A Quick Note on Miley. . . This article appeared after Miley Cyrus came under fire for her choice of clothing on her latest album cover.
When answering the accusations levelled at her, Ms. Cyrus responded with the following words:
"I'm really comfortable with my body..."
Yes, again. Funny how "being comfortable" with your body always means showing it off.
Fare thee well, Facebook!So I deleted my facebook account.
Yes, sites like Facebook and Bebo are very useful - Facebook helped me keep in touch with people I knew in school, for example - but it was also driving me up the wall.
You see, at the time I said my last goodbye to Facebook, I was incredibly lonely. I could go for literally days on end without speaking to anyone apart from my teachers and my family. Everyone I knew had simply vanished......a few people did tell me that they had too much work to do, but only a few.
Here's where I'm going with this: The people I know in real time? I was their friend on Facebook. You know how Facebook works - whenever your friends write something, it appears on your homepage - so I would go onto Facebook, and on my homepage I would see these supposedly hard-working friends in pictures taken in the pub; at the weekly parties the unions in my university throw; in nightclubs; in each others houses; out shopping.....they were everywhere, apart from the places they were supposed to be.
What happened? What happened to community? To paraphrase Wendy Shalit in Girls Gone Mild, I'm sure that people would willingly link to me online, but I want more.
When did we stop going on walks together?
When did we stop visiting each other?
When did we stop greeting each other as we walked along the street?
I want these things. I want to go on walks, I want to see someone face to face - I want to greet random strangers, and maybe brighten their day.
I want what a real community offers - I want to know I'll never be alone, that there will always be someone there for me, who I can be there for in turn. I want to reach out and feel the touch of a flesh and blood person, not the coldness of a computer screen.
I just don't want what Facebook offers anymore. Their "community is a soulless husk," a shadow of what we had, and what so many people want back.
People Confused about the Meaning of SuggestionI recently picked up an issue of Vogue and was flipping through it, when an article on "the power of suggestion" caught my eye. I (naive young thing that I am lol) immediately thought that maybe, just maybe, here was an article about how being fully clothed was better by far than letting everything hang out.
How wrong I was.
I won't bore (and possibly disgust) you with the details of that article. Suffice it to say that the author had some very....interesting ideas about clothing. Apparently it is not enough for us to wear low cut blouses anymore - now we have to give the "suggestion' that we are in imminent danger of falling out of them. Ditto for skirts....now they have to be so short that a flash of underwear seems inevitable...though of course, such wardrobe malfunctions will never happen if you follow the advice in the article! The author advocated the use of....double-sided sticky tape, to stick clothes to the body of the wearer, in order that, in the case of blouses, buttons can be left nearly completely unbuttoned without any fear of clothing actually falling off/flapping open. If I never hear about double-sided sticky tape again, it will be too soon, I tell you.
I think the person who wrote the article was very confused. It made me quite sad, actually......how far have we come, that we have to pretend that our clothes are falling off?!
What happened to the *real* power of suggestion? How about wearing full length sleeves, and then letting people catch a glimpse of the sleeve of your chemise underneath? (all right - my tastes are a bit old fashioned) How about lining your tweed skirt with pale pink satin, and then putting in a kick pleat so that the lining shows occasionally?
These things are suggestive - these things are sexy. The added bonus is that there needn't be a wardrobe malfunction in sight.
Dobule-sided tape? I mean really--how low are we going to stoop?!
Fashion Victim?I read in Vogue this month that making women look tough and sexy was back on the agenda of fashion designers. Seems to me that making women look sexy was never off the agenda. Necklines are getting lower and lower, and skirts are getting higher and higher. I don’t follow fashion, because in comparing myself to the pictures on the page, I feel like the least fashionable person on the planet.
The fact is, I like long skirts, and I don’t feel comfortable wearing a top with a neckline that’s lower than my collarbone. I especially don’t like showing off my cleavage.
At the same time, I’m always reading in fashion magazines that "women’s clothes are looking more feminine," yet it’s always the same: plunging necklines and side slits. Honestly, someone needs to give the fashion industry a ring and tell them they got feminine mixed up with sexy.
On the one hand, I suppose whatever makes you feel feminine; on the other, whenever I try to look feminine, I am made to feel by others that I am a frump. I have actually had people pointing at me and saying to their friends: "look at her skirt!"
I think this is the true meaning of fashion victim. I, and the other teen girls like me, are the real victims of fashion in that we’ve been forgotten about. I’m fed up with being left to rot on the compost heap. It’s time someone told the fashion industry that not all of us care to "flash our flesh," and to stop leaving us out.
Too many masks.I remember, when I started wearing modest clothes on a regular basis, one of the things I noticed was the number of women who glared at me when I was doing totally normal things, like sitting on the bus, or walking down the street. Don't mistake me - when I say they glared at me, I mean GLARED. If looks could kill, I would be a smear on the wall. I always wondered why, and finally settled on the opinion that it was simply because I looked different to them, and to the other women around me.
It seems as good an explanation as any, doesn't it? It could even be backed up by science, if you wanted it put another way. There is an instinct in the brain that makes us fear things that are different or unusual. It probably came in quite handy back in the day ;)
However, the other day I was reading (a fashion magazine, ironically enough) and the author of the piece (to paraphrase) mentioned that women felt compelled to be who they were not, to put a mask on and pretend that they were comfortable with who they were and so on. I doubt that she intended for her words to be interpreted this way, but the thought crossed my mind - maybe these women glare at me because I do not pretend to be comfortable in the modern fashions? Perhaps they wish they could dress in what them comfortable, instead of what society dictated they should wear.
People are always telling me that women choose to dress the way they do. I must disagree, and not just on the grounds that, as Wendy puts it, 'people wear what they can find'.
I've read several articles in magazines lately that carry the common thread I mentioned above, that of women wanting to be more than what they appear to be. Should we view this as a sign of hope for the modesty movement? Perhaps women are finally getting tired of always wearing a mask.
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