Women buy into what they want, men want, or fashion dictates?

hotcopied from the daily mail online (press for link)
Italics in colour : my emphasis/fisking for interesting vocabulary, which you can look up for yourselves-Mike.

Why does the fashion industry hate real women? Models created by computers are used to advertise High Street clothes

By LIZ JONES

We all knew this was waiting to happen, didn’t we? Not content with using ever-younger models who are clearly freaks of nature, the fashion industry has now done what it always wanted to do, deep, deep down: replaced real women, with their accompanying tears, needs, salaries, period pains, and, I don’t know, humanity, with something computer-generated.

High Street fashion chain H&M has admitted the swimwear models featured in its latest online catalogue are not real. ‘We take pictures of the clothes on a doll that stands in the shop, and then create the human appearance with a program on [a] computer . . . The message is clear: buy our clothes, not our models.’

It took a Swedish website to notice the poses and contours in each photo were identical and blow the whistle.

Fakes: H&;M has admitted using the bodies of mannequins in its latest bikini adverts, claiming that the message is clear - buy our clothes, not our models

Which is telling, isn’t it? Until then, the fact each body was of a uniform size, with no extraneous curves, no tiny flaw, was not enough to tip off even the most beady-eyed of observers around the world that these bodies, with their stuck-on, gurning heads, were not, in fact, God-given.

Because, over the past three decades, we have been brainwashed to accept perfection as the new reality. Cellulite, moles, a bit of a wobble here and there, a curve, a swelling of flesh at the top of thighs or even the curve of a tummy have no place on display in the fashion and beauty world.

I grew up believing models were perfect, and that I did not measure up to them, resulting in a lifetime of self-flagellation.

Only when I started working in the fashion industry did I learn that even these strange, young, other-worldly beings were not all they seemed.

I sat in the front row at a fashion show for the first time, and noticed with shock that Erin O’Connor had thread veins, Kate Moss had short legs and cellulite, and magazine cover star Angela Lindvall had bad acne.

Shocked: Liz Jones says she wants to know why the flaws that make women who they really are are erased before they meet the gaze of a woman on the street

On a shoot with the then very young Brazilian model Fernanda Tavares — now modelling the M&S Per Una range — I was shocked to notice that she had badly dyed hair, with her roots showing.

By then I was editor of Marie Claire, a woman of 40, who would never leave the house with even a millimetre of regrowth, and yet here was a world-renowned beauty who couldn’t give a fig.

I was shocked, and continue to be shocked. Why are the flaws that make women who we really are erased before they ever meet the gaze of the woman on the street, the consumer? Why are the image-makers so terrified of showing us that even the most beautiful among us possess physical blemishes?

I have asked this question repeatedly of the movers and shakers in fashion, and am always met with the same blank stare. When I challenged one magazine editor about the extremely etiolated death mask that was a recent cover photograph of Keira Knightley, she replied that ‘my readers want amazing and beautiful . . . are women so stupid to believe that the image is real?’

Um, yes. We bloody well are. The  nerdy largely male, whizz kids behind all these images are so good at their job, even the most sophisticated and jaded among us continue to be fooled.

So we look down at our own bodies, and see tummy fat, and dimples on our buttocks, and we feel the need to buy stuff to fix us. We feel that if we only had that H&M bikini, the rest of us would be transformed. When it isn’t, we feel we are the ones who have failed, when the truth is it’s the garment itself.

I honestly don’t know why I am so shocked that only the heads on these H&M photos are ‘real’ (the faces, too, I’m sure have been tweaked and airbrushed). Because, even 20 years ago, photographs were being routinely doctored.

Doctored: While the bodies have been computer enhanced, it would not be a shock if the models' faces had also been airbrushed and tweaked

In 2000, my art department at Marie Claire were able to move Renee Zellweger’s head and place it on a different body. We did this because the actress’s real body was far too thin and bony to make it onto a cover to promote the first Bridget Jones film. As soon as the movie was completed, Zellweger frantically dieted to lose the weight she had gained for the part, as quickly as possible, developing jutting bones and hair so thin that the lights of the studio bounced off her scalp. But far from our readers being able to spot the difference, no one ever even knew.

What was shocking, too, was that I did this act of subterfuge, albeit it in the reverse way to normal (fancy making an actress look less emaciated!) even though my own life had been ruined by such sleights of hand.

I would never get naked in my teens, 20s or 30s in front of a man, as I had no idea other women had cellulite, and thread veins, until I actually got to produce photographs for publication myself and saw how they were touched up. In my 20s, I experimented with strange eye drops, as I thought women should have the perfect bluey ‘whites’ to their eyes, as seen on the covers of magazines. I had no idea they would have been enhanced on screen by a nerd.

I was recently interviewed by a young male journalist for the new Industrie magazine, as I’ve been chosen as one of the 30 most influential people in fashion in the world.

He asked me why, over the years, I have become more and more anti-fashion, more and more vitriolic. I replied that as I have learned more about its artifice, and found out just how it ignores the needs of its customers, despite the pressure from me, the Government and even the editor of British Vogue, I have become more disappointed.

I told him I’m on the brink of no longer having the strength to fight these people. So, why don’t I let this latest assault on our intelligence, pockets and wellbeing slide? It is just another piece of wizardry, after all.

Nothing has changed: Lynne Featherstone promised legislation last February, but the H&M models prove that nobody in the fashion industry paid any notice to her at all

Yet let’s not forget that H&M’s customers are young, impressionable and riddled with self-doubt. They will each be trying to find their identity.

This latest scandal comes on the back of the store’s new collection of clothes inspired by the film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: the look the clothes promote is grungy, super-slim and drug-addled.

Magazine editors may think these young girls know the difference between fantasy and reality, but the truth is they just look grown-up and all-knowing.

I wish they could see some of the letters I receive each week from children, telling me how they feel they don’t fit in, that they will never measure up to these images.

Take this missive I received last week from a young black girl in Bradford: ‘My skin is darker at my elbows, knees and in the creases below my buttocks. Can you tell me how Kelly Rowland avoids this, and how to get her hair?’

Now, I can tell these girls about Kelly’s wigs and her hours in make-up, as I did in this newspaper on Monday. I can bang on, as I have for years, about what goes on behind the scenes at fashion shows and on photo shoots.

But still nothing has changed! Back in February, Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone promised legislation would be brought to bear on the fashion industry to promote transparency and responsibility.

That month, I wrote in these pages that she was ‘naive if she thinks anyone in Milan or Paris will listen to her’.

Having pored over these latest images from H&M, it seems no one paid her any attention at all.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2071877/Why-does-fashion-industry-hate-real-women-Models-created-computers-used-advertise-High-Street-clothes.html#ixzz1g2LX39r8

Class war insults from bbc america

Hotcopied from http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2011/11/frasers-phrases-class-war-part-1/

I 've highlighted the terms 

They vary from old neutral expressions :the  haves and havenots 

to very insulting and politically superincorrect and newish slang : chav

This article DOES use the offensive USAWhite trash, but neglects the offensive american"redneck", which brits are familiar with too.

FRASER’S PHRASES: CLASS WAR (PART 1)

By Fraser McAlpine | POSTED ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH, 2011

The comedian Simon Brodkin, as his loveable 'chav' character Lee Nelson

We live in troubled times. The international finance crisis has created increasing tensions between those who have a lot, and wish to keep as much of it as possible, and those who have very little and would appreciate some help. But this isn’t a new situation. Ever since civilisation first began (somewhere in the window of inventive zeal between the invention of fire and the invention of the tea set and the afternoon nap) there have been haves and have-nots, and language – like have and have-not, for example – evolved to help capture the simmering situation.

Naturally, because it’s an argument about possession, the language gets a bit heated at times. But for every oik there’s a hoi polloi, for every chav, there’s a toff. It all balances out in the end.

By which I mean the poshos always win. And here’s how they do it:

In The Great Unwashed Corner:

Well there’s no shortage of unpleasant slang bombs to lob down from a lofty perch is there? The rank and file (army talk applied to real life, in much the same way that I understand people who work in movies have taken to referring to people who don’t work in movies as muggles, which is just lovely, isn’t it?), plebeians (or plebs, in actuality a distortion of the old roman order. The original plebeians were a free, land-owning class, above slaves, y’know, men of good standing) , riff-raff (derives from the French rif et raf, meaning ‘one and all’) or the herd (MOO!).

Incidentally, in the internet age there are also expressions like sheeple, a portmanteau word fusing sheep with people, and used to describe anyone who, apparently unthinkingly, likes something which is popular. Usually a barb thrown by someone who feels their taste is above that of the masses. It’s as snotty as calling people the masses in the first place, and should be avoided.

Then there’s prole, which may have started out in George Orwell’s 1984 as a hopeful term for a fictional downtrodden underclass, ready to rise (it is derived fromproletarius, the Roman term for the lowest social class, which was then appropriated by Karl Marx), but is now used, if used at all, exclusively to describe a very real downtrodden underclass in a derisive way. Language has no respect for literature.

In the past, laboring classes would be referred to as navvies – from navigator, often the Irish immigrants to England who built the railways and canals, and that word rubbed off a bit, so that it could be used as a general sneer in the direction of anyone of Irish descent, unless they’re actually building a railway. It sits alongside such gypsy-baiting terms as pikey, and diddicoy as racially sensitive, and hugely emotive words which should be avoided at all costs, even by Guy Ritchie.

Whereas hooligan, a word explicitly derived from an Irish surname and given to mean someone who is wilfully destructive and violent, probably egged on by their mates, appears to have slipped its racial roots and become rather gentlemanly and quaint. Bill Hicks memorably did a routine about the word being somewhat less scary than crip or blood to describe gang members, and yet that’s exactly what the original hooligans were.

Yobbo or yob suffers from the same problem. Only politicians and tabloid newspapers use it, because it’s an educated man’s word for an uneducated (and violent) person. For the people at whom it is aimed, yobbo is too snooty a word to work as a criticism. It’s like being called a yahoo, why should they care?

Nowadays the role of a catch-all term that means “you are less than I” has been fulfilled by chav, a word which proves that the idea of a classless society is as much a myth now as it’s always been. Despite numerous acronyms rushing to take credit for the word, people from the North East of England were using charva or charver to describe groups of poor young people in designer tracksuits long before the term spread southwards. And it’s a word that was a long time coming. In the North-West, around Liverpool, the term is scally, in Glasgow it’s ned, in Norfolk it’s yarco.

In America it’s poor white trash, and that’s how chav is used, as a weapon, hitting downwards.

Uniate catholics aka

Hotcopied from crisis magazine with web illustrations

CHURCH

11/22/2011

We are Non-Roman Catholics

Robert Spencer

The first reaction of visitors to my lovely parish church is generally one of bewilderment, as they anoint themselves with air after reaching out for a holy water font

inside the door and coming up empty. No statues, either.

No stations of the cross.

No confessionals (aka cnfession boxes)


or Rosary group either, for that matter. The first question visitors usually ask is, “Is this a Catholic Church?” Why, yes, it is. But not in the way most Catholics would expect.

A young man in my parish once summed up the prevailing assumption when he told me that he hadn’t been able to make it to our place the previous Sunday, “so I went to the regular Catholic Church.” If the Roman Catholic Church is the Regular Catholic Church, that would make my Melkite Greek Catholic Church and its twenty-two sister Eastern Churches in full communion with Rome Irregular Catholics – and so, for many, we are.

Most Catholics remain unaware that there are Eastern Churches in communion with Rome at all, or that there is any way to be Catholic other than in the Latin Roman tradition. When interacting with Roman Catholics, Eastern Catholics often spend much of their time explaining that yes, we are Catholic; yes, we are “under the Pope”; yes, we share the same faith; yes, you can receive Holy Communion here; yes, coming here on Sunday fulfills your Sunday obligation; and so on. We don’t generally call ourselves “Roman Catholic” — not because we are not in communion with Rome (we are), but because we are not of the Roman Rite. Many (but by no means all) Eastern Churches are “Greek Catholic,” i.e., not ethnically Greek any more than all Roman Catholics are Italian, but Greek in taking our worship traditions from Constantinople.

The lack of awareness of the wondrous mysteries of the East is understandable: Eastern Catholics only constitute between one and two percent of the Catholic Church as a whole, such that the theologian Dr. Seuss expressed an overriding concern of Eastern Catholics vis-à-vis Roman Catholics in his renowned treatise on the Eastern Catholic Churches, Horton Hears A Who: “We are here! We are here! We are here!”

But just as God showered His mercy upon this present dust-speck among the galaxies, so the significance of the Eastern Churches is far greater than their minuscule numbers. The Eastern Catholic Churches stand as the chief expression of the Church’s kinship with over 300 million Orthodox Christians who share traditions of worship, spirituality and theology with those Eastern Catholics. They are also the only current manifestation of Pope Bl. John Paul II’s devout and winsomely expressed hope that one day the Church would again “breathe with both lungs.” As such, every Catholic who is aware of the potential of Irregulars to ride to the rescue should know about them and become familiar with some of their particularities.

The Eastern Catholic Churches, with the exception of the Maronite Church, were born out of the failure of the great reunion councils of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1439-1445) to heal the Great Schism between the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople. Giving up on attempts to unite the Western and Eastern Churches through an ecumenical council that would hammer out a theological agreement acceptable to all concerned parties, Counter-Reformation Rome began sending out missionaries to Orthodox lands (to the bitter resentment of the Orthodox), hoping to affect union with particular local churches. These efforts bore notable fruit with the Union of Brest in 1596 with large segments of the Ukrainian episcopate; the Union of Uzhorod in 1646 with a group of Ruthenian clergy; and the conversion to Catholicism of the Patriarch of Antioch, Cyril VI Tanas, in 1724.

All of these and other unions led to fresh schisms, so that almost all of the Eastern Catholic Churches (except, again, the Maronite) have Orthodox counterparts. But when these “uniate” Churches restored communion with the See of Rome, they were not required to give up their theological, liturgical, or spiritual traditions. After all, before the Great Schism the Church had featured a multiplicity of orthodox rites, devotional expressions, and approaches to spirituality, all with different emphases but no divergences on the substance of the faith; there was no reason why in the second millennium these would somehow have become illegitimate. Often, however, the adoption of Roman customs and practices became the most direct and visible way for Eastern Catholics to demonstrate their loyalties and identity – especially in areas where tensions ran high with the Orthodox.

This “Latinization,” however, hampered the Eastern Churches’ ability to bear witness to the catholicity of the Church to their Orthodox counterparts, who regarded the Eastern Churches’ adoption of Roman practices with contempt, as confirmation of what they regarded as Rome’s theological imperialism. The Second Vatican Council countered this directly, affirming that the various Churches and rites, including the Roman Church, are of “equal dignity, so that none of them is superior to the others as regards rite, and they enjoy the same rights and are under the same obligations, also in respect of preaching the Gospel to the whole world (cf. Mark 16:15) under the guidance of the Roman Pontiff” (Orientalium Ecclesarium 3). The Eastern Churches were called upon to “preserve their legitimate liturgical rite and their established way of life” (Orientalium Ecclesarium 6).

In most Eastern Catholic Churches there ensued a discarding of Latin practices and a recovery of their Eastern traditions. And that process, in turn, is what can lead these Churches to appear so irregular to their Latin brethren. Eastern Catholics sometimes appear indifferent to Latin practices that Roman Catholics can assume are basic to a faith rightly lived. This is not out of hostility to the West, although there is no doubt that at times Easterners do display such hostility as an unfortunate overreaction to Latinization and the incomprehension and often unconscious triumphalism of their Latin brethren. Easterners are more often jealous for their own traditions and less receptive to Latin ones out of an awareness that if they do not bear witness to their own traditions, the Eastern Catholic Churches have no reason to exist. There are already Roman Catholic churches in abundance; Eastern churches thus serve no purpose in becoming merely Roman churches with “a different mass.”

The differences are far greater than that, even as the Faith remains common. Greek Catholic or Byzantine Catholic Churches, which include the Ukrainians, Ruthenians (who style themselves, confusingly “Byzantine Catholics,” as if they were the only ones), Melkites and others, are by far the most likely Eastern Churches that a Roman Catholic may run into in the U.S. The entire emphasis of Byzantine spirituality, upon the sinner as wounded and the Church as the source of his healing, rather than on juridical paradigms derived from Roman law, diverges sharply from Latin spirituality. Churches look like Orthodox churches, featuring an iconostasis, copious use of incense, usually a sung liturgy (most often the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom), and – increasingly – married clergy.

It is the specter of a married priest 



that most often makes startled visitors ask, “Is this really a CatholicChurch?” The Byzantine East, however, has ordained married men from the earliest period of the Church, and Eastern Catholic Churches were no different until 1929, when the Vatican decree Cum data fueritstated that “priests of the Greek-Ruthenian rite, who wish to go to the United States of North America and stay there, must be celibates.” Although this referred explicitly only to the Ruthenian Church, it was always assumed to apply to the other Eastern Catholic Churches as well – a reasonable surmise, since Pope St. Pius X’s 1907 apostolic letter Ea semper had called for celibacy for all Eastern Catholic priests in North America.

The 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, however, takes married clergy for granted, saying that “in leading family life and in educating children married clergy are to show an outstanding example to other Christian faithful (can. 375) and that “once this Code goes into effect…all common or particular laws are abrogated, which are contrary to the canons of the Code” (can. 6).

Does this mean that the Vatican ban on married clergy was lifted by the Code? Certainly some Eastern Catholic bishops have thought so, and have ordained married men in the U.S. In any case, Cum data fuerit’s stipulation that even immigrant priests in America must be celibate is a long-dead letter, as many married priests serve here after having been ordained elsewhere. The situation, however, is unclear: in the 1990s, one high-profile Eastern Catholic ordination to the priesthood of a married deacon aroused considerable fury among the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the U.S.; subsequent ordinations of married men have either taken place outside this country or with considerably less fanfare.

The ambiguity about the legitimacy needs to be resolved definitively, as it was the ban on the Eastern Churches’ age-old practice of ordaining married men that dealt the most serious blow of all to the Eastern Catholic Churches in the U.S., and to the prospect that they would ever in significant numbers genuinely constitute the Church’s “second lung.” Those who believe that the Eastern Catholic Churches should rightly be compelled to follow Latin custom on this issue often assume that priestly celibacy is of divine origin, when in fact it is a matter of ecclesiastical discipline, or they believe that if the Eastern Churches ordain married men in the U.S., the Roman Catholic Church in this country will be bereft of young men with vocations, as all will join Eastern Churches in order to have both marriage and the priesthood.

Although that has never been true in countries where communities of Eastern and Roman Catholics live in close proximity, it was apparently the concern behind the ban in the first place. However, the obverse is actually true: the ban on married clergy certainly drives Eastern Catholics out of the Catholic Church. I will be happy to supply anyone who disputes this with an icon of St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre.

Fr. Alexis Toth (1853-1909) was a Ruthenian Catholic priest who came to the U.S. in 1889, settling in Minnesota. When he paid a courtesy call to the Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, John Ireland, Ireland treated him with breathtaking rudeness, denying Toth (who was a widower) permission to serve as a priest in his diocese, and doubting that Toth was really a Catholic at all. Finding that other Eastern Catholic priests in the U.S. had been treated in similar ways, Toth and several other priests contacted a Russian Orthodox bishop in San Francisco, who eventually received them all into the Orthodox Church.

With enormous energy, Toth then set out to convert Eastern Catholics in the U.S. to Orthodoxy, and was immensely successful: as many as 100,000 Eastern Catholics became Russian Orthodox in the first two decades of the twentieth century, largely because of the prohibition of married clergy, restrictions on other Eastern traditions and practices, and indifference or outright hostility from the Roman Catholic hierarchy. For his labors, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Toth in 1994 as St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre. Thekontakion (a thematic and often homiletic hymn) for his feast day exults that he “called back the sheep who had been led astray and brought them by his preaching to the Heavenly Kingdom!”

The life of Fr. Alexis Toth should serve as a cautionary tale for Roman and Eastern Catholics alike, that while there is one Faith, there is a legitimate and traditional multiplicity in its expression, and to insist on one expression of it to the expense of all the others does detriment to the Church and to the hope that Christians may one day all be one, as the Lord prayed (John 17:11). The Church will only be truly Catholic, truly universal, when the Council’s words are fully realized — that all the Churches and rites are of “equal dignity, so that none of them is superior to the others as regards rite, and they enjoy the same rights and are under the same obligations.”

That goes even for us Irregular Catholics.

For an extended discussion of the role of married priests in the Church see this essay by Catholic journalist Sandro Magister.

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Tags: Eastern Catholicism Ecumenism featured Priesthood top

Robert SpencerRobert Spencer is the author of ten books on Islam and jihad, including "Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics" (with Daniel Ali) (Ascension) and "Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t" (Regnery).

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