Adventures of Barbarella

Give peace a chance. (requested: Self-Confidence)

This is the second time I write this, I'm hoping for spontaneity. I tried to bullet point earlier and I went on a four-page rampage on Feminism. Maybe I'll save that draft for my future Empire Manifesto. (In my future Empire, we will all dress like Cleopatra. Plotting the headpieces as we speak.)

So anyway- confidence. A lot of friends have requested I write this, so hey thank you. If you think I know anything about confidence, I'm flattered. It's not really something I give much thought to and I wasn't sure how to tackle this, it's such a huge subject, everything is connected to it.

This Summer I attended a Buddhist centre where we focused our study on self-healing practices and inner peace. For me, that is what confidence is: to be in peace with yourself. If you look it up in the dictionary, you'll find "to believe in your power and abilities" but you know what? If you are in peace, then chances are you believe in yourself. Why wouldn't you? The opposite would be to be in conflict and live in fear- coincidentially, the default status of modern society.

So to answer all the questions I get on "how to be", I would say, when you focus on being with all your energy, and you're positive, thankful, useful, honest, in tune with your spirit and your senses, then you'll be confident. 

God, how fabulous is she?

(Newsletter from the London Academy of Burlesque, that I had the pleasure to attend and that has truly shaped me forever)

New Feminism: Adrogynous

I'm taking inspiration from fashion to name this article, although what I want to talk about is independent from it. I was reading an article this morning that encouraged me to say something on the subject: one in an old Marie Claire, that went on about the phenomenon of succesful women abandoning their careers for the burka and converting to Islam. While I think that's a little extreme and I have no interest in being quite so vocal, I can see the attraction in desexualising oneself; I'm going through this phase right now.

Girls with bottoms

This is entirely a complaint.

I fail to understand why female clothes are in their majority cut in the shape of a stick.

Take this skirt for instance:




It made me so furious I swear I had smoke coming out of my nose. Insert current facebook status:






It's not even a size 0, it's just a size stupid. And they dared call it "true to size"! True to what size? a child with a beer belly? I realise we all come in different shapes, but if we're gonna choose a standard figure to make our clothes on, can we choose a suitable 90-60-90?? If anything, a shapely dress sculpts you for the better. A dress with no shape will look bad in fatties, skinnies and sticks alike.

ITS NOT ASTROPHYSICS!

I am so fed up I'm starting a category dedicated to hips.

2010 Memorable Mentions

When the sensational mama Jo spoke during our Striptease class about how confidence is everything. She was so right, and so eloquent when she said (i misquote her):

"Those women that walk around, head up high, with airs of grandeur and behave as if they were the prettiest, most desirable thing to exist..We love to hate them, and we might complain and moan to other women.."look at that girl..the way she dresses, the way she talks, flaunts, struts..

Isn't she FABULOUS?""

Plus Sized: The Circus

 
The acclaimed W plus size model pictures. I'm sorry, but when a model looks this sexual, it stops being fashion and it becomes men magazine glamour.

I could care less about how skinny or fat she is, that's not the point. Fashion models are not only skinny; they're mannequins, they're awkward, they're freaks and ghosts, they transform themselves. No one is trying to claim they're sexy, they don't look sexual or pretty. They are transparent. YOU DON'T SEE THEM. They work to present clothes.

So yea, fashion modelling FAIL. That said,  I applaud these and I think there is a big big gap to be filled by curvy commercial models in men's magazines.  

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FAT VS SKINNY and the Real Woman

I refuse to go into this topic for longer than necessary, but I am offended at how the media has been presenting this "issue".

My thoughts:

a) Fat is not better than skinny. Skinny is not better than fat.
b) "Real women" are not fat. We're all real women.
c) No one should be bullied for being fat or skinny.
d) Being skinny should not be associated to malnutrition or eating disorders. It's incorrect, and it's misleading.
e) Being skinny doesn't give you superpowers that will allow you to do better at everything in life.

Being fat or skinny is not a bloody problem!

Also, and this is an entirely different subject, but obsessing over doing what other people with different qualities are doing is not "challenging" and it does not "prove" anything. It's stupid! All these "feminist ideas" with women wanting men jobs and fat women wanting skinny girl jobs and vice versa. It's dumb. We're all different and we do different things.

Why can't we all be ballet dancers? Why can't we all be firemen? Oh, here's an idea. Why can't fat ballerinas with eating disorders be firemen? That would sure PROVE like, everything.

Lady Gaga should make a song out of it

Excerpt from "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters"

"To claim that girls and women want to look like blonde bombshells because of the billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine advertisements makes as little sense as to claim that people become hungry because they are bombarded with images of food in the media. If only the media would stop inundating people with images of food, they would never be hungry! Women’s desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia."

 

"

1 in 4 teenage girls will experience major depression, self-mutilation, binge eating, a serious suicide attempt or notable aggression before age 2. Expectations for teenage girls to be brainy, athletic, nurturing, and look like supermodels - while juggling homework, social networking and resumé-padding activities - are fueling a generational mental health crisis, according to a new book by University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Stephen Hinshaw.

Duh! In a male dominated society where balance between male and female has been lost, we're expected to be all we were a century ago (female) in its best version because we now have aesthetically perfect celebs to look up to, and at the same time accomplish everything males did then. To top it off we shall do it faster, since our greatest power is youth, and the world demands it in both love and career.