Long story short, my wife had some major surgery recently, and the other night had a bad fall and was taken to our local hospital. After a weird evening/night/early morning in a place called the Clinical Decisions Unit, where time and its passage do not exist as known in the outside world, she was moved to a recognisable hospital ward this afternoon.
When I returned for visiting for the first time on this ward, my wife gleefully pointed out her assigned nurse, a really pleasant woman that I’d been chatting to a little earlier. “This is my wife!”, she waved and pointed at me, then she turned to me and said “SHE has a wife too!”, meaning the nurse.
We spent a couple of minutes of joshing back and forth with her about how cool wives were/are and how they are definitely the way forward. This wasn’t in hushed tones, but openly conversational and joking across a fully occupied six bed bay.
Later, her health care assistant was filling in details on the white board above my wife’s bed and wrote. “Her lunch and dinner meals will be brought in by her Wife”.
When I was growing up, I could NEVER have imagined a scenario like that. The sense of …I don’t know the right word really… comfort, normaility? Knowing my wife is in a place where her sexual orientation isn’t just accepted as lip service somehow. It’s not just the presence of an openly lesbian or bisexual nurse on the ward, but seeing her interacting with her colleagues, laughing and joking with them, clearly an accepted and respected member of the team. That gives me a sense of comfort that the team on that ward won’t have an issue about us because “hey, our mate is married to another woman, it’s fine!”
It’s a little thing I guess and yet at the same time seems like an enormously big thing. When people grumble that they have “nothing against gays as long as they don’t keep rubbing it in our faces”, what they generally mean is “as long as they don’t make me aware of their existence”. This up there here is why it’s important to make people aware of our existence; it is important and it does help. At a time when we’re under a huge amount of stress, that woman happily sharing what we have in common has lifted a significant chunk of it.
I was so thrilled to be asked to shoot the Cover of Virgin Magazine, and even more thrilled to hear they were keen to honor my request for no airbrushing of my face or body. This means a lot and is a desperately important stance to take in honor of the 10’s of millions of women (at least) who struggle so much with their self image, due to decades of impossibly demanding body standards being inflicted upon us, and false imagery being used to subliminally manipulate us into a feeling of (needless) disappointment in ourselves.
It’s something I’ve been asking for since my career began 10 years ago. I only sometimes get my way, but I will never stop campaigning for it for these three reasons:
1 It is done in the name of “fantasy.” What message does it send to women (and men) everywhere, that a “fantasy” female is normally only ever one who is impossibly long, and thin, with flawless (and normally lightened) skin, with a thin face, a small nose, large lips, big eyes, and no wrinkles ever, at any age. Why can’t the fantasy ever have some back fat? Or be in a wheelchair? Why can it never be unsymmetrical? Why can it never show the dignified and important lines of a life lived and survived? What is that one, constant, “flawless,” doll like fantasy telling all normal women everywhere? That we are not to be fantasized about? We are excluded from the desirable group? We are the rejected? We didn’t make the cut?
2) The dishonesty of it. There is no mention of alteration, so we are left with the manipulative subliminal messaging that someone else achieved the forever pre pubescent “fantasy” but we can’t. We have failed. Her breasts have been plumped, her legs lengthened, her skin smoothed. But all in secret. It’s so dangerous to put these images into the world of women who themselves often do not even meet the requirements, without the help of a computer, and say nothing of it. There should either be a detailed declaration in small print of the features altered, or we should see the original image and celebrate the humanity and reality of the subject and her photographer. Who frankly, may as well not bloody be there if a computer is doing all the work. Where is the dignity in it? For anyone involved?
3) It is offensive TO ME. To be airbrushed, which is never even discussed with you beforehand, is not a kind act. It’s a passive aggressive attack. To see a simulation of myself, a “flawless” version that I myself could never reach in reality, does not make me feel flattered. It explicitly informs me that I was not good enough on that day. Or on any day. What I am, must be covered up, altered and hidden from sight, or else people shall find me harder to look at. When magazines have in the past altered my ethnic nose to look more caucusian and button like, or lightened my skin… I feel racially offended. When I see that my cellulite and stretch marks that I spend my every day with have been deleted, it makes me feel bad about myself when I see them in the mirror. A feeling I didn’t want or need, which I then have to fight and dismiss in the name of feminism and basic bloody humanity. I am human. I have lived. I have been through a lot, and some of those things have marked me, and I do not feel shame about those things, I do not think someone else has the right to make me feel I should.
Airbrushing is not supposed to be used for anything other than removing a stain on a wall behind the model, or maybe even a single hair out of place that ruins the shot. To use it to alter a face and body, to sell a lie to women, which will more often than not hurt the way in which they see themselves, and could well lead to a possibly unhealthy lifestyle in order to achieve the prototype you made with your computer… is a crime against an entire gender. It’s unacceptable. And it has to stop. “Perfect” imagery in magazines hurt me as a teenager, and made sure I never felt good enough. I don’t want to be a part of that for someone else.
If I look tired/wrinkled, or chubby, then I look tired/wrinkled or chubby, Let my worth as a grown woman who has many parts to my existence live without shame for this. If these pictures that will come out of me on this cover repulse you, then what does that say about you? Because it says absolutely nothing about me.
I had a fabulous time shooting for Virgin, with a talented team of artists, and I look forward to seeing what we made together.
“‘What,’ men have asked distractedly from the beginning of time, ‘what on earth do women want?’ I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet. What form the occupation, the pleasures and the emotion may take, depends entirely upon the individual.”
Stunning photos from Vogue of traditional Mexican women equestrian riders in the sport of Escaramuza (rodeo sport). Article by Mariel Cruz, Photos by Devin Doyle.
Last year, photographer Devin Doyle, who’d spent two years photographing high school rodeo culture in the United States, became curious as to what the Mexican equivalent might look like. After all, he says, “It’s the same land, the same ranching culture.” What he found was an exciting competitive equestrian sport performed by women dressed in stunning traditional costumes, a sport directly inspired by the Adelitas—the female soldiers who fought in the Mexican Revolution.
Escaramuza, an event within the larger rodeo-like sport known as charrería (now recognized as Mexico’s national sport) is comprised of teams of up to 16 women (though only eight can compete at a time) performing a series of routines inside a lienzo charro, or stadium, at breakneck galloping speeds—all while riding sidesaddle.
