Come to a free Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body workshop on Friday, January 1st

2:15 – 3:15 at the JCC Manhattan 334 Amsterdam Avenue (at 76th Street).

It’s a full day event with workshops, exercise classes, yoga, and meditation–and everything is free!  Check out the schedule HERE.

Hope to see you there!

In my last post about the amazing Valerie Boyer and her efforts in France to force magazines to label images that have been altered in an effort to to destroy the illusion of female perfection that women are bombarded with everyday in the media by reminding them that the images are fake, I talked about my wish for having someone in the government get behind this cause in the US.

This morning while flipping through the New York Times Styles section I stumbled upon this letter to the editor regarding last week’s article Point, Shoot, Retouch and Label:

To the Editor:
We, the psychotherapists of the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute are excited to discover our French “sister movement” across the sea.  We are a group of female therapists who have been taking a stand for decades against the media’s total disregard for the female body, and the message that there is only one right way to “be” a woman. We join arms with Valerie Boyer and invite her to participate in “Endangered Species:  Preserving the Female Body,” our new campaign, for which we are organizing and international summit to take place in New York City in 2011.
Signed
Anne Wennerstrand – The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, NYC

And now I will be joining arms with the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute (and they’re right here in my own backyard!) to further this cause here in the US.  That’s their logo up there, isn’t it AWESOME??

Finding out about this group without having to hunt them down just feels like a miracle.  Since reading the article last week I have been obsessed with the thought of striking out and starting a movement here in the US–what a gift to find out that this group exists and has already done so much good work to advance this cause.  I’m really not into the holidays but I have to say I got the best gift ever this year…stay tuned–I’ll be updating on my involvement with The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute and their efforts over the next few months.  And all I can say to women’s magazines across the U.S. is–”Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.”

Every once in a while the New York Times Styles section surprises me.  Normally the bastion of out of reach fashion and elitism, yesterday’s section contained an article written about someone who was part of the solution and not the problem for a change.

Meet Valerie Boyer,  a member of French Parliament who has caused a stir in France by drafting a law that requires all digitally altered photographs of people used in advertising to be labeled as retouched.  Her goal:  to destroy the illusion of female perfection that women are bombarded with everyday in the media by reminding them that the images are fake.
“Retouched photos are a deception, an illusion, and we must think about the consequences” says Boyer.

The article is here.  If you have time, watch the video that goes along with it, it’s very informative.

Naturally the media is fighting back with their self-serving arguments.  “Michelangelo painted idealized bodies, so the idea of idealized beauty was already there” says Anne-Florence Schmitt, editor of Madame Figaro magazine. And Christine Leiritz, Editor in Chief of Marie Claire takes the position that labels on retouched photographs will only tell the reader what they already know.  Really?  I had no idea that a Ralph Lauren ad with the model Filipa Hamilton was retouched so that her waist was reduced to the width of her head.  How would I ever know that if someone didn’t tell me?  And how is this NOT a crime?  There’s retouching to clean up a photo and then there’s digital alteration that remakes a body into something that is a physical impossibility and that’s the real issue is here.  A distinction needs to be made between retouching a photo by cleaning up blemishes, stray hairs and brightening and altering an image to the point where it bears no relationship to the original. It’s this kind of deception that is so damaging to women and their self-images and should be stopped.  It’s all gone way too far and I’m thankful that Valerie Boyer is stepping out to do something about it.  Now if we could only get Hilary Clinton to rally around this issue here in the U.S.