Fit is a Feminist Issue, Link Round Up #25

This is where we share stuff we can’t share on Facebook page for fear of being kicked out! Read why here. Usually the posts are about body image, sometimes there’s nudity but we’re all adults here. Right?

By the way, Facebook recently clarified its stance on nudity, writing, “We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks. We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring. We also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures.” For the full story see here.

Why does a fitness blog even care about body image? You can read about that here.

• ‘Get ‘Em Off’: Vintage documentary on London’s striptease artists (Very NSFW)

  They’re naked and they dance—is a fair description of Get ‘Em Off a documentary that celebrates 100 years of striptease. How or why it’s 100 years of striptease is never quite fully explained, though there are references in the commentary to ancient Egyptian strippers, Parisian can-can dancers, the night they raided Minsky’s and some risque music hall acts form the early 1900s.

  Made in 1976, the summer of the great heatwave that swept across Britain bringing drought, hosepipe bans and melting roads, Get ‘Em Off captures the slowly fading sleazy world of London’s strip clubs. Filmed mainly at Soho’s Nell Gwynne Club, the documentary strikes an awkward balance between laddish banter and documenting the performances by the strippers: Miss Anne, Miss Alby, Miss Chastity, Miss Cher, Miss Carmen, Miss Anna, Miss Linda, Miss Coursetta. we see these girls perform their routines in front of tinsel, drapes, under Kenneth Anger-style lighting.

  Why is a feminist blog including stories about stripping? Lots of reasons I suppose. My view is that it’s just another kind of work but I also think it’s interesting what the women’s bodies look like–small breasts are well represented, ditto body hair.

• Plus-sized models – Is it wrong to call women ‘plus-size’? – BBC

• The lack of female genitals on statues seems thoughtless until you see it repeated

It hit me on a fairly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, when on a whim I decided to visit the Greek and Roman galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; but what hit me was not that, after 20 years, the curation shifted to show an organic progression in the development of the form. It’s that none of the forms showed the reality of female genitals.

There are, of course, nude statues of Greek and Roman women, usually standing in a three point pose – a bent knee, a curved hip, a tilted shoulder to accentuate the form. One has a hand over a breast to communicate modesty; her hoohah is smooth. In fact, all the hoohahs are smooth: there are but modest dents around the pelvic bones of the statues, but no openings or slight separations of the pelvic mounds to be found anywhere. The forms are all Barbie-doll blank down there, like female bodies just sprung out the head of Zeus, fully formed, sometimes clothed and vulvaless.

• Women Are Showing Off Their Stretch Marks With The Hashtag #LoveYourLines

“I like to see my body as a book, the stretch marks tell the story and the scars are the pictures,” wrote this Instagram user.

• Funny or not funny? On the one hand, it’s not the usual way women are encouraged to “lose the belly.” On the other, is it just more normative thinness for men?

I like this one though!