Archive
Tag "mental health"

Sunday Hustle 31/07/11 – The Body Image Edition

By: admin
31-07-2011
sunday hustle

….And thus concludes the end of my second week back at uni. Was I ready for this jelly? No, no I was not. Regardless, you’re more than likely to find me bouncing out of bed ready to LEARN IMPORTANT STUFF rather than clutching at my pillow, praying for JUST 5 MORE MINUTES PLZ. I love learning, and I’m so happy to be back at uni. It’s the ultimate indulgence to feed my mind, to bounce ideas off of other inspiring, positive and creative people.

Things might be a little more quiet now that I’m back at big school and writing essays and trying to remember how to use the APA referencing system (which I totally don’t remember existed, by the way). I wish I had more time to jump up and down on my computer keyboard excitedly and churn out more posts like the eager Gen Y smarty-pants I am, but my course requires a lot of attention and little time for…well, life. Having said that,I’m really determined to make time for the projects that matter to me these days. More writing! More photography! More reading! Like a grocery list chock block of awesome food for the soul! Time is trickier than Where’s Wally. You can’t find it, you have to make it, and you’re never too busy for the things you love. Never.


This week I definitely noticed a trend in articles on self-loathing and self-loving in the physical sense. Because Girls Are Made From Pepsi is all about lady love, coming to terms with and accepting our diverse physicality is a large part of appreciating and celebrating your foxy self. Females of all ages – whether young girls or middle aged women – have all gone through some sort of body image crisis. Some deal with their inner critics more effectively than others, whilst some of still unconsciously grab at imaginary love-handles when trying on new jeans. I personally don’t feel ready to write a body image post of my own, so below are some of the best I’ve read this week (or ever!).

How gay-friendly is Facebook? With the Google+ machine ploughing through the digital stratosphere aiming to catch as many band-wagon enthusiasts as possible (oh yeah, I saw it riding past and climbed on!), Lesbilicious takes a look at how the world’s most popular (and infamous!) social networking site helped (or hindered) queer visability. Can we expect the same from Google+? Do social networks force people out of the closet when they ask you disclose information? Or is it still possible to keep some of our life private? It did not escape me that Google+ does not ask for your sexual orientation…

By the way – it’s awfully lonely on Google+! If anyone wants an invite, holla at me! I’m willing to spread the love around!

Liz at Autostraddle does a fashioncap of the latest Pretty Little Liars, turns the majority of the cast/extras into homos, and consequently makes my week whilst doing so.

THIS IS NEW INFORMATION. Not all women like pink. If you are one of those women, I’m sorry for my blog’s colour scheme and it’s affect on your retinas. Not really, because I love pink! But don’t worry, I still like you. This study, published in the Harvard Business Review (and handily dissected for the sake of my poor attention span by Gawker), suggests that women don’t like pink because it reminds them of other women.

Despite the fact that a full 100% of lesbians are women, it appears that women do not actually love themselves? Because it’s not the color of pink that women hate, according to the study, so much as the fact that pink is “a gender cue” that triggers a “defensive response” among women. This sort of self-loathing behavior is really sad to see among a gender that has produced lots of really quality gymnasts.

The study was conducted in relation to breast cancer donations. Although it seems fairly obvious that sometimes, you know, women prefer blue, some parts of the study actually sounded like they might not be completed baseless.

We put breast cancer banner ads on a website we showed the subjects but never mentioned them. When the site was geared to women [with the colour pink], 33% of women recalled the ads. When it was gender-neutral, 65% remembered. It’s been three years, and we have duplicated the same basic finding 10 times. It keeps happening.

Check out this video for Vanessa Bruno’s SS 12 collection. It features a Lou Doillon and Jessica Joffe as beautifully dressed forest sprites of some sort. (I am still recovering from Stevie Dance’s departure. I feel the need to talk about this. Anyone?)

140 characters can say a lot about your gender. According to a sociolinguistic study, women use a lot more emoticons and exclamation points ( !! =] ). I think I may have been an unwitting subject for this study…

Girl With a Satchel (Erica Bartle, or GWAS as she is known) is talking about body image. It’s a regular topic on GWAS, but I always love her posts on body image because they’re not just empty, superficial rhetoric about how important it is for us to love ourselves. Erica’s past experiences inform her views on body image and the media, so it’s not like she comes across all gung-ho about fighting the evil advertising standards which allow women to look like pore-less faces of sparkling beauty. She just recognises that it really, really sucks to open up a magazine and not feel like you resemble the yummy young things that dominate the pages.

What can be done by publishers in light of the fact that the Voluntary Code of Conduct has not been widely accepted? Go easy on the Photoshop, embrace what’s real, and complement fashion and beauty with a greater proportion of content that gives credit to women and girls’ other attributes. Devote sections to cultivating their minds, creativity, social conscience, resilience and knowledge of the world, as well as playing on their capacity to empathise, laugh, have fun and contribute something positive.

Source: weheartit.com

Rachel Hills shares her personal experience of BDD (body dysmorphic disorder).

When you’re actually living through something, it feels like some dark, impossible shame you could never speak openly to anyone about. Then there’s the stage of recovery where the whole event seems far enough in the past that the stigma begins to evaporate and you can speak about it freely. And eventually, you get to the point where it seems so long ago that it no longer feels relevant, almost as if it happened to another person.

I think I feel a bit like Rachel in a way when she says she finds it hard to open up, and not because she’s ashamed or doesn’t want to relive past events she’d rather keep locked up in her 16-year-old diary, but because it’s had to relate to who we were in the past. How do you speak for someone who exists outside of your here and now? Just as it’s difficult to comprehend and interpret another person’s state of mind, so too is it problematic to try and justify the actions of your former self. I, like many other girls, feel so far removed from who we once were, and that’s why many things are left unsaid.

Conversely, Anna Sussman writes of the eating disorder cliche – ‘Me Too’ Syndrome. I would really love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this one! Do you think there’s an E.D cliche? Or are you more partial to an open book policy? Over sharing? Or over people not caring?

Your vagina is a beautiful flower and anyone who gets your naked as hit the jackpot. Nay to vulva antagonism!

gucci gucci louis louis fendi fendi prada

Look familiar?

Apple, Pear, or Eggplant? I never understood why people compare their bodies with the shapes of fruit. I get the need to associate the female form with a deliciously sweet snack, but I’ve never felt these so called guides to female body shapes ever achieve anything.

Not satisfied? You might have more luck with something like Trinny & Susannah’s body shape guide, which has 12 possible forms—but, if you’re like me, you’ll still be left untyped. This isn’t because of your crazy, freakish body type that is unfit to be clothed. It’s because your body is probably a combination of run-of-the-mill (I mean that with love!) without a particular feature that calls for attention, and certain features that you may want to highlight or conceal but that don’t land you in one of the classic types.

Share

Read More

Sunday Hustle 17/07/11

By: admin
17-07-2011
sunday hustle

For your reading pleasure!

Prozac Nation in the 21st Century – This particular story from The Guardian really hit home for me. With one in three women reliant upon anti-depressants to get out of bed, I feel this article says what so many other people, let alone women, have wanted to say. I never used to be open about my mental health, but these days I’m taking the honesty route. Having been on anti-depressants since I was 12 (yes, even before I hit the troublesome teen years) I was officially diagnosed with depression, and promptly put on Cipramil. I’ve been on and off SSRIs for 11 years, and am gradually starting to ween myself off. The thing is with anti-depressants, you become rather attached to them. They become a part of your body, like an arm or a leg or a treasured birth mark or secret mole. If you want the god honest truth, I don’t think I should have ever been put on them. I’m 23-years-old, and I rely on the highest legal dosage of Cipramil to keep me from hybernating. Whilst I have the luxury of being able to work through my issues on a cognitive level (whatever these ‘issues’ may be, I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel I have a natural predilection for unsubstantiated melancholy), I understand that some people just want to put their black dog to sleep, post haste. It’s so much easier to cover up your demons than trying to train your black dog. (The Guardian)

The doctor was right all those years ago when he told me to consider coming off them because “life gets harder, not easier”. But to sit and talk about depression when there’s so much else to do … children to raise, husbands to harass, homes to run, careers to cultivate, never mind a life to live… well, I’ve got a three-second window in between school drop-off, cleaning the toilet and sleep, so is 2.35am OK for a chat, counsellor? The invitation to “talk with tissues” also rather negates the widely-held scientific understanding of the chemical relationship between serotonin and depression. You wouldn’t tell a diabetic: “there, there, let it all out and forget the insulin”.

What all of us female glossy addicts/pioneers for fierce bitches are hoping for – an autobiography by Anna Wintour. Does she really play tennis every morning? Did she really demand a staffer to purchase an unpublished manuscript of Harry Potter? Does she shave, or does she wax? Is she dressed by bluebirds in the morning? Will she shoot lazer beams out of her eyes when she removes her glasses? (Fashionista)

Lady Gaga’s wishful thinking – Julia is a sapphic sister. (Lesbilicious)

The preservation of the self online - Erica Bartle asks ‘should we encourage young girls to create a public persona’? Social media now the photo albums of yesteryear, and with last night’s party on display for mothers, employers and exes to see, it’s pretty obvious we need to practice some precaution. But how much precaution? In interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, brand manager Sharon Williams suggests that not only should young girls self-censor, they should also develop a public persona. A brand identity of sorts.

”It’s like a tattoo,” Ms Williams, of Artarmon, said. “Parents need to take control and be responsible for their personal brand because as a child, you have no idea that in 15 years’ time or five years’ time, the effects of what you’re doing today will be wide-ranging and have the most extraordinary repercussions.”

However, Erica suggests internet fame is just another way for girls to compete with one another. (GWAS)

There’s a distinction between guidelines and “branding”, the latter connoting a deliberate imagining and projecting of one’s ideal image at a time when that image is in development and vulnerable to external influences. In the process of grappling with the public/private self dichotomy, I imagine many teens could become quite confused in the process. It’s exhausting keeping up appearances, let alone two or more of them! But the last word goes to Eugenie: “Perhaps we need a reminder that not all of us are destined for fame. Or as Mother would say, sometimes a little mystery isn’t such a bad thing.”

 Gertrude Stein gets her iPhone. Incomprehensible modernist poetry follows.

Beauty or brains? Scarlet over at Early Bird Catches the Worm asks which we would rather have, as well as which we would rather be known for. Whilst most people view the two as mutually exclusive, I think we can have both. Why not? (Early Bird Catches the Worm)

DREAM NERDBURGER

For a 15-year-old, Tavi sure is wise. I wish I was cool at 15. Heck, I wish I were this cool now! In this post she talks about beauty privilege, and how to undermine it without coming across as a complete jerk. (Style Rookie)

The general voice of my blog has been very much against the idea of those (or, in a way, any) standards for a long time, maybe not in so many words, but definitely in sprit. I once relished in an email I got saying I was an ugly boy because it felt like proof that I hadn’t given in to societal pressure to be pretty that girls usually feel affected by. I got all self reflecty on Tumblr about creating my own ideas of beauty. I wrote simply during September’s No Makeup Week that I never felt the urge to wear any. I used to dress much more frumpily and goofily, on here and in public real life. Which was great, and I loved it. But, as is the point of this blog, my style has changed a bit.

I would be lying to say it ends at simply wanting to try a different aesthetic of dressing, though. With one’s freshman year of high school comes a new batch of insecurities and a new kind of self-awareness. Except…I would be lying to say it ends there, too, because I know I’m smarter than that, and I know I have a good bullshit filter when it comes to conformity pressure in high school and women’s magazines and men’s magazines and industries that thrive on their female demographics’ insecurities.

Harry Potter and the girls who weren’t the chosen ones. Because the final Harry Potter came out this week, I couldn’t resist digging around for some old articles regarding the super girls in Harry Potter. Most of the feminist readings about Harry Potter lambast J.K Rowling as anti-feminist. Like, why is Harry not Harriet? Why is Dumbledore head master and not Professor McGonagal (never mind that he is replaced by Umbridge). Why are wands so phallic? Why don’t they wave around flowers? Why does patriarchy extend to the wizarding world?! Not so, says this article from Bitch magazine.

Hermione Granger is Rowling’s feminist presence in the novel, of course. We’re continually hit over the head with how clever she is, and it’s Hermione’s intelligent thinking that so often saves the day. Hermione is always guided by a strong set of ethics: She cares about social justice, as particularly embodied in her commitment to house elf rights where most of the wizarding world wouldn’t think twice about their status. She nurses a passion for Ron, her best friend with Harry, but never loses her dignity for it. (Her “Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have” line will never lose its punch.) And she’s brave. Hermione has a fierce kind of commitment to the fight for peace and justice running through the series, even when that means modifying her parents’ memories and sending them to Australia so they will be safe. She made it cool to be smart and forthright for a lot of girls.

BAM.


Read More

There she goes again.

By: admin
09-10-2010
features

I’m super excited about getting this article finally out into the world. I approached my university’s student magazine (the controversial, infamous and occasionally un-PC Tharunka) with the piece, and they’ve agreed to publish it in this year’s last edition. High fives all around.


It takes a strong, if not comfortably batty woman to affirm, “If I’m going to be miserable and sad, I might as well look glamourous whilst at it.” Sad but pretty, and depressingly alluring – crazy women are a modern fascination. It’s more than a vivid fascination with watching a burning wreck; there’s a beauty in the breakdown. It’s an assertion American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel makes in her neo-feminist non-fiction book Bitch, in one of her long winded but equally enrapturing chapters regarding the glamourisation of mental illness. Or, rather, the attitude towards an emerging open door policy on public discussion of mental diseases. Whether she was deducing that an air of “elegantly wasted” is merely the new riguer de jour, or that the beauty in the breakdown is simply an about face to mask some inner shame, is not entirely clear. However, the first point Wurtzel makes – that depression is the new black – shouldn’t be disregarded. Countless tell-all autobiographies line the shelves, as former drug addicts, murderers, and victims of abuse relay a life’s worth of confessions for the publishing world to capitalise upon.  We’ve got Maryan Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia; Toni’s Don’t Tell Daddy and an accompanying sequel detailing the incestuous rapes she was forced to endure at the hands of a frightening father figure; Sickened, a tale of a Manchausen’s By Proxy Childhood; Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s first book and autobiographical account of drug use, depression, suicide attempts and manic episodes; the list goes on and on. And readers devour these books; they’re enraptured by the pain of others. It’s almost as if these confessionals have the same impressiveness and air of authenticity as a doctor’s certificate. These autobiographies are like a Phd in life suffering. “I am a qualified battler,” they appear to be saying. “I have a case of the crazies, I’m loud, proud and out of control.”


Once upon a time mental illness was kept hush-hush. The inflicted were labotomised, with the removal of the frontal lobe ensuring the inflicted kept their mouths shut. Institutions kept the unconventionally morbid thinkers locked away, thus stigmatising a life-threatening disease and leaving other sufferers with a feeling that something just ‘aint right up in the top paddock. Alienation abounds, the viscous cycle continues. But where keeping mum was the trend when something was amiss with mother dearest, when society’s pretty poppies really failed to dazzle and wilted in the public view, open dialogue is now favoured over sweeping all the mess under the carpet. Let’s talk about our problems, we say. Let’s hold hands, join support groups, write novels about our inner conflict and psychotic dialogue.


Let’s take Sylvia Plath for example. The famous American poet was popularised and lauded for her confessional style prose throughout the 1950s, earning her place in publishing history, ordaining her emblematic of women’s literature. Plath gained a level of fame and relevancy her husband Ted Hughes never attained. Hughes does indeed have claim to a thrown of his own inside the literary sphere; he ranked 4th on The Times 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945 in 2008, and was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until he died in 1998. It is not a question of whether his collection of works was better than Plath’s, nor can the feminist argument regarding Hughes’ treatment of his wife really account for his smaller fan club. Deflecting blame for Plath’s suicide onto Hughes cannot be causal for the longevity of Plath’s work. But they do advance bibliophile favouritism towards her. Plath admirers label Hughes a heartless and brooding murderer, a talented killer without a tangible weapon, skilled in the arts of suppression and manipulation. Equipped with his upper hand in his and Plath’s emotionally volatile relationship, he is accused of accelerating the untimely death of a beloved patron saint of suffering. An alleged womaniser, apparently completely unfaithful to all of his wives, Assia Wevill even details his domestic tyranny in A lover of Unreason, an autobiographical look at Hughes’ mistreatment of his mistresses and bona fide partners. Plath’s highly depressed and insane behaviour (the poet was said to bathe at strange hours at other people’s dinner parties, and accounts of her biting fetish have also surfaced over the decades) romanticise her condition. It is without a doubt that her condition was the vehicle behind her famous works. Yes, Plath can attribute her success to insufficient serotonin levels. What’s your reason?


However, perhaps it’s not that these confessions are overly eager to embellish the disease, or eagerness to portray a striking similarity to the infamously disturbed Sylvia Plaths or Courtney Loves or Billie Holidays or Zelda Fitzgeralds. Maybe a desire to appear special, somewhat fragile and delicate and ultimately more complex, is not the driving force behind these biographical experiences. Perhaps an unwillingness to suffer in silence, and instead publicly support those who too share whatever affliction it may be is what’s actually behind all these confessional publications. You are not alone; I am damaged too. Human beings seek companionship, whether it’s congregational mourning such as African traditional bereavement, or a good bawling with friends over a packet of Tim Tams.


The scenario could possibly be that mental illness is a fact of life. With 45% of Australians aged 16-65 suffering from a mental illness at any point in their life (ABS, 2007), one could conclude that that big black tunnel’s getting a lot more cosier. The “over-diagnosis” of mental illness is something explored in Wurtzel’s first novel, the autobiographical Prozac Nation.  Is it comforting to find reprieve in the company of other medicated beings? Or is it a blow to our natural coping mechanisms, squandered and left to whither away after chemically-induced serotonin levels become naturalised, replace our instincts, and eventually become the norm? Is normal human emotion is now medicalised sadness?


 “Part of the appeal is stepping into someone else’s soap opera, but that’s not necessarily an exploitative thing,” says Rachel Hills, Phd student at UNSW. “People long to know what it would be like to live life in someone else’s shoes – that’s part of the appeal of any autobiography, or even a novel. I think it can be read as a display of empathy. There’s also the obvious appeal to people who are experiencing the same issues: many sociologists argue that when people feel different in some way, they will seek out narratives that help them make sense of their experiences.”


Mental health was a major issue at the last election (which, at the time of writing, we’re still in the middle of), with vigils held all over Australia by activist group Get Up! in support of a better mental health scheme. The big black dog doesn’t have to be the elephant in the room (nor the headline of every magazine).


Photo credit: Payton Guerra

 

Read More

What

I am 20-something-year-old who writes things. Sometimes I mention fashion, youth ISSUEZ, gender discussion, media analysis, and popular culture hype. Sometimes I'm NSFW. If you don't like that, that's ok. I still like you!

Daily Booth


check out my daily photostream @ dailybooth.com

Connect

Homepage
Flickr
Linked In
RSS
Tumblr

Live Stream

Copyright Disclaimer

All material, including feature articles, rants, slugs and photographs are the intellectual property of CAMILLA PEFFER unless otherwise stated. These may not be reproduced without explicit permission (see the Copyright Act of 1968 for some leisurely reading) . Where material reproduced on this blog is not my own, I do endeavour to give credit where necessary. Occasionally I like to feature the work of others, including a range of media such as videos, images, blog entries and feature articles. This material will be attributed and adored where necessary. If I have featured work of yours on GAMFP and not given you sufficient credit, please let me know!

© 2010 —Girls Are Made From Pepsi. All Rights Reserved. Powered by Wordpress.

Designed by Wpshower