ideas succeed and what it takes to be an entrepreneur. The most amazing (and useful) part of the course was the simulation. Many academic courses use a simulation to show you how markets evolve, and how a manager has to respond. These are usually computer-based simulations, so they don’t feel all that real. In ENVC, the professor divided the class into 24 teams, 8 of these were VCs and 16 were ENs (entrepreneurs). All the entrepreneurs competed in the same market (“Edtech in India”). Every class entrepreneurs would present to VCs and half of them would get eliminated. Watching the simulation progress and observing the economic + human dynamics play out was a real treat. Initially, all but a few teams had over-lapping ideas. As rounds progressed and teams observed who died/survived, they started learning from each other and incorporating each others ideas. Every VC had 15 sticks to invest. As expected from economics, one team (mine! 😉)got a disproportionate share of the total funding in accordance with a power law distribution. Politics played a huge role too! Many couples put themselves into complementary EN-VC pairs; so that they could support each other! People called upon friendships and other niceties to get funded; objective judgement RIP. It was a faithul simulation of the ugly truth that is human life.

MFIN was about a still emerging branch of the finance that deals with facilitating the development of the poor/not-so-well-off. Here are the core ideas: To make people well-off we want to give them income sources, the simplest of these is running a small business. To start that business requires some inputs/capital. These inputs are beyond the means of these folks (else they would’ve started these businesses already!). So we can just lend money to these folks, right? Wrong. All of lending works on the idea of collateral, the poor being poor don’t have any collateral in the first place! All is not lost, this challenge has been confronted head-on by social entreprenuers, most notably Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and replicated in many countries world over. Their weapon of choice is group lending, where you start by lending to a group of people who keep each other from defaulting. Initial loans are small and grow with time. Because these banks can’t take the easy (and impersonal) way out when it comes to lending, banks like Grameen Bank have innovated on multiple fronts to make finance accessible to a whole new section of society. For example, repayment happens daily/weekly (as opposed to monthly) as this keeps the borrower engaged and aware of their loan. Loan repayment is a social process done in front of a group, thus adding social pressure to avoid shirking on a loan repayment; some wonderful uses of human psychology these are. Grameen Bank is the posterchild of the microlending/microfinance movement and a huge chunk of the economic and social development of Bangladesh has been attributed to it. An interesting concept I encountered was the double bottom--line (we measure only the financial impact of a business, business should also evaluate their social bottom-line and their impact on society). The course was taught by Shamika Ravi, who is a fantastic teacher (and a member of the Prime Ministers Economic Advisory Council); I really felt like I was understanding the core economic concepts as their immediate applications throughout the class.

Finally there was MKAN. MKAN was using the now available glut of data to apply age-old marketing principles of Segment, Target, Position. We used the now classic tools of clustering, regression, etc to do everything from segment customers to predict sales. The course was a good blend of hands-on tool driving while keeping marketing principles in mind. The classes happened at 8 AM in the morning, and hence I scarcely have much to say about this course. That wraps up the acads front.

Offer letters started pouring in for a few people with proactive companies. The gym was finally a thing for me. Some attempts were made in a bid to get skinny before the wedding. The attempts weren’t very successful. However, I’m glad that I got rid of my unfamiliarity anxiety about the gym. One of my reasons for not going to the gym is that I just don’t know what to do there, fortunately the ISB gym has two full-time trainers available 24x7 to guide you. It was my first honest attempt at gyming after trying in the 11th standard, and I’m now comfortable doing basic weights and using the machines. ISL continued its march in March (shitty line, I know). I remained blissfully ignorant.

Yearbook awkwardness continued. People scoured the land for places to get their yearbook photo clicked. Some people came with highly representative ones. It was also time to write yearbook testimonials for people. You had to nominate 3-4 of your friends to collectively write one testimonial for you. Here is where your true friends were revealed! This became just another group assignment with 1-2 people leading the charge for every testimonial.

CS and AoE sessions: A small segment of brave laptop warriors rekindled the joys of multiplayer games. And given the amount of free time available, a lot of kindling happened until the the wee hours of the night. I earnestly tried to join the fun by watching AoE tutorials, but then AoE on my PC kept crashing. And then I was like, why isn’t this in a browser?

SLC calendar

The Student Life Council went into beast mode, driving a ton of events on campus.

These events covered everything from Food fetes (like a giant potluck) to SV wars (which was basically student housing buildings competing to see who can throw the best party). The Food fete really brought the campus together, with everyone either cooking or helping or eating! The dishes students cooked up turned out to be better than expected – not everyone is an amateur in the cooking domain!

This period being a sort of end-of-days, for us all meant that people were extremely enthusiastic about partying. The winter had started relenting a little and spirits were uplifted.  SV wars and the usual birthday parties that happen on campus meant that there was a party every other day, but you couldn’t say no to the next party because this was the last time this would happen.

Which brings us to the most epic party after all the other parties. Holi! The Holi was lit and was the best party I’ve attended in my life. The SLC provided gulal and pichkaris and a giant inflated swimming pool and a DJ and a raindance area. In addition, there was bhaang-laden thandai and bhaang-laden bhajias. It was a warm(er) day compared to others. People were excited and in good spirts, going about throwing colour on friends, enemies, everyone. Then throwing friends, enemies, everyone into the inflated swimming pool. Then dancing and losing their shit after having bhaang. The post-holi post-bhaang time warp in which I struggled to get back to my room and ended up bathing for what seemed like an eternity is something I will never forget.

This concluded formal student life on campus, … or did it?

D-week

The conclusion of ISB life happens through two events - one formal and one informal. The formal one is of course graduation day – the hat toss, the tassel turning, the address to the graduating students by the guest of honour, etc. The informal one, unique to ISB, is what we call D-week, short for De-orientation week, the evil twin of O-week, that happened at the start of the year. Feeling the need to make the final week of ISB life super-duper-ultra-goddamn fun, I joined the D-week team to plan some events.

The D-week happens after ISBs academic session has wrapped up i.e. after the last exam has been written and before the graduation ceremony. Students officially have nothing to do, which adds to the pressure of planning some nice long events. Obviously, students are also free to leave campus and travel around, so making the events awesome and crowd-pulling becomes a must.

This D-week we had a game night, a “hotbox” party, a stand-up performance along with a roast of the GSB, a sundowner party, paintball, sufi night, an awards night along with a prom (the last party). The last event was the distribution and signing of yearbooks.

The events where I contributed to the most were the standup/roast and the awards night.

I gave the longest standup performance of my life (and emerging comedic career), lasting more than 20 minutes. I cracked jokes on every aspect of ISB life and proceeded to crack a few general ones. The auditorium was FULL, as the entire batch had turned up. It was my honour (and pleasure) to entertain these folks laugh; they laughed, a lot, which was a very inspiring and proud moment for me. Fortunately, this time the performance was recorded (by multiple people!).

Me and a handful more folks planned the awards and content for the awards. The winners were decided by live public voting which made the event really fun; thus the winners were a surprise to us too. Lots of controversial awards were given out. To add to the fun, we played jingles related to every award when the winners came on stage, adding to the cheery vibe of the vibe of the evening.

All D-week events were accompanied by some party or the other. I didn’t partake much in the daily drinking, however I did partake hugely in the daily eating. It was such a tough choice between indulging in end-of-days hedonism & trying to get in shape for my wedding. Both sides had a strong case.

On the last day, students gathered in “The Hub”, a small lawn in front of our main building to collect and sign yearbooks. This was fun few hours, writing messages to each other and recollecting memories. With this informal student life at ended.

Graduation

Graduation was a moderately long drawn out affair. Over the course of two days, we had a rehearsal of the graduation, “The Deans Dinner”, the ISB award ceremony, the official graduation ceremony followed by the Deans lunch.

For starters, it was complicated to wear graduation robes. While it’s fun to look like you’re in Harry Potter, wearing a gown is moderately difficult, especially the ISB gowns which have multiple moving parts. I’ve graduated before and it wasn’t so difficult :P. Also, ISB follows the tradition of turning the tassel - when you receive your degree, you turn your tassel from the right side of your hat (“mortarboard”) to the left indicating your successful graduation.

After the rehearsal we had the batch photo clicked followed quickly by the official ISB awards night. I am happy to state that I won awards for winning competitions, being a torchbearer (i.e contributing to student life + the brand of ISB) and finally also won a giant gold trophy for best club. Winning best club was thrilling to say the least. Just before the awards night could start, my Mom who was travelling all the way from Bombay arrived, coincidence? divine providence?

The awards night was followed by the Deans dinner where only the elite (like Deans listers, Club presidents, etc.) were invited. Yours truly was invited too, and he watched the awkwardness of socialising unfold for the umpteenth time.

That was it for pre-events. As I had dinner that evening, it was with my mother instead of the usual coterie of friends/students, it really started to sink in that things were coming to a close, whether I was transformed or not, a whole year had passed by. A year quite different from those before it.

I dropped my mom off and wished her goodnight. Tomorrow was going to be a momentous day.

Graduation day started early with breakfast opening at 7. Me being an eternal early bird, arrived promptly at 7. Then came the … waiting, students, who were all gown-ed up, waited in the academic block in a neat line so they could walk in a procession into the convocation hall. The convocation hall was a newly setup airplane hangar-like structure on the lawns. After a long wait that involved lots of photo sessions and false starts, some orchestral music was played and we all went into the hall in a glorious procession. An invocation was sung, our GSB president gave a speech followed by a few more addresses. We were told that our placements had been the best ever, and thus we were a great batch (Thanks!). The guest of honour gave a really boring and uninspiring speech, lots of people slept off or got busy on their phones. This was followed by announcements of the best professor, best academic associate. Finally we came to the graduation, students were called on stage one by one, in alphabetical order, except for those who received any sort of ISB honours, they went on stage first. My row got up all together, I waited for my moment, my name was called, I walked towards the center of the stage, shook hands with everyone present, grabbed my degree, looked at the camera, smiled, click, and walked out. As I walked out, I remembered to turn my tassel and officially become a graduate. Ah! Long journey. Then I sat as the degree disbursal wrapped. Finally, we all stood up, did a royal hat toss, smiled, laughed, cheered and walked out of the hall as graduates together. It was a fun ceremony. Then there was my favourite part, lunch

Since I had a plane to catch from Delhi, for which I had to take a 4-5 hour cab ride, I was in a rush! There was sadly no time for pleasantries and ooh-aahing. I wrapped up all my exit formalities, packed my bags a proper and took one last look at ISB, a place and people that I did indeed feel a little fonder towards.

This was the end. Of one sort.

I had come here with few expectations, for me B-school was just a brand and a network, these benefits come to after you graduate, I thought (back then) that this was mostly not relevant, I just had to get through it. But I was in for a lot of surprises, mostly pleasant. Apart from discovering news branches of knowledge, made new friends and newer perspectives, headed a club, won competitions and honours (in a far cry from my undergraduate days), tried standup comedy, gotten a kickass job and more. It felt like an eventful and significant year had gone by.

The transition from student to alumnus is most stark when you turn in your student ID card and receive your new Alumni ID card, it is precisely when the feeling of “shit, it’s really over” sinks into you. I wasn’t too emotional as I left, I had come prepared for this end. Back in Bombay, when I was packing for ISB, I packed quite lightly knowing that this was just a year, a temporary stay; and I could also save myself a lot of effort in moving stuff around. My past self had seen my future self which was now my present self and done it a favour! Cool, right?

The fun wasn’t over. Members of the drama club got together and gave every student leaving the campus a proper tear-filled and emotional vidaai; while I left early and couldn’t get one, it was a very sweet gesture.

But there was no time to be chill, my wedding and honeymoon were oncoming!

And so ended #LifeAtISB

#lifeatisb #journal #endings

[sweet-dree-ms-blog]

Cheat Payday 2

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[bluewatsons]

Rebecca Kukla, Measuring Mothering, 1 Int J Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 67 (2008)

Abstract

As a culture, we have a tendency to measure motherhood in terms of a set of signal moments that have become the focus of special social attention and anxiety; we interpret these as emblematic summations of women's mothering abilities. Women's performances during these moments can seem to exhaust the story of mothering, and mothers often internalize these measures and evaluate their own mothering in terms of them. "Good" mothers are those who pass a series of tests—they bond properly during their routine ultrasound screening, they do not let a sip of alcohol cross their lips during pregnancy, they give birth vaginally without pain medication, they do not offer their child an artificial nipple during the first six months, they feed their children maximally nutritious meals with every bite, and so on. This reductive understanding of mothering has had counterproductive effects upon health care practice and policy, encouraging measures that penalize mothers who do not live up to cultural norms during signal moments, while failing to promote extended narratives of healthy mothering.

"A smart woman who loves her unborn child will avoid having a c-section if at all possible. Only a self-absorbed wimp would choose to put her baby in harm's way so that she doesn't have to alter her schedule or feel any pain. These women definitely don't get any respect from me."

"Many mothers who have difficult births love their babies. Love is not a contraction. It's the opposite, for me. A very slow opening."

My mother gave birth to me at the end of 1969, after a difficult pregnancy during which her graduate-student health insurance allowed her only minimal prenatal care.1 A hippy with degrees in literature, drama, and education, she was an ideal mother for an infant and a preschooler: She nourished my every spark of creativity, delighted in my personality quirks, fed me healthy food, and taught me to read by the time I was two. Firm believers that good parenting did not require a hiatus from life and adventure, she and my father became intimately familiar with the playgrounds, zoos, and pony rides of Europe and northern Africa. However, she was a problematic mother of an older child. She was controlling and fearful when I showed signs of independence and derided my desires to fit in with my peer groups. My parents pulled me out of school repeatedly for months at a time and moved me to a new neighborhood and school almost every year, so that they could travel freely without the responsibilities of home ownership. Seeing that I excelled academically despite these disruptions, my mother showed little sensitivity to their effects upon my emotional and social life. Later, once my independence and my failure to accept her vision of life at face value became undeniable, she more or less relinquished responsibility for me, leaving me to support myself from my mid-teens on. Yet she has turned out to be a wonderful mother of an adult child. After we each settled into acceptance of our mutual independence, she became a staunch supporter of my choices and a careful and appreciative audience for my accomplishments, as well as a devoted, playful, creative grandmother. The jury is out on what kind of elderly mother she will become later, after she becomes dependent upon her children in turn.

So was my mother a "good mother"? Aristotle said that a man's happiness could be measured only once he was dead; happiness and unhappiness reside in his life narrative only taken as a whole (1941, Book I, Chapter 10). Similarly, good mothering can be constituted only through an entire parenting narrative. My mother's narrative is not yet complete, nor will it ever be univocal.

Yet as a society we have a tendency to measure motherhood, not in extended narratives, but by a set of signal moments that we interpret as emblematic tests and summations of women's mothering abilities. Women's performances during these moments can seem to exhaust the story of mothering. Mothers often internalize these measures and evaluate their own mothering in terms of them. These "defining moments" tend to come very early in the mothering narrative—indeed, several of them come during pregnancy or even before conception.

Consider how the phrase reproductive ethics has come to refer almost exclusively to ethical analyses of discrete choices faced during pregnancy or even earlier. Key topics in reproductive ethics include abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and fertility medicine. This ought to strike us as strange. Reproduction is the process of creating new people and building families and communities. Reproductive ethics ought to refer to the ethics of creating and caring for new generations. This is a process that extends across the life span. If we restrict our understanding of reproduction to the processes of conception and pregnancy, not only will we ignore much of the material and social labor that constitutes the creation and sustenance of new people, but we surely risk distorting the social and ethical meaning of these early stages of reproduction. That is, it would be odd to think that we can understand the ethics or social significance of pregnancy or conception without understanding them as first and foremost the beginnings of longer narratives. Yet mainstream bioethicists consistently lose interest in mothers once the beginning of their narrative is over. We give little or no bioethical attention to the ethics of mothering children after infancy, not to mention older children. I claim that this reductive understanding of mothering has had counterproductive effects upon health care practice and policy, encouraging measures that penalize mothers who do not live up to cultural norms during signal moments while failing to encourage extended narratives of healthy mothering.2

I believe that one of the important tasks for feminist bioethics is to turn the bioethical spotlight upon the fact that reproduction not only happens in women's bodies, but through women's ongoing, richly textured labor—labor that, after all, does not escape a complicated relationship with medical institutions and spaces after pregnancy ends. From pediatrician's offices and late-night emergency rooms to negotiating the increasing medicalization of children's behavior and bodies, women mother in and through their complicated relationships to medical authority, judgment, and possibilities, even when they resist doing so. Whether or not it should be this way, even in our current age of increasingly shared parenting duties, mothers bear a disproportionate responsibility for managing their children's contact with professional health institutions, maintaining their health at the domestic level (through feeding and hygiene practices and the like), and training them in safety and self-care. Correspondingly, mothers are held disproportionately responsible for their children's physical and mental health imperfections.3 Just as bioethics misrepresents pregnancy and conception when it severs them from the rest of mothering, likewise accounts of the ethics of family relationships miss a pressing dimension of mothering if they fail to bring the tools of medical ethics to bear.

In the following, I explore three examples of signal moments that we interpret as displays and tests of women's maternal adequacy; I then turn to the larger cultural and ethical impact of measuring mothering in these ways.

Responding properly to ultrasound images

Although the rituals and the accompanying rituals vary from country to country (cf., Mitchell and Georges 1997), ultrasound screening for fetal abnormalities during apparently healthy pregnancies has become completely routine in many countries. In Canada and the United States, for instance, it is standard to have such an ultrasound screening around the eighteenth week of pregnancy. The eighteenth-week ultrasound indeed has become so routine that couples often wait until they have had it to announce the pregnancy to friends and family (Mitchell 2001; Weir 1998). The procedure requires no informed consent, is rarely refused by women, and is generally preceded by little or no discussion of the medical purposes of the test, its proven risks or benefits, or the options that will be available if an anomaly is detected. (In fact, there has been no persuasive data showing improved outcomes for individual mothers or babies from routine ultrasound screening, and although an atypical ultrasound may lead to a recommendation for more testing, there are almost no conditions detectable on the ultrasound screen that can be treated or managed in utero. Reported reductions in neonatal morbidity and mortality due to routine ultrasound screening are based on termination rates, and termination can hardly be counted as an option that improves the health of a fetus.)

Although the medical expectations surrounding the test may be vague, the web of normative and social expectations in which it is embedded is not. "Good" mothers are expected not only to have the ultrasound, but to but look forward to it as a key moment on the path to motherhood. The primary purpose of the test, as it is represented in our culture, is not diagnostic but social. Pregnant women are encouraged to treat the event as a treasured moment during which they will "meet the baby" for the first time. When confronted with the image of their fetus, "good" mothers manifest love and amazement and reaffirm that the test has helped them understand the "reality" of the baby. Good mothers are accompanied to the ultrasound by supportive heterosexual husbands and fathers-to-be. The joint attention of the expectant mother and father, directed to the inscrutable screen as the ultrasound technician rattles off the features and properties of the "baby," serves to affirm and foreshadow the normative nuclear family unit. At the end of the screening, the couple usually receives a photo to take home with them, which, as medical ethnographer Lisa Mitchell (2001) has shown, serves socially as "baby's first picture." Indeed, the medical purposes of the ultrasound have taken a back seat to its social purposes to such an extent that many women find themselves completely unprepared for the emotional impact of problematic ultrasound results (cf., Yaqub 2005).

Lest we remain unconvinced that the primary purpose of the ultrasound is social rather than medical, we need only turn to the commercial ultrasound clinics that have sprung up in malls across the continent in the past decade. For a fee, these clinics will perform an ultrasound and provide a photo of your baby in a cute baby-themed frame. They also sell various other types of merchandise decorated with your ultrasound image. What is significant, for my purposes, is the extent to which these commercial clinics advertise their services through rhetoric that suggests a normative expectation that good mothers will want to preserve their ultrasound experience. "Fetal Moments: An Ultrasound to Remember," an aptly named clinic in a suburban Atlanta mall, recommends purchasing "custom keepsake jewelry" featuring your baby's ultrasound photo (see fig. 1). According to their Web site, "Fetal Moments is here to provide you and your family with a wonderful bonding experience through a unique ultrasound that you can treasure for years to come."4 While the clinic explicitly declines to offer medical advice or diagnoses, all their packages include a DVD and photos, "gender determination, if requested," and "room to bring your family and friends."

The ultrasound ritual serves to put women's maternal bona fides to the test. We can see this most clearly, perhaps, by looking at what happens when women "fail" this test. For example, Lisa Mitchell found that Canadian ultrasound technicians and obstetricians corrected expectant mothers who referred to what they saw on the screen as a fetus instead of a baby. When women did not manifest the "proper" level of emotion or the "proper" form of engagement with the ultrasound image, technicians were suspicious of their fitness to mother and their commitment to the pregnancy. Technicians also were suspicious of women who showed too much or not enough interest in the health of the fetus or too much or not enough interest in its sex. They were sometimes directly judgmental toward expectant parents who were "too" interested in the sex, telling them that "finding out the sex isn't important. The most important thing is that the baby is healthy." Occasionally, in such cases and particularly when the woman was not Caucasian, the technicians would even lie about their ability to detect the sex of the fetus (Mitchell 2001, 381).

Figure 1. Advertisement for "Fetal Moments" ultrasound studio (www.fetalmoments.com)

Thus the ultrasound test is culturally framed not only as a social ritual during which you meet your baby, but also as an early moment at which an expectant mother's ability to engage and bond with her baby and to arrange for its proper social reception is measured. One of Mitchell's interviewees told her the story of how her own ultrasound had gone and then asked, "How did I do?" (ibid., epigraph). On the popular television sitcom Friends, Rachel Greene—one of the main characters, who is already marked as a nonstandard mother when she becomes pregnant while single after spending a drunken night with her ex-boyfriend—bursts into tears during her ultrasound, wailing "I'm a terrible mother!" because she cannot see the fetus on the screen when the technician points it out.5 Although the rituals surrounding the ultrasound are culturally variant and relatively recent, our expectations for how women will act and feel during these rituals are already quite rigid and well-entrenched in our folk culture.6 It is acceptable for a woman to refuse or to seek information about the sex of the baby, for example, but only for the right reasons: she can refuse the information because she wants the sex to be a wonderful surprise, but not because she is just uninterested; she can find out the sex because she wants to start contentedly purchasing gender-coded baby gear, but not because she would greatly prefer a child of one sex (although, interestingly, such preferences seem to be more socially acceptable for fathers). One can refuse the ultrasound altogether on the grounds that one will want to carry the baby to term regardless of any anomalies and "love it the same way no matter what," but not because one is simply uninterested in the test and unconvinced that there is any medical benefit to the procedure.

In the face of the dearth of medical evidence for concrete benefits for ultrasound screening, the standard justification for its routinization has been that it helps women bond with their unborn children (cf., Sedgmen et al. 2006). This is so despite the fact that such an effect is scientifically dubious at best (cf., Lapaire et al. 2007). By implication, a woman who fails to have the normative reactions to the ultrasound event is maternally deficient. Interestingly, why we care whether or not pregnant women bond with their fetuses has gone mostly unquestioned. It is a major empirical assumption—and one for which I have found no scientific evidence whatsoever —that bonding with one's fetus makes one any more likely to bond with one's actual baby. Indeed, we might imagine that bonding with something completely portable that we have met only via an image will make the reality of a spitting, screaming infant that much more of a shock. Most pregnant women are already going to extreme lengths to monitor and discipline their behavior to minimize risk; pregnant women obsessively control their diets, exercise regimes, emotional states, hair care product use, and just about every other aspect of daily life. We hardly need a tool such as the ultrasound to heighten this already excessive phenomenon. Meanwhile, pregnant women who engage in seriously risky behaviors such as drug abuse are unlikely to stop without some intervention more helpful than a suggestive image and a stern warning. It seems to me that our valuation of the maternal–fetal bond stems from our desire to start turning motherhood into a normative affair as early as possible and likewise to start measuring a woman's maternal adequacy as early as possible.

Birth as a maternal achievement test

Labor and delivery typically take less than a day; some women labor for as long as a few days. Mothering, however, typically lasts for many decades. Within most mothering narratives, birth makes up a tiny speck. Adoptive mothers do not give birth to their children. Yet we have elevated the symbolic importance of birth to the point where it appears to serve as a make-or-break test of a woman's mothering abilities. If she manages her birth "successfully," making proper, risk-adverse, self-sacrificing choices, and maintaining both proper deference to doctors and control over her own body, then she proves her maternal bona fides and initiates a lifetime of proper mothering. If, on the other hand, she fails at these tasks during labor, she reveals herself as selfish or undisciplined and risks deforming her baby's character, health, and emotional well-being, while putting her bond with her child in permanent jeopardy.

According to our cultural mythos, "good" mothers deliver vaginally without pain medication, after advance planning and appropriate prenatal education. Second-best mothers submit regretfully but docilely to whatever medical interventions the doctors recommend to correct and control their unruly bodies. "Bad" mothers make other, "selfish" choices, such as giving birth at home, seeking out an epidural or a cesarean section, or attempting a vaginal birth after a previous c-section. Alternatively, "bad" mothers may just fail to demonstrate sufficient control over their births. They may labor "unproductively" and thereby "fail to progress" or otherwise fail to proceed in a timely fashion toward an uncomplicated birth.7 In some hospitals, women that end up receiving cesarean sections resulting in healthy babies are routinely given unsolicited literature on grieving to help them through their feelings of failure and loss at not having successfully achieved a normative birth.8

When women were first encouraged to draw up birth plans in which they specified their preferences concerning pain medication, who would be allowed in their rooms during labor, and other basic aspects of their care, the laudable idea was to help women become at least partial agents of their own births, rather than passively submitting to medical management. However, over time, formulating a birth plan has moved from an empowering option to a social duty. In the advice column, "Ask Amy," a recent letter-writer was appalled that her pregnant friend was not attending childbirth classes: "She said that she and her husband were going to "wing it" and that the nurses knew what they were doing. I was a bit stunned that this well-educated woman would have such a casual attitude. . . . This expectant mom also said that they were going to flip a coin to decide whether to have an epidural. I think this is very irresponsible. These procedures do carry a level of risk."9 Contemporary North American pregnant women are expected to plan out their births with the elaborate precision and care of a traditional bride planning her wedding day, and they are expected to do it early. One Web site perversely recommends: "In the happy haze of early pregnancy . . . the reality of labor and birth may seem extremely far off—which makes this the perfect time to start planning for the arrival of your baby with a birth plan that details your wishes."10 One fairly typical "interactive birth plan" that can be downloaded from childbirth.org is a seven-page form that asks mothers to detail their choices in eighteen different categories and several subcategories, covering everything from the lighting in the room, to the specific instruments that may be used in case of complications, to the laboring positions that they will adopt. We can push the analogy between birth planning and wedding planning farther: as women are called upon to plan and design their births, they are invited to think of birth, not primarily as the first day of the rest of their children's lives, but as their "special day," during which their tenure as mothers will be symbolically foreshadowed and put on display, just as weddings are often framed as the bride's special day and as the symbolic moment at which the perfection (or imperfection) of the marriage is performed as a spectacle.

Such elaborate birth plans set up completely unrealistic expectations concerning how much control one can possibly have over the laboring process, thereby setting women up for feelings of failure, lack of confidence, disappointment, and maternal inadequacy when things do not go according to plan, even when mother and baby end up healthy. They also give women the impression that if they do not have strong opinions seven months in advance concerning how they would like their labor room lit and whether they wish to avail themselves of foot pedals during labor, then they are not sufficiently engaged, concerned mothers-to-be. Furthermore, although the entire phenomenon of the "birth plan" is pervaded by the rhetoric of choice and autonomy, all women know that good mothers make some choices but not others. For instance, indicating that one wants pain medication at the earliest medically possible moment is not a socially acceptable choice, even though it is a choice available on the form. Lauren Slater (2004) writes, "Our [prenatal] teacher believed that birth was full of choices. 'You should write a birth plan and give it to the nurses,' she said. 'You should refuse all pain medication. Refuse a heart monitor. Refuse Pitocin. . . .' Our instructor also informed us that birth interrupted by technology equals a mother less able to bond with her baby."

The idea that women had better manage their births successfully or risk failing to bond with their babies—and thereby risk a narrative of motherhood corrupted irreparably from the first moment—is tenacious. Beginning with the attachment parenting movement spearheaded by John Bowlby (1969, 1983, and 1988) and William and Martha Sears (1993) in the 1970s and 1980s, alarmists from both the natural childbirth movement and the traditional medical community have argued, for instance, that mothers who do not breast-feed in the first hour will not bond with their babies, that mothers who are not fully lucid at the moment of birth due to pain medication will not bond with their babies, and so forth.11 Typically, the nominal concern of those who raise such worries is to protect mothers against losing these opportunities to bond because of overzealous medical interventions. However, in fact, such claims redound against mothers who, for whatever reason, do not manage to orchestrate these first moments correctly, putting their maternal success into question from the start. For example, noted birth anthropologist Brigitte Jordan claims, "A semi-conscious mother who does not hear her baby's first cry and a narcotized infant whose reactions are weak are off to a bad interactional start" (1992, 79). She then tells the story of witnessing a birth in which the mother, purportedly terrorized by too much medical intervention, stopped being "courageous" and instead "gave up" during labor. Her contractions stopped, her labor was artificially restimulated, and her baby was born with the help of forceps. Jordan ends the dramatic tale by commenting "I hope she still loves her baby" (ibid. 112–13). The passage is supposed to be an indictment of medicalized birth practices in the United States, but the normative language of failure aimed at the mother is clear, as is Jordan's belief that this woman's failed performance during the moment of birth—however much it can be blamed on her doctors and the institutionalized rituals of the hospital—portends a lifetime of deficient maternity.

In popular culture, the distaste for mothers who do not behave properly during their births is strong and explicit, as is the implication that this bad behavior reflects upon the entirety of their mothering. Women's choices to have or not to have cesarean sections have particularly mobilized this discourse. Notoriously labeled "too posh to push," mothers who choose elective cesareans for non-medical reasons are vilified by the media and in online discussions. In an article entitled "Too Posh to Push Moms Set Bad Example for Society," the Vancouver Sun editorializes, "Pity poor Sean Preston Spears Federline. . . . His mom couldn't even be bothered to suffer a little pain for a lot of gain on the day of his celebrated birth. Yes, giving birth the old-fashioned way hurts. Welcome to motherhood" (Fralic 2005). Here, Britney Spears's elective c-section—which, given the ways of abdominal surgery, probably did involve more than "a little pain"—is taken as reflecting directly upon her entire relationship to motherhood, whereas proper maternity is associated with self-sacrifice and a willingness to bear pain. Meanwhile, on a babycenter.com bulletin board discussion concerning the ethical acceptability of elective c-sections, typical entries express sentiments similar to Ashley, who writes, "I am totally against elective c-sections. . . . A smart woman who loves her unborn child will avoid having a c-section if at all possible. Only a self-absorbed wimp would choose to put her baby in harm's way so that she doesn't have to alter her schedule or feel any pain. These women definitely don't get any respect from me."12 Here again, non-normative choices concerning birth are taken to indicate a global deficiency of maternal love and competence.

Part of what interests me about comments like these is the complete vagueness concerning what sorts of gains and harms are at stake. What exactly would Britney gain by attempting a vaginal birth, and exactly how are mothers who elect c-sections putting their babies "in harm's way"? Of course, this is a complex scientific question, and there is plenty of ongoing research aimed at pinning down the exact advantages and disadvantages for mothers and babies of different modes of delivery. What we do know is that, in comparison with a host of other mundane activities, and in comparison to all previous moments in history, all of the standard options for birth in developed nations (cesarean sections, vaginal births after cesarean, home births, water births) are extremely safe for mother and baby alike. Britney surely takes fewer chances with her baby by scheduling a c-section than does a mother who chooses a preschool that is a car ride rather than a walk away from her home.13

In fact, whether we cast cesarean sections or vaginal births as the risky, selfish option varies in accordance with context, not in accordance with the actual risks involved. Not only have some (mostly indigent) women who have resisted medically recommended cesarean sections occasionally been served with court orders (or in the case of Melissa Rowland in Salt Lake City in 2004, with homicide charges), but even women who wish to attempt an elective vaginal birth after a previous cesarean section are increasingly faced with draconian hospital restrictions (Schneider 2005; Grady 2004) and the same charges of selfishness and risk-taking that their peers who seek elective cesarean sections face. The standard justification for preventing women from attempting vaginal births after a cesarean is based on the risk of catastrophic outcomes due to uterine rupture. Not only is the risk of uterine rupture tiny, but—ironically—this risk turns out to be roughly equivalent to the risk of uterine rupture during primary vaginal delivery (Smith et al. 2002). Meanwhile, repeat cesareans are, of course, no safer than primary cesareans; indeed, quite the opposite. In other words, whether a scheduled cesarean or an attempted vaginal birth is the socially sanctioned, "properly maternal" choice depends on whether or not the mother had a previous cesarean or not. But the fact of a previous cesarean in no way reverses the relative risk of these two options. Therefore, here our social attitudes toward proper maternal choice are cut free of any basis in objective relative risks.14

But in any case, the real risks and their sizes do not seem to be of interest to the lay critics of mothers' birth choices, who appear quite content with hand-waving references to gains and harms. Especially because these critiques are not responsive to any specific, sizable risks, it is hard not to conclude that the main normative standards at play are ideological, not medical: Our cultural insistence that women make "proper" birth choices and maintain control over their birth narratives is not about minimizing real risks; rather, it supports our desire to measure mothering in terms of women's personal choices and of self-discipline exercised during signal moments. What is at stake is not the health of babies but an image of proper motherhood, combined with the idea that birth should function as a symbolic spectacle of such motherhood.

We must remember that mothering is not defined by its first moments. Even the best bond between a mother and her twenty-minute-old baby is a meaningless shadow of a genuine mother–child bond of the sort that sustains good mothering.

You are what your child eats

Providing high-quality early nutrition to children and eating well during pregnancy are undeniably important components of good mothering. Children's nutritional status depends on eating habits that are established over time. However, our culture is replete with images of feeding moments that purportedly corrupt both children and mothers in some permanent way.

The logic of the single corrupting bite shows vividly in a recent article by Jodi Kantor in the New York Times entitled "Memo to Nanny: No Juice Boxes." Kantor writes, apparently without irony, "The current nutritional wisdom says that what children eat may set their tastes in place permanently. In this view, a hot dog is never just a single tube of meat, because it will lead to thousands of salty, processed, who-knows-what-filled lunches to come." Here the seemingly single hot dog is pictured as extending beyond itself, determining and encapsulating a lifetime of poor eating habits rather than remaining singular. By allowing a hot dog to slip into her child in a moment of weakness, a mother can pervert the child's tastes and eating practices forever, thereby undoing months or years of devotion to purchasing organic food, avoiding trans fats, and planning and preparing balanced meals for her child out of fresh ingredients.

Ultrasound tests and birth are idiosyncratic events, and I have argued that mothers are measured by their performance during these events. The logic of feeding is slightly different: one must feed one's child over and over again, and there is no discrete moment at which one can prove one's proper maternality through feeding. On the other hand, at any moment a mother may prove herself an improper mother through an act of feeding. Hence this is a test that one can never pass but is always at risk of failing. Kantor's article received hundreds of online comments immediately from mothers, many of them arguing in favor of more maternal surveillance and discipline and stricter eating rules. One mother commented, "This article is frightening. How can parents give such discretion to a babysitter?" Commentators described quitting their jobs rather than relying upon nannies and grandparents who couldn't be trusted to avoid hot dogs, refined flour, or products with traces of peanuts. One mother who admitted in her comments to owning at least one bottle of infant formula was immediately flamed by others.15

Indeed, one can fail the feeding test very early on. Many parenting guides suggest or claim outright that allowing her baby one single suck on an artificial nipple may well destroy a mother's chances for a successful breast-feeding relationship forever (and in turn, that a baby who is not breast-fed is at high risk for failure to bond with its mother, low IQ, and multiple behavioral and health problems).16 North American breast-feeding promotional materials consistently emphasize exclusive breast-feeding, as opposed to the more productive message that the more breast milk babies receive, the better. "Does one bottle of formula make that much difference? We wish we could say that it doesn't," states La Leche League, rather disingenuously, in their breast-feeding guide, "but we can't" (1997, 90). According to this guide, a single bottle of formula can trigger life-threatening allergies, and any contact with artificial nipples (bottles or pacifiers) can cause nipple confusion, wherein the baby is no longer willing or able to latch onto a breast. In fact, although it is true that a baby who is regularly fed from a bottle may reject the breast or lose the skill of latching onto it, there is no evidence for nipple confusion resulting from the occasional use of artificial nipples (cf. Fisher and Inch 1996 and Neifert, Lawrence, and Seacat 1995). A 1992 study found no difference in breast-feeding outcomes between newborn infants who were exclusively breast-fed and those who received one bottle daily (Cronenwett, Stukel, and Kearney 1992). The pervasive fear of instant nipple confusion among new mothers, cultivated by the medical establishment, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), among others, is itself indicative of the power of the logic of the single corrupting moment.17

Artificial nipples are portrayed as corrupting more than just an infant's feeding practices; their stain can infect mothering as a whole. In What to Expect: The First Year (the sequel to the ubiquitous and unforgiving queen of guidebooks, What to Expect When You're Expecting), we find out how, despite a mother's best intentions, that first offer of an artificial nipple can initiate a process that corrodes nearly all aspects of mothering:

Be aware that pacifier use easily slips into pacifier abuse. What starts out as the baby's crutch can easily become the mother's. There is the ever-present temptation to use the pacifier as a convenient substitute for the attention she herself should be providing to her child. The well-meaning mother who offers the pacifier . . . may soon find herself popping in a pacifier the moment [her baby] becomes fussy, instead of trying to determine the reason for the fussing or if there may be other ways of placating him. She may use it to get the baby off to sleep instead of reading him a story, to ensure quiet while she's on the phone instead of picking him up and consoling him while she's chatting, to buy his silence while she's picking out a pair of new shoes instead of involving him in the interaction. The result is often a baby who can only be happy with something in his mouth, and who is unable to comfort himself, entertain himself, or get himself to sleep. (Murkoff, Hathaway, and Eisenberg 2003, 117)

After her initial offer of the pacifier, the mother in this passage is swept passively down a current of bad mothering over which she has little or no control; led into temptation, she soon finds herself substituting the pacifier for her own activities of mothering. She replaces proper mothering activities with markedly gendered, trivial tasks: chatting on the phone and shoe shopping. Although the first suck may be both tempting and fleeting, its consequence is an orally fixated, emotionally crippled child.18 

The idea that each feeding moment presents a pivotal choice between risk and maternal responsibility extends backwards into pregnancy. What to Expect When You're Expecting warns, "Every bite counts: Before you close your mouth on a forkful of food, consider, 'Is this the best bite I can give my baby?' If it will benefit your baby, chew away. If it'll only benefit your sweet tooth or appease your appetite, put your fork down" (Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway 2002, 80). This passage—which regularly incurs the wrath of pregnant women in chat rooms and on bulletin boards—demands that mothers discipline their eating with literally every bite of food, avoiding the corrupting, selfish bite that is not baby-directed. Here, eating simply because one is hungry ("to appease your appetite") is akin to maternal betrayal.

The risks and benefits that arise from mothers' ongoing lifestyle, economic security, and access to high-quality foods far outweigh the risks and benefits that attach to any single forkful or suck. Our focus on the importance of feeding moments rather than on long-term eating patterns betrays our entrapment within an ideological picture of normative maternal performance, rather than a reasonable concern with children's well-being.

The effects of measuring mothering in moments

I have described three maternal activities—undergoing a routine ultrasound, giving birth, and feeding one's baby (or fetus or child)—that I have argued serve as cultural tests during which women's maternal bona fides are measured. In each case, medical institutions, the media, and mothers themselves collude in assessing how mothers perform during heavily, normatively-regulated signal moments. The rhetoric surrounding these moments suggests, on the one hand, that they will determine the success of the future mothering narrative (whether the mother will bond properly with her baby; whether the baby will develop a lifetime of secure relationships and healthy eating habits) and on the other hand, that they reveal the truth about a woman's fitness to mother (whether she is sufficiently engaged, self-sacrificing, risk-adverse, disciplined, etc.).

Our cultural images of proper maternal behavior during these tests are not politically neutral. Rather, a woman's ability to perform "properly" with respect to prenatal care, birth, and feeding are marked by socioeconomic status and ethnic identity. Consider:

Lisa Mitchell found that immigrant women in Canada were, not surprisingly, less likely to follow the script during their ultrasounds. Not having been trained on the contingent cultural rituals surrounding the event, often coming from countries where there is no routine screening during healthy pregnancy, or from countries where the screening is treated as a clinical rather than a social event, they were less inclined to personify the image on the screen, bring along their spouses, expect keepsake photos, and so forth. Accordingly, ultrasound technicians tended to offer these women less medical information than their counterparts who followed ultrasound etiquette, and the technicians socialized less with these fetal images. Later, they reported that the women seemed insufficiently concerned with and excited about their babies (Mitchell 2001, 185).

An unmedicated vaginal birth that goes according to a predetermined birth plan is taken as the maternal gold standard, I argued. But a woman's chances of having such a birth depend heavily upon her own health, her access to high-quality, continuous health care with a provider who is familiar with her preferences, her ability to articulate her wishes in a way that health professionals will understand, her mastery of English (in an Anglophone hospital or birth center), her ability to hire an advocate such as a doula or midwife, and her level of support from family members and others who can speak for her during the birth. The ability to insist that a birth plan be respected by the hospital staff, even when medically possible, normally requires a high degree of education, confidence, and perceived social authority. Every one of these factors varies by socioeconomic position. Women who manage to have a "natural" birth may feel that they are somehow communing with their mythical pre-industrial sisters, but in fact, they normally draw heavily upon their social privilege and their immediate access to state-of the art technological interventions in enacting their birth narratives.

Poor women have less access to high-quality, diverse foods, and less time to prepare meals for themselves and their children. Poor and minority women have lower rates of breast-feeding than financially secure white women.19 We know that this is not because of differences in women's knowledge of the benefits of breast-feeding (Guttman and Zimmerman 2000). Among other determining factors, poor and minority women are less likely to have jobs that provide enough maternity leave to establish breast-feeding or private spaces in which to nurse. They are more likely to be single parents and to work long hours.20

Thus to the extent that we take "proper" maternal performance during these key moments as a measure of mothering as a whole, we will re-inscribe social privilege. We will read a deficient maternal character into the bodies and actions of underprivileged and socially marginalized women, whereas privileged women with socially normative home and work lives will tend to serve as our models of proper maternal character. Yet it is likely that women pass these mothering tests less by dint of their inherently maternal character and their responsible commitment to their children than because they have the right kind of education, financial resources, health insurance plans, family structure, and jobs.

Our focus on how mothers perform at signal moments is part of a larger cultural sensibility: in North America and Britain, at least, public ethical discourse tends to focus heavily on personal responsibility and will-power as it is displayed (or fails to be displayed) at discrete choice-points, rather than on the structural conditions that enable or undermine people's ability to make good choices over the long term. It is difficult to turn public attention to the environmental, economic, and social conditions that can make various choices and behaviors difficult or easy; instead we tend to employ a conceptual repertoire—made up of notions such as character, will-power, choice, and responsibility—that inherently isolates individuals as ethical agents and occludes such contextual determinants.

This individualist logic encourages policies and initiatives that focus on influencing the choices that mothers make at particular moments, rather than on creating structural conditions that foster extended narratives of healthy mothering. For example, the public service announcements for the United States Department of Health and Human Services breast-feeding campaign, "Babies were born to be breast-fed," launched in 2005, show pregnant women engaging in absurdly risky one-time activities such as log-rolling and bull-riding, followed by the text, "You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born. Why start after? Breast-feed exclusively for six months."21 Here, any single departure from exclusive breast-feeding is equated with a dramatically risky, self-indulgent choice. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that this campaign focuses entirely on mothers' choices, using the rhetoric of personal responsibility and blame, without any attempt to advocate for tolerance for breast-feeding among employers, family members, or members of the public, or for structural changes in workplace rules, maternity leave, or urban planning that would make such exclusive breast-feeding viable for more women (Kukla 2006).

Consider also our emphasis on zero-tolerance when it comes to alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Women are repeatedly told that that there is "no proven safe level" of alcohol consumption during pregnancy; indeed, in the United States, the official position of the Surgeon General is that any alcohol consumption during pregnancy is unacceptable, and a growing number of other countries are adopting similar positions.22 Although extensive research has failed to turn up any evidence of negative effects on fetuses from women's light to moderate drinking as part of a healthy lifestyle,23 the idea that a single drink both reveals maternal irresponsibility and can have a lifelong corrupting influence is pervasive. In a public service announcement produced by the Ad Council,24 a hip young black woman tells her audience, "If you drink alcohol while you're pregnant, you may be ruining your baby's chances of ever having a normal life!"25 In figure 2, a headless pregnant belly appears to be gearing up to suck back a giant glass of wine directly into the womb. The article header employs the language of risk and blame ("women . . . put their babies at risk"), while reinforcing the scientifically inaccurate idea that a single drink can undermine an entire mothering narrative (one drink can "last a lifetime").

Figure 2. From Nurse Week, April 11, 2005

Our determination to prevent women from ever drinking during pregnancy, and our demonization of those who do, has come at the cost of educating pregnant women about the difference between healthy and abusive relationships to alcohol and the difference between theoretically and substantially risky behaviors. The public health emphasis upon complete avoidance of alcohol has not been accompanied by substance abuse programs for pregnant women. The implicit assumption would appear to be that good mothers will follow the no-safe-level, zero-tolerance rule, whereas women who violate this rule already have proven themselves to be bad mothers who are beyond saving. Epidemiologically speaking, poverty, social stress, and smoking are much bigger risk factors for having a baby with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome than is occasional drinking (Armstrong 2003), but our focus on moments of maternal choice occludes these social determinants. Scare tactics underscored by the language of choice, maternal character, and personal responsibility pointlessly convince many women who are not at risk for having babies with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to forgo the pleasure of an occasional glass of wine, while surely inducing little other than guilt in alcoholic women whose babies are at serious risk.

As a culture, then, we privilege early, discrete moments of choice as the measures of mothers, as opposed to ongoing patterns and developing relationships—as if we can bond in a moment, destroy or secure our child's chances at well-being in a moment, or fail at mothering in a moment. And yet, while there is always the possibility that a poor decision will turn out to have tragic consequences (such as Kate and Gerry McCann's much-discussed decision to leave three toddlers alone in a hotel room while they went out for dinner—a decision that has been universally cast by the media as Kate's rather than the couple's), single events rarely play a large role in determining how a child will turn out, or how healthy and successful a mothering narrative will be. My suggestion is that we need to view mothering as a work in progress until the very end. When it comes to health promotion and policy, we should shift our attention away from mothers' performances at key moments, and onto providing families with the systematic support that would enable women to engage in ongoing narratives of good mothering. Such support would include food and job security; decent maternity leave; full access to family planning; a cleaner environment; universal access to decent education and health care; workplaces and labor laws that are structured around the assumption that many workers will have substantial parental commitments, including commitments to breast-feeding and to fathering; accessible interventions for women struggling with addiction, mental illness, or other social stresses; and a safe, competent, junk-food-free public school system for all children.

If we take seriously the idea that reproduction is typically a decades-long social and material labor of love, and never merely a biological event involving eggs, sperm, and wombs; then these are all reproductive rights, and the bioethical consideration of their contours and limits is reproductive ethics. Hence the reorientation of attention that I have been urging would dramatically change the scope and methods of reproductive ethics. In the first instance, reproductive ethics would no longer concern particular medical choices made before conception and during pregnancy. Its primary subject matter would be larger questions of social, economic, and environmental justice, and inevitably—rather than just as an afterthought—gender equity. Contemporary reproductive ethics generally treats mothers as fleeting sources of genetic material and gestational environments, whose ethical role in reproduction is summed up by and confined to a handful of choices made at or before the start of our children's lives. As feminists, we must insist that bioethicists take mothers to be whole, socially situated people with entire life narratives, typically including several decades of mothering.

Notes

Early versions of this paper were presented at the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities annual meeting in Denver, Colorado in October 2006 and as a keynote address at the "Monitoring Parents: Childrearing in the Age of Intensive Parenting" conference at the University of Kent in June, 2007. For wonderful support and helpful conversations, I am grateful to Sonya Charles, Colleen Fulton, Ellie Lee, Meredith Michaels, Tricia Shivas, an anonymous reviewer, and especially the members of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Risk Research Group: Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Lisa Harris, Miriam Kuppermann, Margaret Little, Anne Drapkin Lyerly, and Lisa Mitchell. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

As an anonymous referee rightly pointed out, I do not make any serious attempt to define good or healthy mothering in this paper. Surely women can be better or worse mothers. However, my interest here is in gaining critical distance from (what I see as) one problematic, hegemonic way of measuring mothering, rather than with forging and defending a specific alternative picture of the ethics of mothering. Mothering is serious moral work, and hence we do need to consider what it takes to mother well; hopefully, however, we can transcend the idea that mothering can be measured in any uniform way.

I elaborate and defend the claim that mothers play such a crucial role in the health care system in Kukla 2006.

www.fetalmoments.com (accessed September 15, 2007).

"The One Where Rachel Tells…", first aired October 11, 2001.

I cannot, in any formal sense, provide empirical evidence that these attitudes are entrenched in our folk culture; it is often in the nature of folk attitudes not to be formally documented or articulated.

Several feminist scholars have pointed out how the language of failing and defective women's bodies pervades our discussions of birth. Cf. Harrison 1982; Davis-Floyd 1994; and Lyerly 2006.

This was the practice at Ottawa Civic Hospital, where I gave birth to my perfectly healthy son by cesarean section. I do not know how many hospitals do this, however it is easy to find pamphlets designed for this purpose online. See for instance www.birthrites. org/BookletIndex.html (accessed November 12, 2007). See www.plus-size-pregnancy.org/CSANDVBAC/csemotionalrecov.htm#References (accessed November 12, 2007) for a large clearinghouse of literature designed to aid emotional recovery after cesarean section.

"Ask Amy," August 29, 2007, accessed at www.chicagotribune.com. A recent New York Times article, "The End of Childbirth 101?", underscores the concern about women who do not take childbirth classes expressed by this letter-writer, worrying that such women will not be able to "reap the dividends of having had a teacher who explained each possible intervention."

www.kidshealth.org.

Bowlby's program spawned various sympathetic scientific studies (e.g., Kennel, Trause, and Klaus 1975), as well as a scientific backlash attempting to debunk him (including Lozoff 1983).

www.babycenter.com. Posted September 28, 2006.

I could not possibly document or compare all the possible risks of routine driving and of being born by scheduled cesarean section. But for purposes of illustration, consider that according to the National Center for Statistics, the 2003 rate of automobile accident-related fatalities in the United States was 8.34/1000 population, whereas the rate of perinatal death associated with scheduled cesarean sections in the United States is 1.3/1000 population (Landon et al. 2004).

The argument of this paragraph, differently worded, appeared previously in Lyerly et al. 2007.

News.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/memo-to-nanny-no-juice-boxes.

Cf., e.g., La Leche 1997 and Tamaro 1998, as well as the standard lactation nursing textbook, Lawrence 1994, which recommends giving new mothers this advice.

Cf., e.g., American Academy of Family Physicians 2000. UNICEF and the WHO jointly sponsor the Baby Friendly Hospitals Initiative, which explicitly promotes the total avoidance of artificial nipples in order to prevent nipple confusion. Cf. www.babyfriendlyusa.org (accessed November 13, 2007).

In Kukla 2005, Chapter 5, I document this logic of the corrupting suck, as it appears in popular media, guide books, and scientific journal articles, in quite a bit of detail.

www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5512a3.htm, accessed November 13, 2007.

For detailed discussions of why poor and minority women breast-feed at lower rates, cf. Blum 2000, and Kukla 2006.

PSAs available at www.4women.gov/breastfeeding/index.cfm?page= adcouncil.

Australia and New Zealand are in the process of implementing laws that would require zero-tolerance labels similar to those used in the United States (www.amavic.com.au, accessed November13, 2007), and New Zealand has recently strengthened its Ministry of Health guidelines, which have gone from recommending avoidance of alcohol during pregnancy to urging "total abstinence" during pregnancy (www.otago.ac.nz/news/news/2006/13-07-06_press_release.html, accessed November 13, 2007). Some Canadian provinces require warnings stating that pregnant women should avoid all alcohol to be posted in licensed establishments. In May 2007, the government of Britain and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists "strengthened" their warnings concerning alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Whereas the former official British recommendation was that pregnant women limit their consumption to one to two drinks per week, the new guidelines advise that women should "stop drinking altogether" during pregnancy (Bennett 2007).

For an exhaustive review of the evidence, cf. Armstrong 2003.

Inventors of McGruff the Crime Dog, Smokey the Bear, and the "Babies were Born to be Breastfed" campaign, among other social marketing materials.

PSA available at www.nofas.org/MediaFiles/PSA/PSA.wmv.

References

American Academy of Family Physicians. 2000. Promoting and supporting breast-feeding. American Family Physician 61(7). Available at www.aafp.org/afp/ 20000401/2093. html. Accessed November 13, 2007.

Aristotle. 1941. Nicomachean ethics. Trans. W. D. Ross. In The basic works of Aristotle. Ed. R. McKeon. New York: Random House.

Armstrong, E. M. 2003. Conceiving risk, bearing responsibility: Fetal alcohol syndrome and the diagnosis of moral disorder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bennett, R. 2007. Zero—The new alcohol limit in pregnancy. The Times. May 25.

Blum, L. 2000. At the breast: Ideologies of breastfeeding and motherhood in the contemporary United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bowlby, John. 1969 and 1983. Attachment. New York: Basic Books

———. 1988. A secure base: Parent–child attachment and healthy human development. New York: Basic Books.

Cronenwett, L., T. Stukel, and M. Kearney. 1992. Single daily bottle use in the early weeks post-partum and breastfeeding outcomes. Pediatrics 63: 760.

Davis-Floyd, Robbie. 1994. The technocratic model of birth. In Feminist theory and the study of folklore. Eds. S. Hollis, L. Pershing, and M. J. Young. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

The End of Childbirth 101? 2007. New York Times. November 12. Well.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2007/11/12/the-end-of-childbirth-101. Accessed November 13, 2007.

Fisher, C. and S. Inch. 1996. Nipple Confusion—Who is Confused? Journal of Pediatrics 129(1):174–5.

Fralic, Shelley. 2005. Too posh to push moms set bad example for society. Vancouver Sun. September 29.

Grady, D. 2004. Trying to avoid a second cesarean: Many women find choice isn't theirs. New York Times. November 29, A1.

Guttman, N. and D. R. Zimmerman. 2000. Low-income mothers' views on breastfeeding. Social Science and Medicine 50:1457–73.

Harrison, Michelle. 1982. A woman in residence. New York: Penguin.

Jordan, Brigitte. 1992. Birth in four cultures. 2nd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Kantor, Jodi. 2006. Memo to nanny: No juice boxes. New York Times. September 28. www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/fashion/28nanny.html. Accessed November 20, 2007.

Kennel, J. H., M. A. Trause, and M. H. Klaus. 1975. Evidence for a sensitive period in the human mother. Ciba Foundation Symposium 33:87–101.

Kukla, Rebecca. 2005. Mass hysteria: Medicine, culture, and mothers' bodies. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

———. 2006. Ethics and ideology in breastfeeding advocacy campaigns. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21(1): 157–80.

La Leche League International. 1997. The womanly art of breastfeeding. 6th ed. New York: Plume Books.

Landon, M. B., et al. 2004. Maternal and perinatal outcomes associated with a trial of labor after prior cesarean delivery. New England Journal of Medicine 351: 2581–89.

Lapaire, O., J. Adler, R. Peukert, W. Holzgrave, and S. Tercanli. 2007. Two- versus three-dimensional ultrasound in the second and third trimester of pregnancy: Impact on recognition and maternal-fetal bonding. A prospective pilot study. Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics 276(5): 475–79.

Lawrence, R. 1994. Breastfeeding: A guide for the medical profession. 4th ed. New York: Mosby Inc.

Lozoff, B. 1983. Birth and 'bonding' in non-industrial societies. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 25(5): 595–600.

Lyerly, Anne Drapkin. 2006. Shame, gender, birth. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21(1):101–18.

Lyerly, A. D., L. M. Mitchell, E. M. Armstrong, L. Harris, R. Kukla, M. Kuppermann, and M. Little. 2007. Risks, values, and decision making surrounding pregnancy. Obstetrics and Gynecology 109(4): 979–84.

Mitchell, L. 2001. Baby's first picture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Mitchell, L. and E. Georges. 1997. Cross-cultural cyborgs: Greek and Canadian women's discourses on fetal ultrasound. Feminist Studies 23(2): 373–401.

Murkoff, H., A. Eisenberg, and S. Hathaway. 2002. What to expect when you're expecting. 3rd ed. New York: Workman Publishing

Murkoff, H., S. Hathaway, and A. Eisenberg. 2003. What to expect the first year. 2nd ed.New York: Workman Publishing.

Neifert, M., R. Lawrence, and J. Seacat. 1995. Nipple Confusion: Towards a formal definition. Journal of Pediatrics 126(6): 125–29.

Schneider, M. E. 2005. Insurers set criteria for VBAC coverage. OB GYN News. February 1.

Sears, William and Martha Sears. 1993. The baby book. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Sedgmen, B., C. McMahon, D. Cairns, R.J. Benzie, and RL. Woodfield. 2006. The impact of two-dimensional versus three-dimensional ultrasound exposure on maternal-fetal attachment and maternal health behavior during pregnancy. Ultrasound obstetrics and gynecology 27(3): 243–44.

Slater, Lauren. 2004. When love doesn't come easily. Self magazine. April.

Smith, G. C., J.P. Pell, A.D. Cameron, and R. Dobbie. 2002. Risk of perinatal death associated with labor after previous cesarean delivery in uncomplicated term pregnancies. JAMA 287: 2684–90.

Tamaro, J. 1998. So that's what they're for! Breastfeeding basics. Avon, MA: Adams Media.

Weir, L. 1998. Pregnancy ultrasound in maternal discourse. In Vital signs: Feminist reconfigurations of the bio/logical body. Ed. M. Shildrick. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Yaqub, Reshma Memon. 2005. Hard labor. Washington Post Magazine. April 10.

#motherhood #mothering #judgment #childrearing #conformity #healthcare #cultural expectations #social stigma #natural childbirth #pregnancy #childbirth

[pets60trowel-blog]

7 Frequent Web-site Mistakes Unveiled By Written content Audits

A benefit of operating for a company would be the amount of sites we be capable to review. A large number of purchasers who enroll in ongoing Search engine optimisation and/or articles options will get a information audit. Just like a technological Miami SEO Expert audit, one more outcomes of the information audit really should create the strategies and main concerns in the following stages of written content purpose. With no audit, you can' to create an efficient strategy as you very first need to learn what kinds of articles you' ve acquired, what material you' lso are missing, and what information you' ve acquired too much of.

Although there are numerous posts around on how to perform a content audit (and that i really motivate you to look at these material: Ways to Complete a Articles Audit and ), I am going to end up being centering on what my frequent benefits have been from not too long ago carrying out 15 content material audits. My aim could be to provide you with a greater portion of a platform on the way you can communicate with clients regarding selected content or, if you are the consumer, techniques for you to enhance your web-site content material to maintain shoppers on the site lengthier and, ultimately, convert.

Miscalculation Top: Simply no distinct cell phone calls-to-motion

I have got yet to finish a content analysis where creating more clear calls-to-action wasn' t a emphasis. The aim of a webpage should be clear for any guest (or content material auditor). What is it that you want visitors who lands for this web page to carry out following? Many of our buyers aren't e-trade, consequently it may feel considerably less noticeable; nonetheless , supposing you need anyone to continue to your web site, what' s subsequent?

Even if answer is typically " I desire them to visit a store, " cause it to easier for them. Placed in a prominent " Go to Our Store" option. If it' s an effortless blogging site page, what are the upcoming blog site content articles anyone must study based on anything they just read through? Or are you currently suffering from a suitable e-arrange you' d for instance these to acquire? You obtained the crooks to the finish of your respective blog post - don' to give up the visitor simply because they aren' huge t certainly what to do subsequent!

Oversight #2: Not enough content for any phases from the purchaser quest

Something we sometimes do each time carrying out material audits is watch exactly where during the sales funnel just about every web site is directed (attention, thinking, get, or retention). Everything we at times locate is usually that buyers generally have the disproportionate level of information geared towards creating a invest in, yet not sufficient designed for attention, thing to consider, and retention. This particular isn' t always the case, in particular if they have your blog or solutions centre; nonetheless , the concern additionally maintenance stages tend to be overlooked. When the client cycle will likely be distinct for any system, it' s continue to necessary to have articles that addresses each and every period, however limited the cycle is.

Preservation is really a big issue very! It truly is significantly more cost-useful and simpler to upsell and go across-promote recent buyers than get totally new. Your prospects can also be much less cost-vulnerable simply because they know your product is worth this. You certainly wish to give content with this target audience very to keep them associated with the logo and locate new works by using on your merchandise. Furthermore, you' ve currently received their contact information and facts, so providing information directly to them is a lot easier when compared to a likelihood.

Here are some illustrations of material for each stage:

Attention: Blog articles (explainers, how-tos, and so forth), e-ebooks, instructive online seminars, infographics

Factor: Product side by side comparisons, instance studies, motion pictures

Get: Product or service pages, free trial offers, demos, coupons

Preservation: Articles or content (system applications, testimonials, and many more), newsletters, social media content material

Slip-up #3: Customer reviews aren' t useful to their own personal 100 % possible

There are lots of webpages dedicated exclusively to testimonials in existence over the Interwebs. It' t uncomfortable. Who trusts a recommendations site more than reviews on 3 rd-event web sites like Yelp, Google The Business Enterprise, or Tripadvisor? None of us. Having said that, there exists a spot for recommendations. It' s not using a customer feedback web site.

The easiest method to work with a suggestions is always to match it with the suitable backup. If it' s the recommendation regarding how easy and speedy a customer acquired their product or service, use which will at a transport webpage. If it' s a recommendation about how exactly a product or service sorted out problems that they had, use it following that solution website page. This would increase your backup and aid to relieve just about any anxieties a probable purchaser provides with their conclusion to acquire.

Testimonials can also help you improve your close by importance in search. When you have a storefront which is concentrating on particular towns, request for the customer' s area and state any time you obtain customer feedback. Then, contain appropriate testimonies with their city and also point out on the appropriate location web page(s). Even when your store is Lakewood, Colorado, gathering reviews from consumers who reside in Denver and such as them on the position site can help both equally search engine listings and end users be aware that Denver colorado persons retail store there.

Blunder #4: Not producing content regionally suitable (if it issues)

If area issues in your company, you should not simply use recommendations to further improve the local value, however your written content typically. Take the automobile dealership business, one example is. There are far more than 16, 000 automobile car dealerships in the united states plus they all (presumably) have internet websites. Many of them have really very similar material as they are all trying to sell precisely the same or similar kinds of automobiles.

The most beneficial car dealership websites, nonetheless , are creating written content that matters for their nearby towns. Individuals who live in Denver colorado, in particular , treasure just what most effective automobiles are generally for driving a vehicle inside the mountains, when individuals the Los Angeles vicinity may choose to know which autos obtain the finest road gasoline consumption. Owning your revenue group give thought to common queries they get asked for and responding to them inside your content articles can greatly assist toward strengthening nearby significance and earning faithful clients.

Mistake #5: Definitely not referring to charges

Several companies, B2B corporations basically, generally tend not to wish to listing price on his or her web-site. It' s easy to undestand, specifically when the particular genuine factor to " the amount of managed your services charge? " is " it depends. " The problem with shying faraway from costs completely, despite the fact that, would be the fact folks are searching for pricing information and facts. It' s a huge skipped option never to have any content material associated with prices, also it annoys prospective customers who would as an alternative know your cost you array before offering you a phone call or posting an application for follow up.

It' s mutually good for have price ranges information and facts (or otherwise information on how someone determine rates) on your own web site considering the fact that it' ll help are eligible home business business leads. When a prospect realizes your expense selection and so they continue to get to out to learn more, they will be a better lead than someone who is reaching out to get costs facts. This saves the sales organization the problem of losing their time with bad prospects.

Having pricing details on your web page can also help generate confidence along with the prospective client. When you aren' t translucent concerning your price ranges, it seems as you fee as much as you may get aside with. The better facts you offer, the greater number of trustworthy your corporation appearance. In case all your opposition are frequently concealing their charges, you' lso are the first just one they' ll very likely communicate with.

Miscalculation #6: Finding suddenly lost in vocabulary

There are a lot of terrific organizations to choose from executing great work. And more often in comparison to not, their website will not mirror this and also it could actually. It isn' money t rare for the people tasked with creating net replicate to always be fairly close to to your item. What from time to time occurs is lingo and technological dialect dominates, along with the good reason why a buyer need to care and attention are certain to get missing. In terms of outlining a product or service and even services, Joel Klettke said it biggest at MozCon 2017 . An on-line site will include:

What is the item and why should the prospect cherish it?

How can this product have the prospect' t everyday life less difficult/greater?

What' s the next thing? (CTA)

It' s also critical to consist of online business success, true make full use of conditions, and buyer successes together with the merchandise with your web site also. This unique establishes far more believe in and facilitates your assertions regarding your things. This will confer with your customers in a manner that vocabulary simply just will not likely.

Oversight #7: Website page duplication thru migration to HTTPS

With increased sites having an SSL official document and moving to HTTPS, it' s more significant than ever before to make sure you have 301 redirects set up from your HTTP release for the HTTPS edition to counteract unintentional duplication of your own full web site. Duplicate content can impression search engine ranking positions as search engines like yahoo find it difficult to choose which edition of the web site is a bit more strongly related to a specific research query. We' ve already been viewing quite a few web sites with an full replicated website or some distant internet pages that didn' t get hold of redirects in position inside their migrations. All of us also hold viewing web-sites which happen to have www and low-www models linked to webpages without having 301 redirects very. Going typical crawls will assist you to keep on being together with this sort of repeat written content.

The following are a handful of excellent information to look into when conducting a great HTTPS migration:

Problem #8: Weak interior backlinking as well as web-site architectural mastery

How content is arranged on a web site can be just as essential as what are the written content is. Without correct corporation, customers may well struggle to surf an online site effectively and also search engines like yahoo have a tough time deciding which in turn pages are viewed as most vital. Ensuring that your most important pages of content are set up to be easy to find, by itemizing them inside your the navigation, as an example , is an excellent end user face and can guide these web pages accomplish far better.

Part of making crucial pages of content simple to find is by using inner connecting. Website content is normally made while on an ongoing time frame, and becoming intelligent about inside linking calls for taking the time to take a look holistically within the internet site and determining which pages and posts make use feel to backlink to and thru. I continue to keep experiencing weblog content material that is not going to website link to a major web page on the webpage. While you don' major t want merchandise to become the target of the blog site, it ought to be simple for an customer to obtain on the core webpages of your own website if they wish to do so. As you' re auditing a website, you' lmost all get pages that associate to one another that don' t url. Build information of these along the way so that you can much better link webpages within backup with your phone calls to measures.

Wrapping up

Those things i discover most fascinating about content material audits is just how subjective they may be. Determining why are information good or undesirable is greyish in ways that figuring out no matter whether a web site delivers, say, a canonical label, is simply not. As a result, We have discovered that what written content auditors focus most very much on are usually a reflection with the record of the individual engaging in the review. As well as the most frequent content errors I had handled on on this page reveal my heritage properly, which is a meld of and information advertising and marketing.

[topmixtrends]

AMERICAN MILLENNIALS now find themselves in a place of permanent precarity. Financial security and stability are vaporous dreams for a generation that has to contend with hypercompetitive job markets, suffocating student debts, stagnant wages, eroding worker protections, and rising incarcerations. In his well-researched and depressing book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris does the important work of putting the generational experience of American millennials within a historical context and critiquing the capitalist structures that put them in this precarious position. It is important work, because, as he writes, “soon ‘millennial’ won’t refer to those rascally kids with their phones, it will be a dominant character of a new America. And it probably won’t be pretty.”

Harris begins his labor analysis of American millennials by focusing on the work performed by children in the classroom. “Removing the pedagogical mask” that disguises the work done by children is imperative, because it is in kindergarten that kids are expected to begin the development of their human capital. As Harris puts it, “When students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work.” With more and more time expected to be spent on homework and other productive labor, kids are growing up without opportunities for unstructured, playful interactions with their peers, and are given little chance to develop their unmanaged sense of self.

Instead of an exploratory period of life where self-directed play is encouraged and mistakes are forgiven, childhood is now a time for “risk management” by parents and obsessive investment in one’s human capital. The natural result of this commodified and professionalized upbringing is alienation and anxiety. How else to react to a world “where every choice is an investment”? These jittery kids rack up extracurricular accomplishments and leadership roles in the hope of pleasing what Harris calls the “rating agencies for kids,” college admissions offices. And all the while, they are painfully aware that competition stiffens each year for the decreasing number of jobs paying above starvation wages.

To add to their burdens, for an increasing number of students, attending college entails taking on debts — at levels unheard of for previous generations. The affordable higher education enjoyed by the Baby Boomer generation has completely dissipated, and the cost of attending a four-year public college has increased by 280 percent between 1979 and 2014. The notion that college will lift hard-working, intelligent, and academically meritorious low-income students out of poverty is a myth. Thirty-eight percent of poor students “will remain in the bottom two deciles regardless of their educational accomplishment.” And the modern American university has distilled the exploitation of adjunct professors down to an art; increasingly, in college classrooms, poor adjuncts or graduate students teach poor undergraduate students. As Harvard professor Kevin Birmingham asserts in his speech “The Great Shame of Our Profession,” “Universities rely upon a revolving door of new Ph.D.s who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next years surplus doctorates.”

All this seems like a cruel trick to play on a generation. The education millennials are expected to attain is unaffordable, and reliable jobs are hard to find even if they go thousands of dollars into debt, on which it is almost impossible to default. The situation is oppressive, claustrophobic.

Harris continues his investigation into the generational experiences of American millennials by examining their precarious position in a polarized labor market where the “bad jobs are getting worse, good jobs are getting better, and the middle is disappearing.” Today, young people’s productivity is increasing while their wages stagnate and job security decreases. It was not always like this; worker productivity and worker compensation increased at comparable rates until they cleaved in the mid-1970s. For Americans, “nonsupervisory workers’ productivity tripled between 1972 and 2009, while real wages dipped.” This means that the surplus value sloughed off the top from workers has never been higher.

Harris argues that unpaid internships, where entry-level workers give away their labor for free in exchange for intangibles like “experience” and “networking,” actually “undermine the demand for entry-level workers across the board.” In fact, college students who work unpaid internships for class credit find themselves in the absurd position of paying money for the opportunity to work for free.

In addition to all the maladies described above, youth of color have to fight for survival against racist mass incarceration and a militarized police force that murders unarmed black men with no repercussions: “The US incarceration rate has quintupled since the 1970s, and it’s affecting young black men most of all and more disproportionally than ever.”

So what do we do about this?

Near the end of the book, Harris is suspicious of what he calls “Bop It Solutions” to the material precarity that may become, if it is not already, a permanent condition for every worker in our society. These “bop it” solutions, commonly put forth by the liberal commentariat, include “consumer politics, electoral engagement, charitable giving, and expressive protest.” His critique of consumerism was similar to what I expected. Companies “wrap themselves in the aura of values,” not to create a more equitable society, but to boost public relations and increase their bottom line. As Harris contends: “The market is not a magic desire-fulfilling machine we can reprogram to green the earth and level inequality. It is, rather, a vast system of exploitation in which workers are compelled to labor for their subsistence, and owners reap the profits.” Americans cannot purchase their way to a better future.

The real solution, in my opinion, is working-class solidarity. Building that might be difficult for a generation raised on the ethos of fierce independence and taking every possible opportunity for one’s own advancement, but I do not write it off as impossible. Inside every alienated worker exists a deep longing for a secure community where they can experience the forgotten joy of interdependence. I have little faith in the older generations to stop our spiral, and the burden of necessary revolutionary action will fall on our shoulders.

It seems naïve to speak of a dystopian future, when the present time feels like such an inescapable hellscape. If I may address myself to members of my generation, Harris’s book is a fine gift for the insufferable Baby Boomers in your life whose brains have been dulled by Fox News, or for the liberals who spout off about millennials with their narcissistic selfies and dangerous entitlement. It’s also great reading for when you have six missed calls from Sallie Mae, lock yourself in your room to wallow in existential despair, and want to deepen your understanding of your plight while disassociating.

¤

Reece Rogers is an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas. This summer they were a publishing fellow at the inaugural LARB/USC Publishing Workshop.

The post Permanent Precarity for American Millennials appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[alamkhatoon]

Thunder thighs. Mum tum. Tuckshop lady arms. Far from a biological predisposition, our modern tendency to criticise parts of our own body is instead an ugly by-product of a media-saturated world. Something that the October 2018 cover models and founders of body-love movement, AnyBODY, are on a mission to change.

West-Aussie models and body confidence activists Georgia Gibbs and Kate Wasley sat down with us to talk the impact of social media, health at any size and beauty with no boundaries. Because – in the words of WH&F – it’s not a look, it’s a lifestyle. Katelyn Swallow and David Goding tell their story.

  On the 23rd of January 2017, 22-year-old Aussie model Georgia Gibbs posted an innocent Instagram photo of herself and fellow model and friend Kate Wasley, 23, posed in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A few minutes later, the image was bombarded with negative comments about their differing body sizes, along with accusations of image tampering.

“People were calling me anorexic and Kate fat, and assuming I had Photoshopped my friend bigger to make me look ‘better’. It was really upsetting for us both and so against everything we believe in,” says Gibbs, who started modelling at the age of 16 in her home city of Perth.

“And so our brand, AnyBODY, was born shortly after.”

Launched on the 8th of March 2017 – appropriately, International Women’s Day – the @any.body_co Instagram account had over 5000 followers by close of business day one, and clocked over 20,000 followers after the first 10 days. Today, more than 206,000 follow Gibbs and Wasley, who post professional images of themselves, selfies of women with varied body shapes, inspirational quotes about self-love, and healthy living and beauty tips. AnyBODY has also provided the girls with a host of dual modelling contracts for big brands such as Cotton On Body and Cooper Street.

Wasley attributes the brand’s rapid success to a public and industry that craved body diversity – and a marketable icon to represent it.

“I can’t believe how fast AnyBODY blew up! Although [Georgia] and I are really only two people of different sizes, I truly believe that incorporating a range of sizes, races and genders in advertising and across social media will help thousands of women worldwide when it comes to feeling comfortable in their own skin,” says Wasley, who began her modeling career in 2015 after being discovered by a local model search.

“We decided to preach to people that healthy can come in a range of sizes. Because of the way social media is these days, I think a lot of women lose perspective on what body diversity is. I think a lot of people get sucked into believing that you should look a certain way, be a certain size, and have no cellulite or stretch marks. It’s unrealistic and we want that to change.”

The media’s negative influence on people’s – particularly women’s – body image isn’t a recent concern. According to psychotherapist Natajsa Wagner, media influence can be traced back to illustrations from the 1930s that depicted women with curves, while the ’40s and ’50s saw the female bust and glutes become the focus.

“Mattel created the Barbie doll with unachievable and disproportionate body parts, and in 1966, in the environment of an emerging super-media, we had the world’s first supermodel in Twiggy. She was a sharp contrast to Marilyn Monroe, and over time we learnt that thin was the new ‘ideal’ body image. So, although women come in all shapes and sizes, the overarching truth is that only one type of body is [portrayed as] ‘ideal’,” says Wagner.

By the age of 17, women have experienced a quarter of a million beauty- and body-oriented advertisements, and continue to be exposed to an average of 400 to 600 depictions of ‘beauty’ every day. The emergence of the smartphone and social media platforms puts these images in our pockets, and the way we engage with social media makes these often digitally altered and filtered depictions seem all the more ‘real’. According to research by Trilogy, six out of 10 women believe that people expect online photos to have been retouched or have a filter applied, yet 61 per cent of Australian women do not see the use of a filter as a form of retouching. Additionally, one 2014 study published in Body Image found a direct correlation between poor self-image and the number of hours spent trawling Facebook, due to body comparisons with peers and celebrities alike.

Dr John Demartini, author of The Gratitude Effect, believes our tendency to compare and judge our own body based on individuals who we deem more ‘attractive’ is the primary cause of negative self-perception. “In today’s social media-obsessed world, many people feel pressured to pursue a physical, one-sided, false perfection that is simply unattainable,” he says.

In other words, it’s not a biologically determined position to think of our body negatively; rather, our body image is influenced by a range of outside factors, fuelled by a visually obsessed (and self-obsessed) society. For Wasley, this tendency to compare herself to others led to a host of mental and physical issues in her younger – and leaner – years. While now sitting happily at a comfortable size 16, at her thinnest (size 10/12) she was mentally exhausted.

“For me, my biggest barriers [to a positive body image] were comparing myself to others, whether that be my friends or ‘fitspo’ girls I followed on social media. I had such an unrealistic idea of what I should look like and that resulted in not feeling good enough or worthy of love,” she says.

“I stopped going out with friends because I had such bad anxiety about food and alcohol. I didn’t want to be seen as the ‘fat’ friend – although, looking back now, I was very fit and toned. It’s amazing how you see yourself when you feel insecure; my view of my own body was totally warped. If I can help even one person work their way out of that mindset, I’ll feel accomplished.”

Gibbs expresses a similar memory of juvenile body dysmorphia.

“I remember being 16 and being unsure of who I was, being unhappy with how I looked and spending so much time comparing myself to other people. It really ruined my ability to love myself for all my other talents outside of physical appearance. Barriers to my own self-love definitely came from setting unachievable goals – such as wanting to look like a celebrity who was the complete opposite to me, therefore setting myself up to fail – and comparing myself to others on social media,” she says.

An extension of the same debate is the complex interplay of health, genetics and lifestyle on how the body appears – especially considering Australia’s worsening obesity epidemic, not to mention the ever-increasing occurrence of eating disorders. Gibbs’ mother was a personal trainer and her father a CrossFit instructor, so healthy food and exercise were integrated into her life from an early age – but both were seen as tools for optimal performance rather than to create a particular body shape. Early in her modelling career, however, Gibbs’ naturally curvaceous silhouette and muscular lower body were often criticised by an industry set on slim.

“I’m predisposed to having a small waist, bigger quads and broad shoulders. But through training, these features are definitely exaggerated and other areas built on and changed too,” says Gibbs.

“I’ve always had to overcome hurdles about my appearance. But over the last few years – as I’ve built a brand around myself of wellness and self-acceptance – it’s been amazing to see clients accept me for who I am and now embrace the ‘love AnyBODY’ message.”

Wasley, on the other hand, comes from a paternal line of tall and built physiques, and first became conscious of her health at age 17.

“I was never self-conscious [growing up]. I knew I was on the bigger side, but I honestly didn’t have a problem with it until I started to compare myself to other girls. Maybe it was about the same time I became interested in boys…who knows. But I remember not having a clue where to start,” she says.

“I feel like I’ve finally reached a place of contentment and balance, which I’m truly grateful for! I eat healthy and exercise, and I’m a size 16, and I feel if I were to stop [exercising and eating well] completely, I’d maybe sit at a size 16/18 naturally – but my body would look different, if that makes sense.”

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” – a sentiment the AnyBODY team echo. Gibbs and Wasley encourage women to see good health as encompassing the physical, the mental and the spiritual. It’s about balance, the ability to move freely and think clearly, and it’s highly individual.

“Health is so much more than your physical fitness,” says Wasley. “To an extent, I don’t believe you can judge how healthy a person is based on their weight and physical being. For example, when I was at my thinnest, people were asking me left right and centre for fitness advice; I suddenly became the ‘fit friend’, running 10km multiple times a week and avoiding alcohol. If you looked at me, I was the picture of health. But what no one knew was that I was dealing with disordered eating, I was isolating myself from social events and my friends, and I was so miserable and hated how I looked. I wasn’t healthy at all.”

WH&F head trainer and Creating Curves founder, Alexa Towersey, agrees.

“As a society, we need to redefine what we think ‘healthy’ looks like. The reality of the situation is that body dysmorphia exists at both ends of the spectrum. We naively live under the assumption that a size 10 is making healthier choices than a size 16 based solely on their appearance, and without even taking into consideration age, ethnicity, genetic makeup or hormonal profile.  It’s the underlying relationship with food and exercise – whether it’s positive or negative – that we should be paying attention to,” she says.

Toeing the line between adopting a positive body image and striving to reach your health and fitness goals is not always easy. But for the AnyBODY brand and for a fair chunk of body image experts, striving for physical change isn’t necessarily a negative thing; wanting to create a healthier, fitter body that exudes confidence can be a noble goal and set you on a journey that invigorates, rather than sabotages, your self-esteem. The important thing is to understand why you are wanting to change, says Wagner.

“We’ve all experienced feeling uncomfortable in our bodies: we know when we feel physically fit, healthy and comfortable in our clothes and we know when we don’t. Wanting to make changes to positively impact our health isn’t wrong,” she says.

“However, when you start to define your level of self-worth and value by how you believe your body should look, the desire to improve your body or work towards a better level of health has gone too far. Do it for the endorphins; do it because you’re looking after your body and challenging yourself. There is a huge amount of research now that shows exercise to be one of the most uplifting tools we have and makes us feel good about our current body shape.

“A positive body image means a person is able to accept their body as it is with respect and admiration. Living with a positive body image means you have the ability to utilise your own self-esteem, maintain a positive attitude and are emotionally stable. Because of this, you’re able to filter through the messages from the media, your peers and family, and remain steadfast in how you feel about your body.”

While Wasley and Gibbs admit they’ve had to work hard to become body-positive, the duo hope the AnyBODY brand can help more women accept their appearance and feel empowered in their journey to good health; and, for them, this starts with a greater diversity of body shapes and sizes being represented on the catwalk, in advertising, in clothing sizes and in the media. Already, key brands have taken their cue, with Cooper Street releasing their ‘curve range’ inspired by the movement. Future plans for AnyBODY centre on launching their Skype for Schools program, tackling teenagers’ self-esteem, body confidence and personal development issues, while Wasley is looking to one day complete her Health Promotion degree to further advance the cause. But, in the interim, both Gibbs and Wasley offer one piece of solid advice: quit the comparisons and learn to love you – for you.

“Today I feel fantastic about my body the majority of the time. I still have my bad days because, well, I’m human – but they’re now few and far between. I think it’s the way I deal with it now that has been my biggest achievement. I focus on things I love about myself instead of dwelling on what I dislike. I have health and fitness goals now rather than weight or size goals,” says Wasley.

“Loving your body is an individual journey that’s completely different for everyone. But my top tip is not to compare yourself to anyone – especially on social media – because often you’ll be comparing yourself at your worst to someone at their best. Just remember you are worthy of love, no matter what you look like. There are people out there that love you for you, and don’t give a crap about what you look like. Those are the people worth keeping around.”

ALL FEATURE photography: Cotton ON Body

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[ramoswomensgym0]

Full story: talking body confidence with cover models Georgia Gibbs and Kate Wasley

Thunder thighs. Mum tum. Tuckshop lady arms. Far from a biological predisposition, our modern tendency to criticise parts of our own body is instead an ugly by-product of a media-saturated world. Something that the October 2018 cover models and founders of body-love movement, AnyBODY, are on a mission to change.

West-Aussie models and body confidence activists Georgia Gibbs and Kate Wasley sat down with us to talk the impact of social media, health at any size and beauty with no boundaries. Because – in the words of WH&F – it’s not a look, it’s a lifestyle. Katelyn Swallow and David Goding tell their story.

  On the 23rd of January 2017, 22-year-old Aussie model Georgia Gibbs posted an innocent Instagram photo of herself and fellow model and friend Kate Wasley, 23, posed in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A few minutes later, the image was bombarded with negative comments about their differing body sizes, along with accusations of image tampering.

“People were calling me anorexic and Kate fat, and assuming I had Photoshopped my friend bigger to make me look ‘better’. It was really upsetting for us both and so against everything we believe in,” says Gibbs, who started modelling at the age of 16 in her home city of Perth.

“And so our brand, AnyBODY, was born shortly after.”

Launched on the 8th of March 2017 – appropriately, International Women’s Day – the @any.body_co Instagram account had over 5000 followers by close of business day one, and clocked over 20,000 followers after the first 10 days. Today, more than 206,000 follow Gibbs and Wasley, who post professional images of themselves, selfies of women with varied body shapes, inspirational quotes about self-love, and healthy living and beauty tips. AnyBODY has also provided the girls with a host of dual modelling contracts for big brands such as Cotton On Body and Cooper Street.

Wasley attributes the brand’s rapid success to a public and industry that craved body diversity – and a marketable icon to represent it.

“I can’t believe how fast AnyBODY blew up! Although [Georgia] and I are really only two people of different sizes, I truly believe that incorporating a range of sizes, races and genders in advertising and across social media will help thousands of women worldwide when it comes to feeling comfortable in their own skin,” says Wasley, who began her modeling career in 2015 after being discovered by a local model search.

“We decided to preach to people that healthy can come in a range of sizes. Because of the way social media is these days, I think a lot of women lose perspective on what body diversity is. I think a lot of people get sucked into believing that you should look a certain way, be a certain size, and have no cellulite or stretch marks. It’s unrealistic and we want that to change.”

The media’s negative influence on people’s – particularly women’s – body image isn’t a recent concern. According to psychotherapist Natajsa Wagner, media influence can be traced back to illustrations from the 1930s that depicted women with curves, while the ’40s and ’50s saw the female bust and glutes become the focus.

“Mattel created the Barbie doll with unachievable and disproportionate body parts, and in 1966, in the environment of an emerging super-media, we had the world’s first supermodel in Twiggy. She was a sharp contrast to Marilyn Monroe, and over time we learnt that thin was the new ‘ideal’ body image. So, although women come in all shapes and sizes, the overarching truth is that only one type of body is [portrayed as] ‘ideal’,” says Wagner.

By the age of 17, women have experienced a quarter of a million beauty- and body-oriented advertisements, and continue to be exposed to an average of 400 to 600 depictions of ‘beauty’ every day. The emergence of the smartphone and social media platforms puts these images in our pockets, and the way we engage with social media makes these often digitally altered and filtered depictions seem all the more ‘real’. According to research by Trilogy, six out of 10 women believe that people expect online photos to have been retouched or have a filter applied, yet 61 per cent of Australian women do not see the use of a filter as a form of retouching. Additionally, one 2014 study published in Body Image found a direct correlation between poor self-image and the number of hours spent trawling Facebook, due to body comparisons with peers and celebrities alike.

Dr John Demartini, author of The Gratitude Effect, believes our tendency to compare and judge our own body based on individuals who we deem more ‘attractive’ is the primary cause of negative self-perception. “In today’s social media-obsessed world, many people feel pressured to pursue a physical, one-sided, false perfection that is simply unattainable,” he says.

In other words, it’s not a biologically determined position to think of our body negatively; rather, our body image is influenced by a range of outside factors, fuelled by a visually obsessed (and self-obsessed) society. For Wasley, this tendency to compare herself to others led to a host of mental and physical issues in her younger – and leaner – years. While now sitting happily at a comfortable size 16, at her thinnest (size 10/12) she was mentally exhausted.

“For me, my biggest barriers [to a positive body image] were comparing myself to others, whether that be my friends or ‘fitspo’ girls I followed on social media. I had such an unrealistic idea of what I should look like and that resulted in not feeling good enough or worthy of love,” she says.

“I stopped going out with friends because I had such bad anxiety about food and alcohol. I didn’t want to be seen as the ‘fat’ friend – although, looking back now, I was very fit and toned. It’s amazing how you see yourself when you feel insecure; my view of my own body was totally warped. If I can help even one person work their way out of that mindset, I’ll feel accomplished.”

Gibbs expresses a similar memory of juvenile body dysmorphia.

“I remember being 16 and being unsure of who I was, being unhappy with how I looked and spending so much time comparing myself to other people. It really ruined my ability to love myself for all my other talents outside of physical appearance. Barriers to my own self-love definitely came from setting unachievable goals – such as wanting to look like a celebrity who was the complete opposite to me, therefore setting myself up to fail – and comparing myself to others on social media,” she says.

An extension of the same debate is the complex interplay of health, genetics and lifestyle on how the body appears – especially considering Australia’s worsening obesity epidemic, not to mention the ever-increasing occurrence of eating disorders. Gibbs’ mother was a personal trainer and her father a CrossFit instructor, so healthy food and exercise were integrated into her life from an early age – but both were seen as tools for optimal performance rather than to create a particular body shape. Early in her modelling career, however, Gibbs’ naturally curvaceous silhouette and muscular lower body were often criticised by an industry set on slim.

“I’m predisposed to having a small waist, bigger quads and broad shoulders. But through training, these features are definitely exaggerated and other areas built on and changed too,” says Gibbs.

“I’ve always had to overcome hurdles about my appearance. But over the last few years – as I’ve built a brand around myself of wellness and self-acceptance – it’s been amazing to see clients accept me for who I am and now embrace the ‘love AnyBODY’ message.”

Wasley, on the other hand, comes from a paternal line of tall and built physiques, and first became conscious of her health at age 17.

“I was never self-conscious [growing up]. I knew I was on the bigger side, but I honestly didn’t have a problem with it until I started to compare myself to other girls. Maybe it was about the same time I became interested in boys…who knows. But I remember not having a clue where to start,” she says.

“I feel like I’ve finally reached a place of contentment and balance, which I’m truly grateful for! I eat healthy and exercise, and I’m a size 16, and I feel if I were to stop [exercising and eating well] completely, I’d maybe sit at a size 16/18 naturally – but my body would look different, if that makes sense.”

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” – a sentiment the AnyBODY team echo. Gibbs and Wasley encourage women to see good health as encompassing the physical, the mental and the spiritual. It’s about balance, the ability to move freely and think clearly, and it’s highly individual.

“Health is so much more than your physical fitness,” says Wasley. “To an extent, I don’t believe you can judge how healthy a person is based on their weight and physical being. For example, when I was at my thinnest, people were asking me left right and centre for fitness advice; I suddenly became the ‘fit friend’, running 10km multiple times a week and avoiding alcohol. If you looked at me, I was the picture of health. But what no one knew was that I was dealing with disordered eating, I was isolating myself from social events and my friends, and I was so miserable and hated how I looked. I wasn’t healthy at all.”

WH&F head trainer and Creating Curves founder, Alexa Towersey, agrees.

“As a society, we need to redefine what we think ‘healthy’ looks like. The reality of the situation is that body dysmorphia exists at both ends of the spectrum. We naively live under the assumption that a size 10 is making healthier choices than a size 16 based solely on their appearance, and without even taking into consideration age, ethnicity, genetic makeup or hormonal profile.  It’s the underlying relationship with food and exercise – whether it’s positive or negative – that we should be paying attention to,” she says.

Toeing the line between adopting a positive body image and striving to reach your health and fitness goals is not always easy. But for the AnyBODY brand and for a fair chunk of body image experts, striving for physical change isn’t necessarily a negative thing; wanting to create a healthier, fitter body that exudes confidence can be a noble goal and set you on a journey that invigorates, rather than sabotages, your self-esteem. The important thing is to understand why you are wanting to change, says Wagner.

“We’ve all experienced feeling uncomfortable in our bodies: we know when we feel physically fit, healthy and comfortable in our clothes and we know when we don’t. Wanting to make changes to positively impact our health isn’t wrong,” she says.

“However, when you start to define your level of self-worth and value by how you believe your body should look, the desire to improve your body or work towards a better level of health has gone too far. Do it for the endorphins; do it because you’re looking after your body and challenging yourself. There is a huge amount of research now that shows exercise to be one of the most uplifting tools we have and makes us feel good about our current body shape.

“A positive body image means a person is able to accept their body as it is with respect and admiration. Living with a positive body image means you have the ability to utilise your own self-esteem, maintain a positive attitude and are emotionally stable. Because of this, you’re able to filter through the messages from the media, your peers and family, and remain steadfast in how you feel about your body.”

While Wasley and Gibbs admit they’ve had to work hard to become body-positive, the duo hope the AnyBODY brand can help more women accept their appearance and feel empowered in their journey to good health; and, for them, this starts with a greater diversity of body shapes and sizes being represented on the catwalk, in advertising, in clothing sizes and in the media. Already, key brands have taken their cue, with Cooper Street releasing their ‘curve range’ inspired by the movement. Future plans for AnyBODY centre on launching their Skype for Schools program, tackling teenagers’ self-esteem, body confidence and personal development issues, while Wasley is looking to one day complete her Health Promotion degree to further advance the cause. But, in the interim, both Gibbs and Wasley offer one piece of solid advice: quit the comparisons and learn to love you – for you.

“Today I feel fantastic about my body the majority of the time. I still have my bad days because, well, I’m human – but they’re now few and far between. I think it’s the way I deal with it now that has been my biggest achievement. I focus on things I love about myself instead of dwelling on what I dislike. I have health and fitness goals now rather than weight or size goals,” says Wasley.

“Loving your body is an individual journey that’s completely different for everyone. But my top tip is not to compare yourself to anyone – especially on social media – because often you’ll be comparing yourself at your worst to someone at their best. Just remember you are worthy of love, no matter what you look like. There are people out there that love you for you, and don’t give a crap about what you look like. Those are the people worth keeping around.”

ALL FEATURE photography: Cotton ON Body

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  Read more ... from http://www.womenshealthandfitness.com.au/lifestyle/motivation/2378-full-story-talking-body-confidence-with-cover-models-georgia-gibbs-and-kate-wasley

[alamkhatoon]

Thunder thighs. Mum tum. Tuckshop lady arms. Far from a biological predisposition, our modern tendency to criticise parts of our own body is instead an ugly by-product of a media-saturated world. Something that the October 2018 cover models and founders of body-love movement, AnyBODY, are on a mission to change.

West-Aussie models and body confidence activists Georgia Gibbs and Kate Wasley sat down with us to talk the impact of social media, health at any size and beauty with no boundaries. Because – in the words of WH&F – it’s not a look, it’s a lifestyle. Katelyn Swallow and David Goding tell their story.

  On the 23rd of January 2017, 22-year-old Aussie model Georgia Gibbs posted an innocent Instagram photo of herself and fellow model and friend Kate Wasley, 23, posed in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A few minutes later, the image was bombarded with negative comments about their differing body sizes, along with accusations of image tampering.

“People were calling me anorexic and Kate fat, and assuming I had Photoshopped my friend bigger to make me look ‘better’. It was really upsetting for us both and so against everything we believe in,” says Gibbs, who started modelling at the age of 16 in her home city of Perth.

“And so our brand, AnyBODY, was born shortly after.”

Launched on the 8th of March 2017 – appropriately, International Women’s Day – the @any.body_co Instagram account had over 5000 followers by close of business day one, and clocked over 20,000 followers after the first 10 days. Today, more than 206,000 follow Gibbs and Wasley, who post professional images of themselves, selfies of women with varied body shapes, inspirational quotes about self-love, and healthy living and beauty tips. AnyBODY has also provided the girls with a host of dual modelling contracts for big brands such as Cotton On Body and Cooper Street.

Wasley attributes the brand’s rapid success to a public and industry that craved body diversity – and a marketable icon to represent it.

“I can’t believe how fast AnyBODY blew up! Although [Georgia] and I are really only two people of different sizes, I truly believe that incorporating a range of sizes, races and genders in advertising and across social media will help thousands of women worldwide when it comes to feeling comfortable in their own skin,” says Wasley, who began her modeling career in 2015 after being discovered by a local model search.

“We decided to preach to people that healthy can come in a range of sizes. Because of the way social media is these days, I think a lot of women lose perspective on what body diversity is. I think a lot of people get sucked into believing that you should look a certain way, be a certain size, and have no cellulite or stretch marks. It’s unrealistic and we want that to change.”

The media’s negative influence on people’s – particularly women’s – body image isn’t a recent concern. According to psychotherapist Natajsa Wagner, media influence can be traced back to illustrations from the 1930s that depicted women with curves, while the ’40s and ’50s saw the female bust and glutes become the focus.

“Mattel created the Barbie doll with unachievable and disproportionate body parts, and in 1966, in the environment of an emerging super-media, we had the world’s first supermodel in Twiggy. She was a sharp contrast to Marilyn Monroe, and over time we learnt that thin was the new ‘ideal’ body image. So, although women come in all shapes and sizes, the overarching truth is that only one type of body is [portrayed as] ‘ideal’,” says Wagner.

By the age of 17, women have experienced a quarter of a million beauty- and body-oriented advertisements, and continue to be exposed to an average of 400 to 600 depictions of ‘beauty’ every day. The emergence of the smartphone and social media platforms puts these images in our pockets, and the way we engage with social media makes these often digitally altered and filtered depictions seem all the more ‘real’. According to research by Trilogy, six out of 10 women believe that people expect online photos to have been retouched or have a filter applied, yet 61 per cent of Australian women do not see the use of a filter as a form of retouching. Additionally, one 2014 study published in Body Image found a direct correlation between poor self-image and the number of hours spent trawling Facebook, due to body comparisons with peers and celebrities alike.

Dr John Demartini, author of The Gratitude Effect, believes our tendency to compare and judge our own body based on individuals who we deem more ‘attractive’ is the primary cause of negative self-perception. “In today’s social media-obsessed world, many people feel pressured to pursue a physical, one-sided, false perfection that is simply unattainable,” he says.

In other words, it’s not a biologically determined position to think of our body negatively; rather, our body image is influenced by a range of outside factors, fuelled by a visually obsessed (and self-obsessed) society. For Wasley, this tendency to compare herself to others led to a host of mental and physical issues in her younger – and leaner – years. While now sitting happily at a comfortable size 16, at her thinnest (size 10/12) she was mentally exhausted.

“For me, my biggest barriers [to a positive body image] were comparing myself to others, whether that be my friends or ‘fitspo’ girls I followed on social media. I had such an unrealistic idea of what I should look like and that resulted in not feeling good enough or worthy of love,” she says.

“I stopped going out with friends because I had such bad anxiety about food and alcohol. I didn’t want to be seen as the ‘fat’ friend – although, looking back now, I was very fit and toned. It’s amazing how you see yourself when you feel insecure; my view of my own body was totally warped. If I can help even one person work their way out of that mindset, I’ll feel accomplished.”

Gibbs expresses a similar memory of juvenile body dysmorphia.

“I remember being 16 and being unsure of who I was, being unhappy with how I looked and spending so much time comparing myself to other people. It really ruined my ability to love myself for all my other talents outside of physical appearance. Barriers to my own self-love definitely came from setting unachievable goals – such as wanting to look like a celebrity who was the complete opposite to me, therefore setting myself up to fail – and comparing myself to others on social media,” she says.

An extension of the same debate is the complex interplay of health, genetics and lifestyle on how the body appears – especially considering Australia’s worsening obesity epidemic, not to mention the ever-increasing occurrence of eating disorders. Gibbs’ mother was a personal trainer and her father a CrossFit instructor, so healthy food and exercise were integrated into her life from an early age – but both were seen as tools for optimal performance rather than to create a particular body shape. Early in her modelling career, however, Gibbs’ naturally curvaceous silhouette and muscular lower body were often criticised by an industry set on slim.

“I’m predisposed to having a small waist, bigger quads and broad shoulders. But through training, these features are definitely exaggerated and other areas built on and changed too,” says Gibbs.

“I’ve always had to overcome hurdles about my appearance. But over the last few years – as I’ve built a brand around myself of wellness and self-acceptance – it’s been amazing to see clients accept me for who I am and now embrace the ‘love AnyBODY’ message.”

Wasley, on the other hand, comes from a paternal line of tall and built physiques, and first became conscious of her health at age 17.

“I was never self-conscious [growing up]. I knew I was on the bigger side, but I honestly didn’t have a problem with it until I started to compare myself to other girls. Maybe it was about the same time I became interested in boys…who knows. But I remember not having a clue where to start,” she says.

“I feel like I’ve finally reached a place of contentment and balance, which I’m truly grateful for! I eat healthy and exercise, and I’m a size 16, and I feel if I were to stop [exercising and eating well] completely, I’d maybe sit at a size 16/18 naturally – but my body would look different, if that makes sense.”

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” – a sentiment the AnyBODY team echo. Gibbs and Wasley encourage women to see good health as encompassing the physical, the mental and the spiritual. It’s about balance, the ability to move freely and think clearly, and it’s highly individual.

“Health is so much more than your physical fitness,” says Wasley. “To an extent, I don’t believe you can judge how healthy a person is based on their weight and physical being. For example, when I was at my thinnest, people were asking me left right and centre for fitness advice; I suddenly became the ‘fit friend’, running 10km multiple times a week and avoiding alcohol. If you looked at me, I was the picture of health. But what no one knew was that I was dealing with disordered eating, I was isolating myself from social events and my friends, and I was so miserable and hated how I looked. I wasn’t healthy at all.”

WH&F head trainer and Creating Curves founder, Alexa Towersey, agrees.

“As a society, we need to redefine what we think ‘healthy’ looks like. The reality of the situation is that body dysmorphia exists at both ends of the spectrum. We naively live under the assumption that a size 10 is making healthier choices than a size 16 based solely on their appearance, and without even taking into consideration age, ethnicity, genetic makeup or hormonal profile.  It’s the underlying relationship with food and exercise – whether it’s positive or negative – that we should be paying attention to,” she says.

Toeing the line between adopting a positive body image and striving to reach your health and fitness goals is not always easy. But for the AnyBODY brand and for a fair chunk of body image experts, striving for physical change isn’t necessarily a negative thing; wanting to create a healthier, fitter body that exudes confidence can be a noble goal and set you on a journey that invigorates, rather than sabotages, your self-esteem. The important thing is to understand why you are wanting to change, says Wagner.

“We’ve all experienced feeling uncomfortable in our bodies: we know when we feel physically fit, healthy and comfortable in our clothes and we know when we don’t. Wanting to make changes to positively impact our health isn’t wrong,” she says.

“However, when you start to define your level of self-worth and value by how you believe your body should look, the desire to improve your body or work towards a better level of health has gone too far. Do it for the endorphins; do it because you’re looking after your body and challenging yourself. There is a huge amount of research now that shows exercise to be one of the most uplifting tools we have and makes us feel good about our current body shape.

“A positive body image means a person is able to accept their body as it is with respect and admiration. Living with a positive body image means you have the ability to utilise your own self-esteem, maintain a positive attitude and are emotionally stable. Because of this, you’re able to filter through the messages from the media, your peers and family, and remain steadfast in how you feel about your body.”

While Wasley and Gibbs admit they’ve had to work hard to become body-positive, the duo hope the AnyBODY brand can help more women accept their appearance and feel empowered in their journey to good health; and, for them, this starts with a greater diversity of body shapes and sizes being represented on the catwalk, in advertising, in clothing sizes and in the media. Already, key brands have taken their cue, with Cooper Street releasing their ‘curve range’ inspired by the movement. Future plans for AnyBODY centre on launching their Skype for Schools program, tackling teenagers’ self-esteem, body confidence and personal development issues, while Wasley is looking to one day complete her Health Promotion degree to further advance the cause. But, in the interim, both Gibbs and Wasley offer one piece of solid advice: quit the comparisons and learn to love you – for you.

“Today I feel fantastic about my body the majority of the time. I still have my bad days because, well, I’m human – but they’re now few and far between. I think it’s the way I deal with it now that has been my biggest achievement. I focus on things I love about myself instead of dwelling on what I dislike. I have health and fitness goals now rather than weight or size goals,” says Wasley.

“Loving your body is an individual journey that’s completely different for everyone. But my top tip is not to compare yourself to anyone – especially on social media – because often you’ll be comparing yourself at your worst to someone at their best. Just remember you are worthy of love, no matter what you look like. There are people out there that love you for you, and don’t give a crap about what you look like. Those are the people worth keeping around.”

ALL FEATURE photography: Cotton ON Body

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