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Happen to be a morning person?
If so, check me out this SUNDAY, July 2nd on NBC's Weekend Today Show. They're airing a segment featuring an interview with me about All Made Up, celebrity hype, teen girls etc... it's going to be on at around 7:15 or 7:20 am local time (meaning no matter which time zone you're in.... that's what time it should come on)
If you get NBC... you should be able to see it!
Awwww yeah.....
The Turn Beauty Inside Out conference got off to a GREAT start today. There are over a hundred girls and their parents/mentors in attendance until Saturday midday on St. John's University campus in Queens, New York City... and there's just a boatload of positive energy for creating change, raising awareness and making a difference when it comes to representations of women in the music industry...
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Today's keynote speaker was the amazing Blanche Williams, XM radio host of Greatness By Design, a talk show that focuses on the stories behind men and men and women of greatness.
She had all sorts of inspiring quotes and perspectives to share with teens and parents in attendance, including:
"I am what I believe I am"
"I see the greatness in your girlness"
"I am beautiful
I am greatness
I am me"
She also pointed out that every great woman we can name/think of/recognize was once just a girl dreaming and thinking of what to do with her life.... AND that well-behaved women rarely make history.
Can I get an AMEN to that!?!?!
More tomorrow or Friday (after my own gig....)
Just saw a most interesting TV commercial last night (and by interesting, I mean totally distressing).
It was for a Diurex, "Long acting water caplets." Which also now use the slogan "The 'Skinny- Jeans' medicine!"
Now weightloss/water pills are nothing new. They've probably been on the market since the 1950s... but to explicitly linking them to "skinny jeans' which is so Sex and the City and women's magazines of today ("'Help! I need to fit into my skinny jeans by Friday night!") is. 
The part I like the best (and by like the best, I mean that horrifies me greatly) is the silhouette of the dancing woman on the package. It seems to say 'Yesssss! I've tricked by body into thinking it's thinner!"
*****
On another note: as of tomorrow, I'll be presenting at Turn Beauty Inside Out 2006 for the next few days. LOTS of cool speakers and activists...plus several hundred teen girls and parents. Will blog the highlights!
Quick post for today cause I have a million meetings.
But check this out:
Yet just because adults know this is going on... doesn't mean teens do.
Amazing stuff
This trend--"hip" restaurants hiring models to lie still and act as serving platters bearing sushi--has been kicking around for a few years. It's back again now, and it's gross on so many levels.
Apparently Diablo's Downtown Lounge in Eugene, OR is now jumping on the band wagon because (according to a recent news article) the trend is
"growing in popularity in Portland, Seattle and throughout the country.
This exotic and erotic feast of the senses is not about pornography or sleaziness, nor is it meant to demean women, said Jessi Wilcox, Diablo's events coordinator.
"It's art," she said.
Actually, it's not. At least I don't believe it is in this case. She's using that word as a defense of actions that she knows and we know aren't art. If it were art, it probably wouldn't be taking place at an average restaurant and used to draw people in and spend money on sushi. It's about nakedness in a crass, commercial sense that's buying into and advancing the pornification of our culture. (Of course, I am NOT saying that art can only happen in museums or in places of high culture. So don't try to trip me up on my argument there. You know what I mean.) This is about sensationalism, nakedness, and making money.
And this is the part that really, really makes me mad: (from the same news article)
"In 2003, a group of Asian-American women in Seattle protested a Pioneer Square restaurant, Bonzai, that offers naked sushi, saying treating women like a serving platter reinforces attitudes that make domestic and sexual violence so prevalent in American society.
Bonzai's response? It had two men come down on the next occasion, strip to their boxer shorts, and let people eat doughnuts off them, before hiring them as permanent naked sushi models, according to The Seattle Times."
GRRRRRRRRR. I HATE that reductionist approach of tit for tat. The point is not to have men strip down and lick their bodies. That doesn't really do much at all to counteract bodies-for-commerce. And don't get wrong: I'm not a prude, or against sexy images etc etc. But I AM against another, new method example of women (cause for the most part the sushi models that have been reported on in the press over the past few years ARE women) being paid for their bodies (bodies that conform to a certain look, as sushi and other models do) instead of their other attributes.
I'm in the process of reading the most amazing book called Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Out Daughters from Marketers' Schemes by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown, two well-respected academics and authors. I'm going to be doing an interview with them for Bitch magazine ("The Feminist Response to Pop Culture") that's going to be published sometime this fall.
Some of the things I've learned from Packaging Girlhood:
The book comes out in August... and is so so worth picking up, whether or not you have a daughter!
