Thank You Target, for Helping Me Understand Unrealistic Beauty Standards with Your Bizarre Photoshopping Snafu

You may have seen these photos from Target's website, where a Junior's swimsuit model was bizarrely photoshopped. (Shout out to The Ethical Adman, who first spotted it.) Here's the full ad:

At first glance, it looks kind of normal, minus her incredibly long, thin arm and the fact that the place where most people's arms narrow at the wrist occurs a few inches above her hand. But moving onto the important piece of terrible photoshopping: 

A few inches of her crotch have literally been removed, evidenced by the fact that her swimsuit magically continues to cover a portion of her legs. 

What on earth happened here? 

We've been told for a while now that the images we see are so altered and distorted that they present a beauty standard for women that is unattainable. But no matter how much I hear that, read about that, and see cool pictures or videos that illustrate the process, it's still difficult to keep that fact in mind when I see women in any magazine, online ad, billboard, commercial, etc. So I'd like to thank this amazing ad for helping me really get it - here's a whole new standard that is literally, physically impossible, not to mention undesirable and a more than a bit nausea-inducing to really think too hard about. 

And I'm sorry, I know that the square crotch cutout is really the star here, but that arm! That creepily elongated hand!

Thanks, Target. I appreciate you helping me and millions of other women better understand the ridiculously unattainable beauty standards to work hard to create for us so that we'll buy your products. You're the best. 

All These Little Things Add Up

All These Little Things Add Up.

This morning on the train, a man asked if I wanted to sit down next to him. Assuming the best, I smiled and said “no thanks, I’m getting off at the next stop.” He then turned around, put his face about four inches from that of the woman sitting behind him, and asked her the same thing. Clearly uncomfortable, she said no and then got up and moved to the other side of the train. A few minutes later, the man stood up. I moved aside to let him pass me, but he moved with me, and pushed against me despite the fact that the train was not crowded and there was absolutely no need to touch me at all to get through the aisle.

This incident in itself is not a big deal. Things happen, right? People are rude sometimes. Whatever.

But when things like this happen every single day, it starts to add up. Seemingly little things like this are things that women experience on a daily basis. Yesterday I was waiting for my coffee in the café across the street from my office building when a male employee asked me to move and wait somewhere else. Only his way of “asking” was to put his hand on my waist and push me forward, then to say “can you go wait over there?”

It’s only 9:30 in the morning. There are still be plenty of opportunities today for men to make me feel like my body is public property, to make it clear that my feelings of personal space don’t matter. They will touch me without my consent in a way that makes me feel very uncomfortable. They will not pretend to try a verbal request first, nor will they apologize.

Radical, Authentic Consent

The real-life story of Alice tells about a man who would not ask for sex from his girlfriend in any physical or verbal way, but instead did something revolutionary: wait for her to ask.

This essay will be longer than usual, as I'm going to attempt to describe something that I call "authentic consent," a concept that came about as a result of Alice's story.

Feminists have done a lot of work to redefine what consent means. A quick summary: consent is often thought of and described as simply not saying "no." Popular culture is very focused on the fact that a woman saying "no" to a man who asks if she wants to engage in a sexual act (or, more often, just begins the act) signifies that she is not consenting. This is a good start, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Feminists have helped to define a vision that goes further: that simply not saying "no" does not equal a "yes" and that the "yes" must be freely given, meaning that it can't come about because the woman is drunk, on drugs, mentally disabled, a child, or being pressured in some way (like being blackmailed or threatened with some type of consequence if she doesn't perform the act). Clearly, a freely given yes is important, as a yes that is not freely given isn't really a yes at all.

I want to go beyond this more enlightened view of consent and explore the notion of pressure beyond the obvious aspects of coercion through something like blackmail or a favor done with sexual acts as the payment. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to only refer to pressure for sexual intercourse and not other sexual activities, and I recognize that the heterosexual, cisgender example that I use is limiting.

Here's a review of the three boyfriends Alice had throughout college who informed her views on consent: