"I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver."

"I felt very vulnerable, because I can work out, I can eat healthy, but I can’t change the fact that both of my kids enjoyed the left boob more than the right. All I wanted was for them to be even and for people to stop commenting on it."

From "Gisele Bündchen Reveals She Got a Boob Job After Breastfeeding Kids — but Instantly Regretted It."

"When I woke up, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I felt like I was living in a body I didn’t recognize," but her best husband in the world, Tom Brady, said "I love you no matter what," and that taught her, "What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger."

I'm blogging this as refreshment from other, more dire problems afflicting women. Body image can be troubling for many of us, but this is Gisele Bündchen, famously beautiful, rich for her beauty, married to a beautiful man who is rich for his physical prowess. You don't get any more beautifully elite than her. She was always praised for her body, and that creates an exquisite problem: other people expect you to have a beautiful body, and they notice and talk about little things that have gone wrong, things that for all her hard work on her body — exercise, eating right — were something she could not control. Two babies enjoyed the left boob more than the right. It's those outside forces, the people with their expectations and the babies with their left-boob preference, that drove her to seek outside help. In search of perfection, she got the surgery, and surgery, she learned, is another imperfection, an alien imperfection. Better the unevenly sucked breasts than the surgically invaded ones! But she learned. She learned through the wisdom of her gorgeous husband and the hoary old aphorism that maybe he taught her or maybe she found for herself:

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Now, back to Christine Blasely Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. Did what didn't kill them make them stronger?

ADDED: If you Google "What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger" (or "What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger"), you don't get a lot of interesting stuff about Nietzsche and the uses of his aphorism, you get a screenful of stuff about Kelly Clarkson and her hit song "Stronger." If Nietzsche weren't already dead, it would make him stronger, presumably, to see that.

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"What exactly is Saint Laurent saying about female sexuality and empowerment here?"

I'm reading Robin Givhan in the Washington Post. The post title is the headline. There are lots of photographs of glamorous clothes with an edge of trashiness. I clipped out part of one photograph. Not randomly selected. It's what caught my eye as I scanned the page with the idea of "female empowerment" foremost in my mind. I've left out what Givhan calls the "teeny-tiny shorts" (which are what we used to call "hot pants").

Let's see how Givhan answers the question posed in the headline:

Yes, the female form is beautiful, but is it made more beautiful by borrowing clothes from the boys, by wrapping it in a cloud of debauchery, by having parts exposed in a way that makes a woman “all legs” instead of full human?

This is not to say that the collection was bad or offensive or improper, only that it raised questions. And raising questions is good, particularly in this moment when the culture, both here and in the United States, is considering its male and feminine norms....

I guess I'm not going to get an answer to the question, only more questions. Questions good. Why not a column full of questions? Maybe we women writers should be all questions, just like the runway models are "all legs."

[Male designers at Saint Laurent] have told women that it is empowering and satisfying to wear teeny-tiny snakeskin shorts with towering heels, to splash through shallow waters with breasts bared on a night chilly enough that guests were swaddled under blankets. They have told them that the ideal female form has the spindly legs of a filly — so immature and scrawny that one half expects the model to collapse in a heap from the sheer exhaustion of having to walk upright....

Yes, the female form is beautiful. It’s inspirational. But what has it inspired? And has that been empowering to women or simply satisfying to men?

So, yeah, we do end with more questions. I was going to say it's the same old questions I've always seen about fashion designers, but really the questions have evolved. What I used to see (half a century ago) was the question whether the designers hated women. This idea was typically tied to the observation that they didn't sexually desire women at all: The designers are gay and that's why the clothes are hostile to women. What we see in this new column is the idea that male sexual desire for women is driving the designs. Are the designers not gay anymore? Why would expensive clothes be designed to "satisfy" men? The women are the clients. What's the logic here?

Oh, I see I'm doing questions, even as I want Givhan not to proceed in the form of question-asking. All right. I'll posit some answers to her questions. Why shouldn't I take the power to say what's what? I will! The clothing is designed to call out to women. It looks the way it does because that has been working to sell clothes. The women who buy those clothes think those clothes will benefit them, and the perception that this is what heterosexual men desire in a woman is a perception that needs to take place in the mind of the woman, and that is the perception the designer is trying to stimulate. If the woman buys clothes that she perceives as satisfying male desire, she is seeking sexual power over men.

And I suspect that one reason Robin Givhan doesn't say that is because it criticizes the woman. The question "has that been empowering to women or simply satisfying to men?" leaves women in the down position, where we can muse MeTooishly. That's a politically advantageous place to stop. And how much of the advertising in The Washington Post comes from the fashion industry? That's another reason to end with musing questions and not rough critique — economic interest.

Raising questions is good, particularly in this moment....

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"I want to create scenarios and imaginary fashion places where real clothes for everyday life can cheer you up."

Said Giuliano Calza, the co-founder of God Can’t Destroy Streetwear, quoted in "Models Wearing 3 Breasts Strut Down The Runway At Milan Fashion Week/The prosthetics were an homage to 'Total Recall,' the designer told HuffPost" (HuffPo).

Here's the "Total Recall" inspiration (warning: naked breasts):



Cheer up!

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Cory Booker and Brett Kavanaugh — Chris Cillizza pushes away whataboutism, but we might reach for it anyway.

"What makes Cory Booker's groping incident different than the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh."

That's the CNN headline for a piece by Chris Cillizza.

The automatic, easy, snarky answer: He's a Democrat.

I still haven't read the article, and I hadn't previously noticed there was a "groping incident" about Cory Booker. Is it an allegation or something we know happened? Anyway, to give an nonsnarky answer — again, before reading the article — I'd say: Cory Booker has a limited term and faces reelection. Brett Kavanaugh is up for a lifetime appointment.

Let's read this piece now:

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote in the early 1990s -- while a student at Stanford -- about an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed.

"With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast," Booker wrote of that night. "After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark.'" The point of Booker's column was how that moment, and his work on the issue after, had changed him -- and his views on women, consent and assault -- forever. "It was a wake-up call," Booker wrote in his Stanford column. "I will never be the same."

You're already consensually kissing. You try to touch her breast and are pushed away, and you try again and — what? — the end of the story is missing. But, holy God, if that's what ruins your life these days, the world has gone mad. I wonder whether college-student Cory was bullshitting when he claimed to be changed forever by this "wake up" call. But, again, I don't know the end of the story. Did the woman take him to task for trying again? And what's the "Top Gun" slogan? Maybe Cillizza isn't telling the story straight.

So the difference between the 2 stories — and this is my opinion, not Cillizza's — is that Booker's story was a story he told on himself, as part of posturing and instructing about how to be a good man. I don't know if it's true, but he chose to tell it and tell it that way. What really happened? I have no idea. Kavanaugh is suffering through someone else's telling of what is purportedly his story, and it's not told in the template of how he became such a good man, but to frame him as secretly evil. Within that other person's story, he is brutal and ugly, not boyishly copping a feel that he later lavishly regrets.

Back to Cillizza:

The rise of the #MeToo movement and the cavalcade of high-profile men admitting to behavior that ranges from boorish to criminal has opened eyes and forced uncomfortable and important conversations. The accusations against Kavanaugh are another moment to examine our assumptions and talk openly about how we should bets [sic] approach these situations -- both now and going forward.

Oh, yes. Let's have a conversation about everything! Talk openly! How do you think that will go? Place your "bets."

What we don't need amid all of this is an epic bout of "whatboutism" [sic].

Yeah, don't come after my guy while I'm going after your guy. That's whataboutism! I want you to stand down while I take all my shots. Funnily enough, that's how all these "conversations" tend to go when we're encouraged to have a conversation about some hot subject.

What Booker did as a teenager wasn't right. And he has been and will be judged by voters on them. But to turn Booker into a political missile to prove hypocrisy misses the mark. This isn't about Booker. This is about Ford, Kavanaugh, and how we, together, figure out the right way forward.

Yes, tell us what this is about.  You call out "whatboutism" — AKA whataboutism— but I'm going to call out your "what-it's-about-ism." You don't get to restrict the subject to exactly the scope you like. When you do that, it's "what-it's-about-ism" (my coinage).

But of course, everything's different from everything else. We can talk about differences and samenesses. Don't tell me what to do.

IN THE COMMENTS: Nonapod said:

"an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed. 'With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head'"

Top Gun came out in 1986. This whole story is an anti-strawman.

Wow. I found 2 typos in Cillizza's piece — "whatboutism" and "bets" — so maybe "1984" is another typo.

Anyway, checking the release date of the movie — it is indeed 1986 — I found the "slogan," I believe. It's "I feel the need... the need for speed!" That's such a stupid sex slogan.

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