Riots Not Diets

Here’s a very cute use of cross stitch in art. Flickr user Sparklyvodka (great name, like her already!) made these as a final project for an art course. These are all based on things the celebrities would never say. Although I wonder if there should be (in private) at the end of that statement..

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Cheers to Julie for the ace find!

Speaking of skinny girls with eating disorders. I am certainly adding my voice to the outrage against the Miss Bimbo online game. I am not linking to it because I don’t believe they need any more encouragement.

Basically the game involves playing games on their website to earn Bimbo dollars which are then spent on making your virtual body look hot. Options include diet pills and plastic surgery. The hotter ie skinnier your Bimbo is, the better you get ranked against other users of the site.

This offends me on so many levels. Most of the press has been around parents being outraged. And as a parent I am outraged. I get petrified at the thought of how to explain the world in a rational way to a teenager now. I can’t even imagine how I’m gonna get a teenager through to her 20s without an eating disorder/drug addiction etc in 15 years time.

But I’m more angry as a woman. I saw one of the developers of the site on tv nonchalantly shrugging off concerns of parents as no big deal. I don’t think it had occurred to him that people might find this offensive. He claimed that their site isn’t anything new, it’s all stuff that’s around in society anyway. But he was wrong.

This site is turning the physical mutilation of women for the purposes of men’s voyeuristic pleasure into a virtual competition. It’s turning it into a game, with mass participation. This has a massive desensitisation effect for very young impressionable minds. Participants of this game can experience the social ‘benefits’ of plastic surgery without ever having the deal with the costs, both physical, emotional and financial of the actual surgery.

I’m angry that some young men thought that it would be a nice profit making venture to exploit the competitive drive amongst young women.

And I’m really pissed off that they put craft on the front page.

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