Bombshell Betty, body hate, and porn

Image of my friend April Flores (aka Fatty Delicious) via.

I’m sitting here about to write this week’s column with a copy of Vivid Video’s new porn film Curvaceous in front of me (directed by Shylar Cobi). When I was in the Vivid offices a few days ago, Eon held it up to me and said challengingly, “Notice anything different?” I paused for a second. Usually “curvaceous” is porn code for “big tits” like, big tits on a stick, which is how I generally describe porn’s standards of beauty underneath a set of big knockers. (omg, I love calling breasts “knockers”) To Eon I replied, “They’re not stick thin!” he said yup, it’s girls with real bodies.

I haven’t watched it yet — because I’ve watched The Doll Underground (pre-order link) twice it’s so hot — but I’m looking forward to Curvaceous. But what’s really piqued me this afternoon is an email conversation I’m having with local burlesque star Bombshell Betty, and she directed me toward this post about body hate on her blog you gotta read, and her conclusion about porn is a zinger. Here’s a snip:

(…) A few days ago, a friend in an online social website sent me a message telling me that he’d read about me in the April issue of Skin&Ink Magazine. This was a little surprising to me, because I had originally expected the article to run in the March 2007 issue – a full year ago! You can read the article here (sorry, I don’t know how to make it into one PDF document): Page 1, 2, 3 and 4. It is a great article, I think. For some reason though, whether due to misquotes or changed ideas in the year and a half since I interviewed for this article, a couple of my quotes don’t really express my perspective on a couple of touchy subjects, so I’d like to expand and clarify what I think about two subjects mentioned: very thin fashion models and pornography.

First of all, I don’t think fashion models are personally responsible for the eating disorder epidemic that is taking place in the United States, accompanied by misogyny and body hating from both men and women. Fashion models have as little control over their genes and overall body type as the rest of us do, and they are under considerable pressure from their industry to maintain extremely low body weights in order to get work.

And THAT is where the problem comes from. The industry pressure. To be fair, the fashion industry has recently started making efforts to change this. In the last few years, some countries have banned models that they deem unhealthily underweight (read about it here), and Jean Paul Gaultier recently featured a plus size model, Velvet D’Amour on the runway in Paris. You can read a couple of opinions about Gaultier’s gesture here and here. (…read more.)