Only watch if you want to kill 5 minutes and get your mind off of something major.

Abortion Language in the Health Care Bill: Another Women’s Smackdown and What to Do

From NY Mag – by Amy Siskind

When Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-Neb.) abortion language was added to the Senate health care bill, a Republican member of my organization sent me this email: “Don’t blame us. It’s your party and president that started this mess.”

Is it me, or is Obama’s health care bill increasingly like the movie Groundhog Day? Another day, another women’s health smackdown.

Ladies, we are a bargaining chip – and apparently, not a very big one. Women’s health is under assault. Mammograms, pap smears, the Stupak Amendment and the Nelson language are all part of the wake up call of our generation.

As 2009 draws to a close, women stand at a crossroad of possibility. In 2009, women made significant strides in combating overt sexism and, at long last, elected a woman candidate because of, not despite, her gender. Yet, if women don’t wake up and restructure our activism, the basic privileges and liberties that we have all taken for granted for several decades could well be fleeting.

The good news – women have the power to effectuate change. After the 2008 misogyny-fest, we said “no more” to overt sexism. As a result, 2009 might well be dubbed The Year of the Apology. Chris Matthewsapologized on behalf of Dick Armey for Armey’s comment to Joan Walsh. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.)apologized for calling Fed Adviser Linda Robertson a “K Street Whore.” Letterman apologized (twice) for his “jokes” about Governor Palin’s teenage daughter. Heck, even Chris Brown apologized for almost strangling Rihanna to death.

Women also flexed their muscles this year up in Massachusetts where Martha Coakley won a landslide victory in the state’s primary election for Ted Kennedy’s vacant senate seat. Yes, Coakley is poised to become that state’s first female senator. Yes, Coakley would become our country’s 18th woman senator (a record). But the most compelling takeaway is this: Martha won because of, not despite, her gender. Coakley’s campaign was successfully able to harness the support of women and women’s organizations from around the country.

If our country and women were ready in 2008, we could have used the Coakley template to elect our first woman president. And yes, in the last few months we’ve heard a fair amount of “I told you so’s” from Hillary Clinton supporters. But as we embark on 2010, it’s time to put that aside and move forward. In 2010, women need to unite and work to get more women in leadership roles.

Why the call to action? I’ll sum it up in one word: Mammogram. The new mammogram guidelines came from a government agency in Obama’s Democratic Administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson had actually rebuked a similar recommendation in 2002 under the W. Bush Administration. That the mammogram recommendations were even made public is emblematic of the weakened state of women’s bargaining power.

Our saving grace would be our women leaders — of both parties. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) co-sponsored an amendment to the Senate’s health-care bill. Meanwhile, other women leaders, including Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R-Calif.) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), have also spoken out on behalf of women. If not for this bipartisan effort on the part of our women leaders, women in their 40s would have become the first target of health care rationing.

And the battle is only beginning. Rationing pap smears has also been mentioned.

Question: How is it possible that our country could considering cutting back preventative screenings for breast cancer and cervical cancer; yet not a word about taxpayer funding of Viagra? How can this be?

The Nelson language is just another notch. And whether or not you are pro-choice, here’s again the takeaway: All aspects of women’s health are under assault. Who knows what will be rationed or taken away next?

In 2010, we must elect more women into positions of power. And, we need to reformulate the old game plan of only focusing on Democratic women. It’s a losing strategy. In 2009, we learned that we cannot count on the Democratic Party to stand up for women. We can, however, count on women politicians to stand up for women.

For here’s the other aspect: We cannot control the political climate around us. Four of the 10 most vulnerable Senate seats in 2010 are held by Democratic women: Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). We need to cultivate and finance women from all parties. We need strong candidates for every political headwind and tailwind.

And, yes, we can do this. Our progress in 2009 shows that when women unite around an issue, we will prevail. We said “no more” to the misogynyfest of 2008 and we prevailed. We said “yes” to making history in Massachusetts and achieved that too. In 2010, we must roll up our sleeves – women of all ages – and work to get more women into positions of leadership. Simply put: Our health and well being depends on it.

Congrats to the cool kids in the U.K.  You won the battle!  Rage Against the Machine takes dominance over the Christmas single chart this year.

You’ll thank me!

Every season there are a few new models that stand out – be it for grace on the runway and or off. After the Spring 2010 shows, these are the models on my radar:

Lindsey Wixson

Frida Gustavsson

Abbey Lee

Laura Halm

Sara Blomqvist

Emily DiDonato

Alana Zimmer

Yulia Leontieva

Pernille Moeller

Martha Hunt

Mathilde Julia Frachon

Jessica Cline

Lena Lomkova

Emma Beam

Jen Messelier

Melo Dagault

Sharon Kavjian

Untitled from Victor Del Toro on Vimeo.

OK – As I sit in England with snow covering the trees and anticipate the first white Christmas I’ve had in 10 years I actually want to leave, get on a plane back to sunny los angeles and go to Target.  Yes, Target!

…to buy this!!!

Rodarte for Target – $39.99

… and then back to England in time for New Years and my birthday so I can wear my socialite inspired party dress.

Two of the smartest most creative men in fashion & beauty are together for fashion week. What to come from Francois Nars for Marc Jacobs spring 2010 runway collection is most anticipated by junkies like myself world-wide.  60 looks are on their way –  we’ll experiment and let you know the tricks after the show.

Shown here is an editorial Francois Nars created with photographer Steven Meisel and hair stylist Oribe Canales. 

…and of course miss Heather Burton herself holding up her portfolio with the new Marc Jacobs ad she’s in that ran in WWD. Party time it is!

Love love love – xo

…from Mail Online

The wobbly bits that shook the world: The joyous support created by one model’s picture (flabby tummy and all)

By Linda Kelsey

At first glance it’s just the kind of playful picture your boyfriend might snap of you, caught unawares on a lazy Sunday morning. The subject looks glowing, happy, natural, totally at ease with her body and herself.

But something is awry. Something that causes you to do a double-take. Especially given that this photo has just appeared in a glossy magazine. By now, I bet you’ve spotted it. What I am referring to is the small roll of fat around the middle of this 20-year-old model.

It might be a tiny imperfection, but when it was published in the American edition of Glamour magazine, it appeared amid hundreds of pages of adverts and fashion shots in which the models have no blemishes, no frown lines, no wrinkles and certainly no body fat.

Defying convention: Lizzie Miller’s tummy has featured as a story on America’s morning TV programme Today, one of the most-watched shows in the country

So what impact did this little mound of flesh have? Were women disgusted that such an offensive thing should be displayed in public?

Well, even though it was only 3in square and hidden away on page 194, this extraordinary image of a woman with wobbly bits that have not been airbrushed away has sparked a whirlwind of reaction – almost all of it positive.

Hundreds of readers flooded the magazine’s website the moment after the image first appeared, roaring their approval and appreciation with comments like: ‘I love this picture. I was starting to despair of ever seeing real women in magazines and it made me reassess how I look at myself. I have a similar tummy which I hate – but look at her, she’s beautiful.’

Groundbreaking: Lizzie -who is 5ft 11in and 121/2st – is considered too big to model even plus-size lines

Such was the excitement that Lizzie Miller’s tummy featured as a story on America’s morning TV programme Today, one of the most-watched shows in the country.

Now Glamour is planning a follow-up feature in November’s issue which will include more shots of Miller.

Many of the women who spoke out in support of the image were horrified that professional Lizzie – who is 5ft 11in and 121/2st – is considered too big to model even plus-size lines.

Having been rejected as too big, she said the reaction to her picture proves ‘that the world is hungry to see pictures of normal women’. She’s so right.

What also gives this image such sledgehammer power is that it’s not her breasts or her upper arms or her thighs that draw the eye immediately, but the stomach – the area of every woman’s body that inspires more agonies of self-loathing than any other.

You might be a mother who, however hard you try, simply cannot shift what has cruelly been dubbed the ‘mummy tummy’. Or you might be a young woman who likes a glass of wine and is paying the price with a bulging midriff that just never responds to sit-ups.

Of course, when we dress up to go out we can always rely on one variety or another of Bridget Jones’s big hold-em-in pants. But when we are naked in front of the mirror, there is no disguising a sagging tummy. That’s why it’s so groundbreaking to see a beautiful woman who is a model, even if a curvy one, willing to reveal that she, too, has the same imperfections as the rest of us.

In its way, this picture has as much power to shock as the photograph of actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who seven years ago stripped to her underwear at 43 – without the aid of an airbrush – to prove that even a woman who was once Hollywood’s pin-up girl had matured to have as many lumps and bumps as the rest of us.

When I was editing SHE magazine in the early Nineties, we decided to produce a special ‘Big is Beautiful’ issue. We ran a competition to award a modelling contract to a size 14-plus model, and featured women naked who were far larger than Lizzie Miller. We also ran a picture of the famously fat Dawn French on the cover, showing off her considerable decolletage in a knockout vermilion Vivienne Westwood dress.

That issue of the magazine flew off the shelves to become a complete sell-out, the fastest and highest-selling issue in the six years I was editor.

I made a vow from then on to feature women of all shapes and sizes, and not just in specially flagged-up features. I thought that perhaps in the dozen years since I stopped editing glossy magazines things would have changed.

I hoped that, along with reality television and an appetite for real-life stories of every hue, real-life women with real-life bodies might begin to appear in other glossy magazines and across the media.

But what seems to have happened is quite the reverse. Just look at Sophie Dahl, who arrived like a blazing comet on the fashion scene as a gloriously sensual size 14, but who then began to shrink before our very eyes until she was wafer thin, presumably because she was constantly surrounded by images of female perfection.

And if models and celebrities are not actually perfect, they sure as hell will be by the time their images appear on the newsstands.

As Lizzie Miller herself has said: ‘Pretty much every picture in a magazine or ad is airbrushed . . . I don’t think the public understands how much smoke and mirrors are involved in making women look like that.’

AT A GLANCE…

• 8 per cent of women have a classic hourglass figure
• 34in is the typical British woman’s waist. In the Fifties, it was 27.5in
• 20 per cent of women are pear-shaped

On this last point, I think Lizzie is wrong. Almost everyone these days is aware that photographs are re-touched. Kate Winslet went public about her thighs when they were airbrushed almost to the point of disappearing altogether when she appeared on the cover of GQ.

Keira Knightley’s breasts have suddenly acquired a bigger cup size in the new Chanel ad, and everyone is talking about her breasts as if they own them.

But even if we are aware of what goes on in the world of showbiz and fashion, that doesn’t mean we should be blase about it, or pretend it has nothing to do with us. Being bombarded with perfect images everywhere just makes us despair all the more about our imperfect bodies.

If all those celebrities, with their personal trainers, personal nutritionists, personal stylists, hairdressers and make-up artists, world-class photographers and expert lighting, can’t be seen in pictures without being airbrushed, what might the rest of us need before being deemed acceptable to be seen in public? A full body transplant, perhaps.

The only genuine media breakthrough in recent years as far as the portrayal of real women is concerned has been the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty, featuring women of all ages, shapes and sizes.

Not only did women respond well to it, Unilever was canny enough to make the campaign ongoing. Never mind that it’s all part of its brand-boosting campaign to sell more products, The Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which provides teachers with educational tools to include body awareness seminars within schools, is at least a stab at raising the issues involved.

Even Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, entered the fray recently when she criticised prominent fashion designers for encouraging Size Zero models by sending out tiny clothes for fashion shoots.

In an open letter, she wrote: ‘We have now reached the point where many of the sample sizes don’t comfortably fit the established star models.’

She also pointed to the trend for ‘jutting bones and no breasts or hips’ and how such body shapes are a result of the ‘minuscule’ pieces of clothing supplied to the magazine for photo shoots.

Vogue is regularly re-touching photos to make the models look larger, she told the designers. But how much larger, I wonder. From a Size Zero to a size 2 or 4 perhaps? Almost even up to Kate Moss’s ‘gigantic’ proportions? The trouble is, when you’re talking about Vogue, it’s all relative isn’t it? In high-end magazines like that, you will rarely see anything so provocative as this new picture of Lizzie Miller.

Illnesses have taken me to a level of skinniness which horrified me, but as soon as the weight has come back on I’ve begun to feel discontent again with what I’ve got, pinching disconsolately at myself, castigating myself for not watching the levels of cholesterol in my diet or going to the gym.

In the past six months I’ve put on about 12lb and my washboard stomach is now a small mound – rather like Lizzie Miller’s, in fact.

It’s ironic when you think about it that mostly it’s not men who make us paranoid about our bodies – they often don’t even notice imperfections that we agonise over for years. It’s the magazines for sure that chip away at self-esteem.

Perhaps one small picture of lovely Lizzie Miller and her little pot belly – just like the women currently prancing in all their variety around the London stage in Calendar Girls – isn’t going to make much of a difference to this chronic and complex condition of female body dissatisfaction.

But it’s a step in the right direction. Unless we start addressing the issues, unless we wise up to the fact that our body fantasies can never be fulfilled, we’ll continue to be pointlessly unhappy for a long time to come.

Photography and words by Eryka Clayton

Senses I never new existed were heightened and brought to complete balance. This land is a bounty of natural wonders, opportunities for adventure, historic richness and culture. There is something magical about Jordan that centered me while I embarked on adventures that will be significant for a lifetime.

10 miles from the Dead Sea, nestled 800 feet below sea level and surrounded by the Ma’in Hot Springs that were once used by pilgrims, lays Six Senses Resort and Spa; my home base for the next 6 days. Ecstasy.

Highlights

The Dead Sea is famous for being therapeutic and impossible to sink in- and its reputation is accurate.  Fact: The Dead Sea is evaporating quickly.  Locals are working hard to channel water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea to slow down the process.  As this will save the Dead Sea, it will also change it so time is of the essence is you want to experience the Dead Sea for all it has to offer.

Petra is one of the new 7 wonders of the world!  This Nabatean stone city is dated back to 9BC and still has Bedouin families living there full time.  I was lucking enough to have one of the locals guide me through.  I energetically made it 3 miles into the city, sighting proof of ancient civilizations before calling for a Jordanian taxi (donkey) to take me back to the car.

Six Senses Spa is one of the most unique spas in the world and took me on a full day sensory journey. Each treatment is given in a private spa suite and ends with relaxation time by a private spa hot spring accompanied by dried fruit, nuts, and fresh ginger tea.

Learning my favorite new recipe by At the Springs Executive Sous Chef Hamzeh Abu El Foul:

Kofta

Lamb Chop meat (fresh lamb only)

Pepper

Salt

Garlic

Olive Oil

Parsley

Bell Pepper

*Mix together and serve raw for an appetizer

www.sixsenses.com

www.visitjordan.com