Category Archives: Current Issues

SOCS-Older Women Are Invisable

Most older women are not visible in modern media. Women who are aging naturally that is. We don’t see many older actresses and models. Women drop off the radar and start to disappear as they get older. Wouldn’t you like to know more about them? Wouldn’t you like to hear their stories? Who are they? According to Beauty Redefined , in their great post, they have been shunned by main stream media. They have been “symbolically annihilated.”

That sounds like science fiction. Something The Borg would say. “We are The Borg. You have been symbolically annihilated. Resistance is futile!” But looks like it is not science fiction. If you are an older woman you will not see yourself in popular magazine ads, in Hollywood films or on TV. Unless you have had a lot of “work done” to make you look much younger. There may be a few token older women on display but they are in the minority. Kind of like endangered species in the zoo.

Then there are all the negative messages for women about letting yourself look your natural age. Messages bombarding us about anti-wrinkle creams, botox, hair color, diets, and plastic surgery.

“What would happen if confident, happy, beautiful women decided to forego painful and expensive anti-aging procedures, breast lifts and enhancements, liposuction, all-over hair removal or tanning regimens? How could that change the way their daughters, students, friends, nieces and coworkers perceived themselves and their own “flawed,” lined, real faces? How could simply owning (and treating kindly and speaking nicely about) our so-called “imperfect” bodies affect not only our own lives, but those over whom we have influence? Is it possible to slowly but deliberately change the perception of these “flaws” as something to shame, hide and fix at any cost to something acceptable and embraceable in all their human, womanly real-ness?” (Beauty Redefined)

Yes what would happen? The “beauty” industry would self-destruct. I do like to be optimistic, enthusiastic, and hopeful about change. I think I can imagine the change beginning. I think I hear it. Robotic voice in background, “The self-destruct sequence is initiated….”

This is my contribution to Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

#This Oppresses Women

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“Women, are you sick of being bombarded with advertisements that depict women as sexual objects? That use our bodies to sell products? That embolden men to disrespect us? That tell us we are not worthy unless we conform to unrealistic, sexist, racist, and unhealthy beauty standards?” ( National Women’s Liberation)

A campaign by National Women’s Liberation and Red Stocking to place stickers on ads that are exploitive of women and, I like the last sentence, “tell us we are not worthy unless we conform to unrealistic, sexist, racist and unhealthy beauty standards.”

Do you see a contradiction between breast augmentation, push up bras, and minimizer bras? It seems like we are never supposed to be happy with the way we are.

This add really makes you want to do this, NO.

Suggests bigger is not better

Breast Augmentation

Wonderbra or Push Up

Minimizer Bra by Olga

Maybe Things Are Changing At Last

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I spotted this post on Yahoo Beauty today and felt a spark of hope. It is about a model, Erica Jean Schenk, who landed this cover for a running magazine. It is encouraging to see that there may be a crack in the wall of popular media opinion about the definition of beauty and health. Is it possible that women who do not fit the current popular image of beauty have a chance? I know there is a Body Image movement and I think it’s great. And I say it’s about time.

Another nice post on this in Huffington Post by Louise Green. She says:

“More than half of North American women represent the plus-size demographic, making up hundreds of millions of women, yet only one fitness magazine in history is bold enough to showcase a plus-size woman on the cover.”

Maybe now there will be more magazines willing to do so.

Making Connections the Introvert Way

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We have all heard about how it is important to have social connections, important for our well-being. But making connections can be daunting for someone with an Introvert temperament. There needs to be a good fit. I have felt this in my own life when looking for outside interests. I did not see this issue addressed in any books or articles I had read other than to say how introverts can push themselves out and try to be more extroverted. Until I saw this post by Emily White.

In her post she talks about how she was made to leave an environment that had been ideally suited to her and move back to a big city. This was interesting to me because I have felt as she did about the city environment. I live near Los Angeles which definitely qualifies as a big city. What is daunting about such a big city is that there is so much of it and this can be a bit overwhelming. You have to really focus in and look around to find your niche in such a big place. It is like looking at a big cluttered room and trying to decide what to do first and where to begin. Ms. White gave me some food for thought and showed me that you can succeed in making connections as an introvert even in a big city. She doesn’t say we have to morph into an extrovert or do extroverted activities that involve things that introverts do not like such as making a lot of small talk or participating in groups. Unless the group is involved in a cause we are passionate about.

I really like that she is addressing this and discussing how she found connections that fit her. It is good to see posts like this because it gives support to people who want to make connections but want to feel comfortable doing so and do it in their own way.

Since I have started into a semi-retired stage, I have been looking for activities and projects that are engaging to me. I have done the usual book group at the library and I am doing volunteer and paid tutoring. My blog is something very new for me. I definitely was not into social media and I do think introverts approach social media differently from extroverts. I can get very overloaded with social media and the internet. So I am working at balancing my involvement. Which means limiting the time I spend on WordPress, Facebook and email. There must be time set aside for reflection and quiet pursuits.

Some views of Los Angeles, a very big city, and some parts of it that suit my interests, (not the crowded freeways).

Los Angeles from the air

405 Freeway Los Angeles

Griffith Park and Observatory

Hollywood Sign because I do love movies

Los Angeles Central Library

Mural Central Library

Dorothy Chandler Pavillion

LA County Museum of Natural History

El Matador Beach

Some new ideas

Topanga Canyon Trail

Me attempting photo from car near Ventura

SOCS-Butterflies are Free

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Butterflies are Free is a film starring Goldie Hawn about a free spirited girl who lived in San Francisco. One day she sees a cute guy peering at her from a neighboring window while she is undressed. She thinks he is a peeping Tom and rushes next door to tell him off and realizes he is blind. I love the setting and era of this movie, (San Francisco in the 60s). Goldie helps the boy to overcome his fears and be independent and he helps her realize she has her own hang ups as well. I think this was Goldie Hawn’s first film and she is adorable.

Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles each year and during the Fall to late winter they end up in California. I always love to see butterflies outside. We get a few around my house. On my list is the idea of putting in plants that will attract butterflies, birds and bees.

Even though butterflies can fly thousands of miles, they couldn’t fly as far as the New Horizons space ship. I try to imagine what it is like on Pluto. There wouldn’t be any butterflies. Pluto is so far from the sun that it wouldn’t have daylight. Amazing that a planet so far away is still kept in orbit around the sun. Pluto has 5 moons but no oceans or people to be affected by their forces. If we had 5 moons how would our world be affected?

Pluto has been out there waiting for us to visit. We finally made it. We did a fly by, like a migrating butterfly, but we didn’t drop in yet.

This post is my contribution to Lindaghill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. 🙂

It Sure Looks Like a Planet to Me

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Pluto Observations Through the Years via NASA

I got this copy of a photo of Pluto in my email yesterday from Dr. John P. Holden at the White House, Director of Office of Science and Technology Policy. He said he hoped I would share it with someone so, besides some of my family and friends, I am sharing it with you, [ This photo is no longer available so I replaced it with this Gif from NASA ]. I am going to share the text of the Email as well because I don’t think he would mind. I signed up a long time ago to get emails from The White House. Any US citizen can. Here is the text of the email message:

“This morning, the United States became the first country to reach Pluto — and the first country to explore the entire classical solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. NASA’s New Horizons interplanetary probe has been making its way to Pluto since January 19, 2006, and has been providing the world with the sharpest photos ever seen of our Solar System’s most prominent “dwarf planet.” Today, it made its closest approach to Pluto yet — about 8,000 miles — at around 07:49:57 EDT.”

It seems to me I remember it was decided a while back that Pluto was not a real planet. I have to admit I never liked the idea that Pluto was no longer a planet. I don’t know about you, but I think this looks like a planet.

OK I researched briefly some articles on the topic of Is Pluto a Planet?

Space.com

Discover

Per CNN One person who never accepted Pluto’s demotion is Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons spacecraft, the first spacecraft sent to Pluto. He said Pluto was given the boot because of its distance from the sun.

“In fact, if you put Earth where Pluto is, it would be excluded!” Stern said. “Any definition of planethood that excludes Earth, in any circumstance, is deeply flawed. After all, if there is any object everyone agrees is a planet, it’s Earth.”

I read today they found snow on Pluto. So it has weather?

For more info:

NASA New Horizons

What do you think?

**If you are reading this on the new WordPress Reader, you can click on the post title to take a poll and let me know if you think Pluto is a planet.

Beauty

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What is considered to be beautiful is always changing, over the years and across cultures. I think the young woman in the above image may have a “wheat belly.” ( a reference to a popular book about gluten free diets). She is a little soft and pudgy according to current beauty standards. Her belly is bulging out a bit.

Opinions about diet are always changing as well. There are so many changes in just the past 20 years. Remember all the talk about low fat diets and heart health. I stayed away from butter and ate margarine for years to find that now we know margarine is actually very bad for you. And then no red meat. I followed that advice as well and did not eat red meat. Now I hear that the low fat diet caused many people to eat too much sugar, which is worse, and that some fats are good for us. And it was artificial sweeteners are good and then they were bad. Now sugar is bad again. Then coffee is good, coffee is bad, or wine is good, wine is bad. White wine is not as good as red. No white wine is ok. Now red is better as long as its organic. Confusing isn’t it.

It is amazing how there are so many books and posts telling us how to be better at everything. How to eat, have sex, be mindful, find purpose and exercise in just the right ways.

This got me thinking about body image in general and women’s body image in particular. I want to be comfortable with my body and it’s image even if it is not the ideal. Women spend a good part of their lives worried about their appearance and weight, scrutinizing their bodies in the mirror to see how they measure up to the latest popular image.

I have read many articles on this topic and this lead to a website called Beauty Redefined. I am sure there are others out there that are as good but I do like a lot of what this one has to say. It belongs to Lexie and Lindsay Kite, who have PhDs in media and body image. In there own words, We have a passion for helping girls and women recognize, reject and resist harmful messages about their bodies and what “beauty” means and looks like. I am learning there is a lot of resistance against all the dieting and the popular media images of beauty. This is a positive thing.

This a great little short film by Em Ford, a very courageous young woman, who demonstrates how women are judged by their appearance. And how some commenters on social media are sociopaths.

There is resistance to dieting as well. In her book Body of Truth, Harriet Brown talks about how she learned to become comfortable with her body at a weight that felt comfortable to her. She makes a convincing argument about the futility of dieting and how all the hype about obesity is overblown. She talks about her own daughter’s struggle with anorexia and how this experience helped her and her family change their attitudes toward food. She includes some of her own process that she developed through therapy to be able to relax about eating and not be obsessed about diet.

Another website I have discovered is Refinery 29 that has some good posts about positive body image and anti-dieting. There is great blog on there called The Anti-Diet Project by Kelsey Miller. She did a recent post about intuitive eating. This has been around for awhile. It is learning to make food neutral and get in touch with your natural appetite and get off the diet merry-go-round. Another post by Kate Harding as part of Refinery 29 Take Back the Beach exposes many of the myths about the virtues of dieting.

I find the posts about positive body image and anti-dieting encouraging. Maybe there is hope that people’s attitudes will change and we can learn self-acceptance.

In the meantime, it is good to keep a sense of humor. There is one health practice that I really believe in, laughter. When we laugh we lower our stress hormones, improve our circulation, increase our endorphins, exercise our lungs and even exercise our core muscles. I believe the part about the core muscles because my daughter pointed out to me, and I confirmed it by looking in the mirror, that my belly moves up and down when I laugh. Besides laughter makes us feel great don’t you think?

https://youtu.be/gQ4lhO0LBX8

Comic Relief

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I loved watching Laurel and Hardy when I was little. Still do. The ability to make people laugh is such a gift. And comedians are a gift to the world. Sharing a couple of laughs with you today.

Thanks to Dave Barry. I spotted this on his blog this morning sent in by one of his readers:

AS FORETOLD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

Beach closed off after huge hole opens up shooting SNAILS into the sky ‘like a geyser’

THEY CAN ALSO BE MISTAKEN FOR CAMELS

Man mistakenly raises ‘puppies’ for two years – before finding out they’re black bears

I really needed this laugh. Reminds me how important it is to find something to smile and laugh about, especially in current times.

Synchronicity and the BMI

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I believe in synchronicity because many times when I am ruminating about an issue up pops the information that I need.

The issue that I have been thinking about for a while is weight gain and obesity in older people (women in particular). And how obesity is defined by the use of certain parameters like the BMI.

I have noticed that as I get older I have accumulated weight with hardly any effort and find it very hard to lose the weight. There are many factors that contribute to weight gain in older women besides just overeating. Let me list a few.

Some of the factors are decreased metabolism, or we don’t need as many calories and don’t burn up the calories as efficiently. This also makes it difficult to lose weight by reducing caloric intake. I know with me my metabolism seems to slow down even more if I restrict calories. Another factor is the natural loss of muscle as we age. Muscle helps our bodies burn calories. Stress from worrying about weight loss, among other things I worry about, can cause increase cortisol which then results in my body wanting to hold onto weight. Many older women have hypothyroidism which again affects the metabolism. And there can be a genetic predisposition and your body’s natural make-up that leads to being a larger size.

For all these reasons and more older people (women) many times end up in the overweight and obese section of the weight chart at the doctor’s office. I say that there needs to be a change at the way we look at weight, and older people should not be compared to younger people when it comes to defining obesity.

There can be dangers with dieting. Dieting often leads to muscle loss instead of fat loss. It is actually dangerous for older people to lose muscle because this can affect balance which can lead to falls and worse. Studies have shown that low weight is worse for recovery from surgery than being overweight.

So today I found a great article on Next Avenue that really resonates with what I have been thinking called ” Why Our Culture is Obsessed with Thinness,” by Patricia Corrigan.

Here is just one of the many excerpts from the article I loved about how nutsy we are about diet that even when women were in hospice with cancer they refused to eat desert.

Consider this: A hospice chef in Wisconsin told a science journalist that many of the dying women who were still able to eat “refused bread, salad dressing, butter, chocolate, desserts and other ‘fattening’ foods.”

You’re on your last lap, and you think it is imperative to pass up salad dressing and say “no” to chocolate?

Another point Patricia makes, which I have been thinking about as well, is that people naturally come in all different shapes and sizes with different genetic make-ups and it is unrealistic and wrong to expect everyone to fit into these narrow parameters that are considered normal by our society.

She also shares information about another author who has written a book about this topic, Harriet Brown “Body of Truth,” which I intend to read. In fact, I could quote Patricia’s whole article verbatim but I will let those interested click on the link above to read for themselves. I will share this information in the article from Harriet Brown’s book:

dieting and weight cycling (aka yo-yo dieting) leads to unhealthy physical and psychological effects

physical and psychological damage comes from being rigid, chaotic and fearful about eating

people unhappy with their weight are more likely to give up on health-positive activities than heavy people who are satisfied with their weight

whether you diet or don’t, you are going to die

Patricia and others have made the point that weight loss has become a big industry with pharmaceuticals and all kinds of diet specialists and diet foods. I suggest, along with Patricia, Harriet and others that we take a critical look at the current cultural spin on weight and start to “change the conversations about weight and health with ourselves, our families, our friends and our doctors.”

I intend to take her article with me to my next doctors appointment.

Sensory Processing Disorder Through A Child’s Eyes

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Understood is a website that provides information and support to parents and those interested in helping kids who have learning differences and attention issues. I found this website through the National Center for Learning Disabilities which is one of the well know non-profits that helped create the website. One of the features of the website is called Through Your Child’s Eyes. Which gives the perspective of the child’s experience with their learning issues. Here is a great one describing Sensory Processing Disorder.

I have seen a child cover her ears and scream when she went into a gym filled with noisy kids. If you understood it is actually painful for the child to hear all the noise, it explains the behavior.

Sensory Processing Disorder does not just affect children with Autism. It can exist by itself or with other conditions like ADHD.