I share a partial series of the most incredible fashion model images, released as the IMG show package on Models.com. The images are the ultimate in creativity and artistic exquisiteness, a really fine wine for the fashion industry.
Behind the curve in writing about these images, the timing is actually perfect. Regiular readers — and definitely my growing list of photographer friends — know that these images reflect all my writing topics ‘from fashion to flogging’.
Anne’s Writers Block
I’ve been a bit stuck in my writing with Bro. Dennis in our 2 Ps in a Pod blog. He is the profound one, and I profane. Our writing opens up many old wounds on the topic of women and religion, although my honesty is having huge impact according to Bro. Dennis. He lost board members over his association with me, women who objected to not only my words, but the limited nudity on AOC.
It’s been a tough couple of weeks politically in America. I am now officially a totalitarian feminist in the aftermath of the Komen Breast Cancer foundation/Planned Parenthood, according to FOX News. Social conservatives think we second wave feminists should just lie down and play dead — until we are.
Then the noise will stop because the good girls are now all in line, thanks to ardent social conservatives and ‘Sex and the City’ lap doggies.
It wasn’t until this morning that my writer’s block was broken. It was Kristen McMenamy’s Tim Walker editorial ‘The Origin of Monsters’ for LOVE magazine #7 that sent me into an emotional tailspin and a highly emotional email to Bro. Dennis. I will publish it.
Better yet — on top of an incessant stream of supportive emails that I’m receiving from photographers and artists saying “don’t stop, this is incredible” — I read in Fashionista this morning that Coco Rocha, Crystal Renn and more models had a powwow in Manhattan last night to launch the Model Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded by Sara Ziff dedicated to “helping models in the American fashion industry organize for safe, fair and healthy standards in their workplace.”
Finally some girls with spunk. Back to the IMG Show Package. Their willingness to go this route, making such a bold, artistic, controversial visual statement about being female is breathtaking. Whoever conceived this project, I love you, love you, love you. Thank you sooooo much. Anne (PS. There is no info about the project, just images, on the IMG Models website.
Woman | Malgosia Bela | JavierVallhonrat | Vogue UK April 2009 | ‘In A Very Private Affair ’
We’ve seen a few fashion editorials lately, in which the woman is an adulteress and most often in the company of a non Wall-Street-striving kind of guy. Translated, she’s hot for the guy who isn’t the sum of his possessions and has time for hot sex.
I stopped by UrbanDictionary.com just now for their take on the word ‘adulteress’. Admitting up front that the word doesn’t get a lot of action, the definitions amused me. They include:
- Known to men as the best sex they have had since high school.
- A woman with low morals and high sex drive. In other words,the female version of a man.
- A word you definitely don’t want to hear from your wife’s attorney in divorce court. (The only place it doesn’t sound sexy)
- Perhaps one of the few times where a woman is seeking sex for a purely physical need (like men) rather than for an emotional or spiritual connection.
- Who an adulterer should be married to. She would then be known as a swinger.
A recent article in Women’s Health Magazine got more scientific about studying The New Adulteress, reporting this month that according to a recent online poll, 79 percent of respondents said that having an affair with a “taken man” was never acceptable but 46 percent admitted doing it.
Nearly Half of Women in Women’s Health Poll Admit to an Affair
Noel Biderman has set up an online dating agency for married people called ashleymadison.com. Picture: Justin Lloyd When asked it the presumably mostly women respondents would rather be a mistress or a deceived wife, more than 62 percent opted for ‘mistress’. The majority of women in the WH poll said that they weren’t trying to break up a marriage. In fact, knowing the man was married and therefore not looking for a long term relationship with her was an advantage.
The chance to play savior is a common reason women end up in bed with men who are already taken, says Mira Kirshenbaum, a couples therapist and the author of When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts and Minds of People in Two Relationships. “Sometimes a woman decides that a guy is with a partner who squashes his potential, and she hopes to help liberate him.” From that perspective, an affair can be viewed as more a noble cause than a moral transgression.
Mate Poaching As Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary psychologist David P. Schmitt says that ‘mate poaching’ occurs in almost every society on earth; launching an estimated 10 to 15 percent of all romantic relationships, according to his survey of nearly 17,000 people worldwide.
David M Buss, PhD, also an evolutionary psychologist agrees, saying that high-quality men are often in scarce supply, so women compete for the best of the lot.
I am always suspect of the scientific assumptions employed by male evolutionary psychologists because we know that when the subject is sex in the animal kingdom, females are in charge and males compete for her favor. It seems logical to assume that once women became the property of men, competing for the best owner made sense.
In today’s world where women of professional status frequently out-earn men, the evolutionary psychology assumptions may be challenged by the reality that society’s expectations of marriage is changing. When half of all marriages end in divorce, branding women as slut girls for having an affair rings a false tune.
Note that educated, professional marriages enjoy lower divorce rates that poor people’s marriages, often among social conservatives who are more likely to marry than cohabit. Power couple affairs have gone on for centuries among members of the aristocracy and in modern-day Europe. It seems that the trend has also come to America.
Men Don’t Marry Mistresses
Researchers quoted in the Women’s Health article report that only a small minority of men marry their mistresses.
One survey, of 4,126 male business executives, found that only 3 percent of those who left their wives pursued a serious relationship with their mistresses. The WH poll agrees, saying that 86 percent of respondents who’d cheated confirmed that the affair didn’t result in a long-term relationship with the man. That’s good news for girls who just wanna have fun, but not for the female seeking a partner or husband.
Are Stay-At-Home Moms Majority of Women on Ashley Madison?
Reviewing other research about women who are adulteresses, married people’s affair website Ashley Madison reported in 2010 that of the 31,427 women who signed up the day after Mother’s Day, 67 pecent identified themselves as stay-at-home moms. Take that, social conservatives!!
Good Morning America talked about life on Ashley Madison in 2010.
GMA on Ashley Madison
Care2 wrote The Ashley Madison Moment this week, reporting that Internet cheating is growing at an estimated 79 percent per year.Ashley Madison reports that women are 30 percent of US signups. Just launched in Australia, where prostitution is legal and women have more rights than in America, Ashley Madison’s 500,000 signups are 40 percent women, reports Perth Now.
Canadian Noel Biderman is setting up Ashley Madison’s global headquarters in Sydney, Australia this year, creating 250 jobs to service its 11 million members in 15 countries. About the company’s unusual success in Australia recruiting women, Biderman says:
“Australian women are not naïve. They know that men have legal brothels as an outlet. I believe they are saying, ‘right guys, you’ve had your fun. Now we’re going to have ours’.”
Most recently, Ashley Madison was in the news for its endorsement of Newt Gingrich for President. In response to the three-time-married Republican, who did marry his mistress of six years, and then took a ‘no-adultery pledge’, Ashley Madison’sBiderman installed a billboard in Bucks Country, Pa.
For all their finger wagging, we know without a doubt that social conservatives buy more pornography.
I knew it! The minute I saw these Patrick Demarchelier images — especally these two of Joan and Candice — I knew they came from the mind of Carine Roitfeld.
In three seconds, I went from why is Candice holding a pin cushion (couture, of course) to the pink rose in Candice’s love zone. No-no, I said. This is Carine Roitfeld making one of her classic irreverence statements, proving once again that she can communicate her womanly key points with clothes on. This is why I adore Carine!
It’s this subtle irreverence, the sly wit that’s now totally gone from Vogue Paris, wiped out with the sensuality. Carine makes a case for the suppression of female sexuality — the mutilation of female sexuality — with a proper flower and a pin cushion.
How great to see Candice Swanepoel, Daphne Groeneveld, Joan Smalls, Saskia de Brauw and Sui He in V Magazine #74, styled with sly wit and great taste by the irrepressible Carine Roitfeld.
A few week’s ago Monsieur le critic — the one who says Julia Restoin-Roitfeld has no talent and Mario Testino is a totally used up photographer — took us on a tour of his studio. Silently we moved over his white walls and plain birch cabinets — if I remember correctly.
His digs offered no inspiration at all, doing nothing to portray him as a visionary painter or even good taste. Note: recycled, flea market furniture style is just fine but the design inspiration, style cupboard was barren.
His entire “come into my artistic world” video wasn’t fit for the most humble voyeur like me, a person lacking the professional talents and marketing insights of Monsiur le critic, whose resume is real hard to come by.
I don’t go looking for trouble, but when smarty pants people like Monsieur rip other talented people apart, I expect pure perfection from him. When it was so lacking, I said “seriously, Anne, let it go.” Truly I forgot about his insipid little apartment tour until Wednesday night, when New York City painter Liz Marotti posted in Facebook’s International Women Artists’ Salon, of which I am a member.
“Wow,” I said after watching Liz’s video. Now this woman takes us — for better or for worse; the good, the bad and the ugly — into her world. I have a real sense of Liz Marotti and her infectious spirit.
Monsier le critic writes that he has no idea of what he is trying to express and Liz Marotti can’t stop talking, trying to help us understand her vision. Is this a classic difference between he and she?
I have no idea. All I know is that Liz Marotti has moxie and is truly earnest about her art. She knows how to hustle with authenticity, and that’s the biggest tribute I can pay a woman, because we always want to fit in and not rock the boat. Liz Marotti says “fear not, ladies.”
Helen Reddy would like Liz Marotti’s ‘I am woman; hear me roar” approach to expressing her love of painting; and so do I. You can view more of Liz Marotti’s paintings here from PURRR Marketing Group. Anne
Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and the late French-born artist Louise Bourgeoise collaborated in the hauntingly beautiful and poetic Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway, an arresting memorial to 91 people, 77 women and 14 men, who were burned at the stake here in the 17th century for the crime of witchcraft.
Sturla J. Stalsett, general secretary of the Vardø Church City Mission, pointed out during the opening ceremonies presided over by Her Majesty Queen Sonja of Norway, that the memorial is meant to remind us of the ongoing danger of collectively creating scapegoats. If historical circumstances seem peculiar now, the intent behind the work addresses larger moral claims.
I highlight descriptions of the memorial, drafted for Architectural Record:
Visitors enter the memorial on the north by a gangplank placed perpendicularly to the elevated Zumthor structure, a 410-foot-long building within which a tensile structure of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-coated fiberglass fabric is suspended on cables. Once inside, the visitors proceed along a 328-foot wood-plank catwalk about 5 feet wide. As they thread their way through the dark cocoon of the interior, visitors pass 91 windows, each dimly lit by an exposed-filament bulb. Ropelike cords from the lamps form scalloped borders at the edges of the undulating ceiling. The feeling is like being in the stomach of some prehistoric creature, half-fish, half-reptile — except there is a glimmer of light.
Owing to the high winds on the site, the glass walls stop short of the ceiling and floor and slide past each other to allow gaps for wind drafts. In the middle of the space is Bourgeois’s piece, an aluminum chair with gas flames shooting out of the seat. In this rather literal evocation, the burning chair is reflected in seven oval mirrors placed on metal columns in a ring around the fiery seat, like judges circling the condemned. If you think you’ll be too warm standing near the burning chair, don’t worry. In this blustery place, temperatures rarely rise above 51 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, witch hunts took place across Europe and in the American colonies. Researchers believe that between 40,000 and 100,000 people were killed, mostly women. It’s not easy to put these events behind us, when key supporters of more than one 2012 Republican presidential candidates are aligned with religious forces who say that Oprah is a forerunner to the anti-Christ.
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