I tend to use my personal facebook profile as a stress-ball, which often involves posting links to articles that irritate me to no avail.
And then people started telling me to "calm down", which, unless you happen to be a good friend of mine, pisses me off even further. Because you know, you SHOULD get angry about misogyny. You SHOULD get angry about body negativity. Not all of us just value going out and getting drunk, some of us like to share our rage with like-minded people.
And I also seem to post about lingerie a lot. No surprise there.
So I thought, rather than constantly update my facebook with links to article that range between "WTF" and "ARGH", perhaps I'll put them in a weekly blog post instead.
This week's light reading:
Triumph's Japanese division have created a bra inspired by a new economic plan - Because nothing says sexy like economics. Oh yeah, inflate that baby. Also: Company spokeswoman Keiko Masuda was quoted in The Guardian as saying, "we hope that, as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger." - this sounds vaguely threatening. What is she saying? We hope that we all become richer and therefore get fatter? Get breast implants? What?
Abercrombie & Fitch surprises no one by admitting that they don't want "plus-sized" (which in this case, is over size 16) customers - And apparently people are outraged by this turn of events.
24 Hour Street Harassment Diary - This article made me go "YES" by the end of it. A good read for any woman that has ever suffered street harassment (I remember two particularly upsetting cases for myself. One was when I was 17 or 18 and wore a just-above-knee-length skirt and skin coloured tights and had about 15 comments and leering looks from men while traveling on the train - and then I cried in the middle of Liverpool Street station and phoned my then-boyfriend to come and get me. The second was when I was waiting outside the Apple store for my boyfriend to finish work. I was wearing a playsuit with skin coloured tights. 3 separate men wouldn't stop harassing me. And that's why I don't wear skin coloured tights let alone BARE LEGS).
What if Gender Roles in Advertising Were Reversed? - Most of this isn't a surprise to me (although I don't think the tame M&S advert should be included, as the issue isn't that the IMAGE is sexualised, it's that many people unfortunately only equate lingerie to sex) but I hadn't seen a handful of these that are particularly shocking. Although the reversal is funny in this case, I don't believe that reversing the stereotypes is the way to equality.