TheBunnyBlog.com - March 16, 2007
Freedom 90
Before I knew where any of my fuckupage came from, before the years and years of self psycho analysis and research, before the therapy, and the journaling, and the ranting on the web to get my parts and pieces tagged, there was YM magazine.
Oh how I loved Young Miss magazine, lived for next month's issue of YM. My friend Carrie got me a subscription to it for my birthday in the seventh grade. All of my friends subscribed, and the day it showed up in our mailboxes (different days, as mail carriage was unpredictable due to the fact that half the postal service employees in town were Seasonal Affective drunkards), was a special holiday. It would be the day of the YM magazine soiree, during which we would read the issue cover to cover, take all the quizzes and then clip a new image for our locker decor.
This was 1990, the year of the supermodel, and we couldn't have been happier about it. You couldn't so much as breathe twice without hearing or seeing or smelling Cindy, Christy, Naomi, Elle, Linda, Claudia, their faces, bodies, perfumes etc. We each picked a supermodel as a personal talisman, decided upon democratically so there would be no overlap. George Michael's "Freedom 90" video was our favorite, of course, because it featured all our icons--save mine, Miss Elle McPherson--in sexy high-contrast states of undress. In case you don't remember, "Freedom 90" was heterosexual George MIchael keepin' it real, singing "You've got to give for what you rake." For the three and half minutes we acted out "Freedom 90" during after school hang out sessions, I did nothing, but my girlfriends did inspired impressions. Carrie was Linda Evangelista, and actually looked a bit like her with shorter hair and wonky nose. She'd sit in the corner lip-synching and then pull her sweater up over her head during the appropriate moment. Liz was Cindy Crawford in the bathtub. Cassie was Christy Turlington, and looked everything but regal as she burst through Carrie's kitchen doors--not french doors, tit-high chow station doors--in Carrie's grandmother's afghan. Later in the video, she'd smoke from a pencil squeezed between her chubby fingers like it was a cigarette. No one wanted to be Elaine Erwin because she had weird, squinty eyes and married a stupid redneck, but the most coveted "Freedom 90" role, the sexiest role of them all, was played by Heidi, who took on the heavy duty of portraying Naomi Campbell in a black headband, shakin' it with a whip. The whip was one of Carrie's rope belts. We were five pimpled girls from an area of the world not known for fresh genes or Hybrid Vigor, pretending to be the world's most fabulously beautiful women. We weren't even sure Cassie's parents weren't cousins.
When left to their own devices, adolescent girls are capable of engaging in an astounding amount of superficiality and beauty obsession.
Later, I picked up the nasty habit of hurling up lunch and dinner, though I always digested breakfast (it's the most important meal of the day, you know). I never thought about the behavior then, because I was just a kid. I procrastinated on the issue, and before I knew it, my hurling habit dug in, morphed and ended up being a big problem. I'm not sure if the other girls had a similar problem, as we went our separate ways after junior high. If I had to take a guess, I'd say a few of them did.
I got to college, and got militant, because that's what you do when you go away to college. You rebel against shit you know nothing about. You find something big and common, something unfair and oppressive, and you fight like hell to knock it down for specious reasons. I fought like hell against the beauty industry. Those fuckers made me puke (were making me puke). How dare they shove their femmebots in my face day and night! I read and reread and highlighted and dogeared Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth." I lectured everyone I knew. I told them that 150,000 women died each year of anorexia, a statistic I picked up from "The Beauty Myth," when the actual number of anorexia deaths per year was approximately 100. The fact checkers should have caught that one, don't you think? Now everyone I met in college thinks I'm an ass, even the ones I didn't puke on.
I renounced YM magazine. Truth was, I began pinching my thighs and calling myself unacceptable in the third grade, which was long before 1990. Elle McPherson never caused my fuckupage.
A few years ago, I was shopping in a drugstore. I ran into a piece of retouch work I did at my second agency job before I dropped out. I often run into old print pieces, package designs or ad work I did in the past. I get a kick out of it. Not too much of a kick anymore, but its still sort of a hoot. The retouch work was for a skin care line meant for acne sufferers, which must have been long defunct--since the box top wore a carpet of dust--and though I had once spent days laying out the back label design, toiling over each square pica till it was press ready, I was still repulsed by the photos on it. One was the before photo. One was the after. The before photo looked not unlike Heidi in her salad days, shakin' it with a whip, but lookin' like pizza. The after photo was what would have happened to Heidi had she been able to get her paws on the miracle elixir inside the pack. But what I knew, that other people did not know, was that the pretty skin in the after photo was not the result of using a "miracle elixir," but a miracle editing program called Adobe Photoshop.
(Different retouch job that looked similar to the one I did for the skincare line. Poor girl. She's actually quite stunning without the pimples, which is more than Carrie, Heidi, Cassie, Liz and I can say)
I wrapped models in fake skin all the time. Every graphic designer did. We bleached eyeballs, whitened teeth, took in thighs. It was our job.
I know there's no sense bitching about it, that the disordered have to take responsibility for our own actions, emotions, lives etc, and can't go around blaming photo retouchers for our issues. I realize that emotional fuckupage comes from a very primal place in early development, that it has roots in trauma and dependency, not Elle McPherson. But look at that after image, and tell me that's fair. Tell me its okay to have that kind of power over what's real and what isn't. Tell me its alright to touch up photos like that and put them in YM magazine where baby girls can get their hands on them. They could have had the best upbringing ever, and it wouldn't matter. Sooner or later, they would notice the difference between what's in the mirror and what's in the magazines, and feel like shit. Tell me that doesn't sting like a face full of acne. And when does the beauty industry have to give for what it rakes? Heterosexual George Michael certainly did.
Posted by The Bunny at 12:27 AM