To imagine that African American women are immune to the standards of slenderness that reign today is, moreover, to come very close to the racist notion that the art and glamour—the culture—of femininity belong to the white woman alone. The black woman, by contrast, is woman in her earthy, "natural," state, uncorseted by civilization. "Fat is a black woman's issue, too,'' insisted the author of a 1990 Essence article, bitterly criticizing the high school guidance counselor who had told her she did not have to worry about managing her weight because "black women aren't seen as sex objects but as women. So really, you're lucky because you can go beyond the stereotypes of woman as sex object. . . . Also, fat [women] are more acceptable in the black community." Apparently, as the author notes, the guidance counselor had herself not "gone beyond" stereotypes of the maternal, desexualized Mammy as the prototype of black womanhood. Saddled with these projected racial notions, the young woman, who had struggled with compulsive eating and yoyo dieting for years, was left alone to deal with an eating disorder that she wasn't "supposed" to have.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (dir. Tom Gormican).
[It’s] fun for fans of [Nicolas] Cage’s filmography and eccentric personality as a performer. He clearly has a sense of humour about his image yet takes it seriously and commits to the absurdity of the role—as himself, ironically. It’s peak Cage and possibly the beginning of another Age of Cage.
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The ✨️Genders✨️ of the Pedro Pascal Cinematic Universe:
Asshole (affectionate)
Babygirl (derogatory)
Babygirl (affectionate)
Slut
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Our culture is one in which Oprah Winfrey, a dazzling role model for female success, has said that the most ''significant achievement of her life" was losing sixty-seven pounds on a liquid diet. (She gained it all back within a year.) It is a culture in which commercial after commercial depicts female eating as a furtive activity, properly engaged in behind closed doors, and even under those circumstances requiring restriction and restraint (see "Hunger as Ideology" in this volume). It is a culture in which my "noneating disordered" female students write in their journals of being embarrassed to go to the ice cream counter for fear of being laughed at by the boys in the cafeteria; a culture in which Sylvester Stallone has said that he likes his women "anorexic" (his then girlfriend, Cornelia Guest, immediately lost twenty-four pounds); a culture in which personal ads consistently list "slim," "lean," or "trim" as required of prospective dates. The anorectic thus appears, not as the victim of a unique and "bizarre" pathology, but as the bearer of very distressing tidings about our culture.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight
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Javi Gutierrez • The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
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