Livingstone - body fascist?
These two fine figures of health, fitness and pulchritude - Len Duvall and Ken Livingstone - have set themselves up as arbiters of what is attractive and what is healthy:
And why are they straying somewhat beyond their respective remits of chairing the Metropolitan Police Authority / the Greater London Labour party, and
Duvall thinks "young girls [are] starving themselves to death because of the lead being given by the fashion industry". Care to provide the figures, Len, or are you, as I strongly suspect, making it up as you go along? And not a hint of hyperbole either, I'm sure. Belief in free will is so terribly old fashioned, isn't it?
As to Livingstone, he goes that wee bit further and comments "I would be quite happy to ban under size models throughout the entire fashion world.“ A lot of the women on catwalks look disturbing. The idea that anything about this is attractive is just bizarre". And how do you look to them?
Yes, some models are thin. Then again there are plenty of people in the public eye who are not, and it ill-behoves anyone to make a judgement on what people should or should not find attractive, still less for a politician to attempt to wreck the ability of someone to maker a living based on their appearance. Insert the name of your preferred racial, cultural etc group in the place of 'under size' to get the full impact. Ideals of beauty vary greatly both across the ages and across cultures - I doubt that the average Samoan would find a Somali attractive, or vice versa. Given that the average Briton is bigger now than 20 years ago, I cannot help but think that the impact of 'size zero' models in shaping the popular consciousness has been less than enormous.
Always supposing that one's morphology is entirely in one hands, can we look forward to Duvall & Livingstone coming down like two tons of bricks on body builders, athletes, folk with orange tans, long hair, short hair, tattoos, piercings, thick ankles, split ends, acne or whatever else they consider "bizarre" for others to find attractive?
Cross-posted to Anyone But Ken.
Labels: Art of not 'getting' it, Livingstone, London
This entry was posted
on Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 1:59 pm.
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Pushing one's pregnant partner down a flight of steps is pretty bizarre, too.
Brilliant stuff today C. Sorry I do not have the time to disagree with anything
Many girls in a poll I did here said they'd prefer if models looked more realistic. That doesn't help because they don't look particularly realistic anyway here.
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