Before & After Photoshop GIFs Make Me Feel Even Worse About Myself
Meatless Monday: 14 Savory & Vegetarian Shiitake Mushroom Recipes
Blisstree Bookshelf: The Beauty Experiment by Phoebe Baker Hyde
Reese Witherspoon’s Arrest: Bratty Behavior Or Relatable Reaction? The Blisstree Writers Debate
Gwyneth Paltrow, Please Stop Talking About What You Eat
Earth Day PSA: How To Recycle Your Clothes, Cosmetics, And Even Running Shoes
OK! magazine’s latest cover features a bikini-clad Jennifer Lawrence and Kourtney Kardashian and the promise to reveal their “easy weight-loss secrets.” It’s nearly April, so all women’s media from now through June is obligated to get us “bikini-ready,” obviously. More
Peruse the right sidebar of Mail Online on any given day and you’ll find a smorgasbord of fat-shaming, gossip-mongering and oohing or booing over celebrity outfits. But today in particular the Mail’s sidebar grabbed me. First it was Miranda Kerr dolled up in some women’s magazine, then January Jones, then Dakota Fanning. One, two, three, throw in a couple of lesser-known Victoria’s Secret models in European fashion spreads, Olivia Wilde dressed like a cancan dancer on the cover of Vanity Fair and an MSNBC news anchor showing off her baby bump and there it is: The whole absurd portrayal of women in fashion and entertainment media summed up in less than a few hundred megapixels.
More
If you put Katy Perry’s face on Paula Deen’s head, it still looks pretty much just like Paula Deen. This shouldn’t be able to happen.
More
The Devil Wears Faded Glory?!? More
When I think of Cosmo, the first — or second, or 36th — thing that comes to mind isn’t “female empowerment.” But a new study on the effects of women’s magazines on sexual attitudes finds the lady mag we most love to hate may prime women to prioritize their own sexual pleasure. Could all those “576 Ways to Please Your Man” articles be secretly subversive? More
Go take a look inside a few women’s magazine on the newsstands right now, and I guarantee that in at least one of them, you will find the following admonishment: to have sex even when you don’t want to, because it’s good for you.
The more insulting versions of this sentiment are that you should have sex when you don’t want to because it’s good for your partner (they’re typically referring to your male partner), or because it’s good for your relationship.
Well, I’m here to tell you this: Having sex when you don’t want to isn’t good for anyone. Not your partner, not your relationship, and most of all, not you. So you shouldn’t do it. More
Isn’t their any life stage where women aren’t bombarded by idealized images of what we should look like?
More
This month, Glamour‘s health section features a short trend piece on how celebrities are now admitting that “staying in Hollywood shape sucks.” Where in the past, thin actresses were prone to tell us that they simply go for walks with their dog and eat whatever they want, today’s are supposedly fessing up to the work it takes to look lean. Glamour finds this refreshing. But Glamour still promotes unrealistic body ideals and warped diet and weight loss tips. More
It’s safe to assume that many of the images you see in magazines and advertisements have been digitally enhanced. Now a new tool from Dartmouth University computer scientists lets us see exactly how and to what extent such photoshopped images have been altered. What’s so cool about the program is it doesn’t just identify the obvious (like that fat rolls or deep wrinkles have been removed) but minor beauty enhancements, too. You might not have consciously noticed how much whiter Angelina Jolie’s eyes are in the second, touched-up photo—but this computer program did. More
The Sweetest Twitter Marriage Proposal You’ll Ever See
Clueless Mom Gives Birth on a Bike Without Realizing It
True Or False: Marathoners Can Eat Whatever They Want
8 Things You Shouldn't Do Before Bed
Why Don’t More Women Talk About Masturbation?
Don’t you love it when women’s magazines give us quick and easy workout moves demonstrated by pretty (and pretty buff) fitness models, and act like we could look just like them if only we’d complete this simple exercise routine for five mintues on a tropical beach somewhere? We don’t love it so much. The photo shoot models are simply impossibly fit; they certainly don’t need to be doing these often very basic exercises. We’re sure they’re very nice people in real life, but the truth is that they end up just making us feel badly about ourselves and our own fitness regimen. Plus, we’ve never actually done any of the how-to exercises from the pages of women’s fitness magazines, have you? (We usually just like to poke fun at them.) So, to give this “New Ways to Tone Your Tush” article from the March 2011 issue of Oxygen a little lift, we swapped the oversimplified instructions for some wishful thinking on the part of our instructor-in-print. Here are this week’s Exercise Monologues: More
– Blisstree Deputy Editor Briana Rognlin on the often contradictory body image messages that mainstream society sends to women, from her post: 15 Lessons Our Fitness Magazines Taught Us
We’ve been reading fitness magazines for years, but lately we’ve been wondering why we keep shelling out for the stacks of glossy, virgin paper gathering dust in our apartments. How much new news are we really getting? A lot of the messages we get from fitness magazines are not only the same things we’ve been hearing for years. It can be motivating to get the reminders, but then again, they’re usually contradictory and confusing. Save your money (and a few trees), and print out our list of the top 15 fitness magazine lessons: More
If you’re bored in bed, Cosmopolitan Magazine suggests that you take it to the backyard and get sexy with your sprinkler for a little extra fun. We don’t know what neighborhood these people live in, but this one just seems … More
September is the month of the 40-plus woman – or, at least in the world of women’s magazine covers, anyway. Doree Shafrir of The Hollywood Insider first pointed out the over-40 domination, and Jezebel also wrote about the trend. Older … More
