GENDER BENDER



Looking from the outside in - people, place and practice

Friday, August 26, 2011

Monday, August 22, 2011

Children's book encourages little girls to be skinny



A new children's book, Maggie Goes On a Diet, is making headlines. It is about a chubby girl who stands in front of the mirror holding up a too-small pink dress and sees a different version of herself. Her mirror image is, of course....thin. "This book is about a 14 year old girl who goes on a diet and is transformed from being extremely overweight and insecure to a normal sized girl who becomes the school soccer star. Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self image." - Amazon description

Is the only way to be better, to be skinny? Are young girls supposed to be taught that being chubby is an awful thing? If it is unhealthy, yes of course, but this book is just preposterous!


Thursday, August 18, 2011

Pakistan Floods: Then and Now

These images show the before and after of last August's Pakistan floods. It shows the effects of the Monsoon rains at the time of the flood and also the state of things today.
I love the above picture, so moving.





Courtesy of Getty Reportage

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Genderswap


There's nothing like a good genderswap. I love these pics, since they push the bounds of what is normal and how a certain gender should act and look...





Courtesy of Vogue US.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Sexist Ad



Have ads really changed a lot from this one, or are they just sexist in a different way?

Friday, August 12, 2011

Shooting Up


Some shocking pictures taken by the brilliant photographer, Ed Ou. He photographed women in New York using drugs, mostly shooting up heroin. He also shows the other effects of drug addiction, such as homelessness.







Thursday, August 11, 2011

Sweaty People

I love this photo essay! Photographer, Sacha Goldberger took photos of joggers, asking them to sprint for him and then pose right after...some very sweaty people.








Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Under a nuclear cloud

Ed Ou is a Taiwanese Canadian photographer. Here is a very moving and disturbing reportage he did, called: UNDER A NUCLEAR CLOUD


SEMEY, KAZAKHSTAN, NOVEMBER 24 Nurse Larissa Soboleva holds two-year-old Adil Zhilyaev in an orphanage in Semey, Kazakhstan Nov. 24, 2008. Adil was born blind and afflicted with Infantile Cereberal Paralysis (ICP) and hydrocephalia, as a result of his mothers exposure to radiation during years of Soviet weapons testing during the Cold War. He was abandoned by his parents, and is now cared for in an orphanage.



"During the Cold War the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Polygon covering 18,500 square kilometers on the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, was the site of a secret Soviet nuclear testing programme. Through four decades, the Soviet Union test detonated over four hundred nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and underground in preparation for a nuclear war that never took place.


The locals were used as guinea pigs to test the effects of radiation on human populations. Villagers living close by were given no protection or warning of the dangers of radiation. The Soviet military prohibited doctors from attributing the sharp rise in illnesses and deaths from cancer, leukemia, and radiation exposure in the region to the nuclear tests.


 

Today, only the frenetic chirp of a Geiger counter warns us of the invisible radiation that makes this nuclear wasteland so dangerous that scientists hesitate to spend any amount of time there. Yet, almost two million villagers spend their entire lives in and around the affected area, roughly the size of Italy - drinking ground water, growing crops, and grazing their livestock off the highly irradiated land.



Radiation has silently devastated three generations of people in Kazakhstan, creating health problems ranging from thyroid diseases, cancer, birth defects, deformities, premature aging, and cardiovascular diseases. Life expectancy in the area is seven years less then the national average of Kazakhstan. Suicides are common. Even though nuclear testing ended twenty years ago, these conditions and genetic mutations are passed down for generations to come. " (Ed Ou)