Postal Travels magazine, April issue

The new issue of Postal Travels magazine just came out, and it's full of all kinds of mail and postal goodness. Pen-pallers might want to check out all the interesting articles and product reviews... and products from Missive Maven on etsy are reviewed on pp.42-43.

Happy reading and writing!

Reader response: Decent high fashion exists

This charming blog reader letter came to me in response to this post featuring scary (to me) fashion models.



My astute beloved pointed out that the model had been posed leaning over just to make her stomach fat into rolls... had her spine been straight, we would not see these rolls. So it is a bit sensationalized, but still - I will take this any day over an emaciated anorexic!



I have left the text of the reader's letter visible because I found her comments so insightful that I wanted to share them. (I hope she doesn't mind, and if she does, I hope she'll let me know!) It reads:

Missive Maven-
I really enjoy your blog, fountain pens, and fashion. After your recent post, I thought I would send you some fashion magazine images that aren't terrifying. I don't normally read fashion rags (the street fashion blogs are much more diverse and therefore interesting), but this one had Gabourey Sidibe on the cover. So I gave it a shot. I found good photos with different sized models who weren't looking a)vacant, b)violated or c)dead. Yes, it was a "size issue" and I'm sure they do this to sell magazines, but it was still refreshing. There were also interviews with artists and actresses who talked about their craft (gasp). I'm with you on distancing yourself from bullshit, but I hope you find this somewhat repairative. Decent high fashion exists.

Hear, hear! This letter absolutely made my day; I hope it makes someone else's day, too.

Meanwhile, go have a look at Operation Beautiful, and then go write a letter. ;-)

This scares me

While I applaud the effort anyone puts into a handmade envelope, I've been mulling over these two for a while. I've got a few big philosophical things to say about them, first and foremost that I find them deeply, deeply disturbing.

I grant you I don't have a TV. I don't follow or worship celebrity. I am blissfully ignorant of pop culture, and I don't think you could stuff a fashion magazine down my throat if you tried. I am deliberately distant from this crap, and such deliberate distancing was crucial to my personal process of healing and rebuilding my own body image. (In my youth, I was NOT so distant from such advertising culture.) There is a reason I find this blather appalling, and this pretty much sums it up.

No wonder our women, especially young girls, have serious body image issues (and eating disorders and cutting disorders and everything else that goes along with self-hate) when they're barraged with this crap... and then internalize it as their standard of beauty.



So here we have the emaciated warrior. I will confess I like the woman warrior aspect of it, but good lord, this waif hasn't the muscle to heft a spear! She is skin and bones, people! I look at this skeletal frame and wonder if she actually has enough body fat for her body to function hormonally. If I saw a young woman like this, I would be concerned about an eating disorder. This is so skinny it repulses me, and it repulses me further that women see this starved image and aspire to look like that.



Now, creepfest #2. I can't see enough of this one's body to know whether she's got a healthier figure or not, but let's deconstruct that eye makeup. Good lord, this woman looks beaten. She looks happy to be beaten. You have to turn this envelope over to see the rest of the ad, but...



...look! She's kinda sorta chained up! WTF?? Chained and beaten? And this is sexy? What, exactly, is this ad selling? (I'm not even sure- clothes? perfume? a submissive woman?)

I'm not a prude, people, and I love me some good pin-ups. There is a big difference between showing powerful, sexy women and objectifying women and starving them. I'm sure we can argue the finer points of this, and I imagine this blog post will generate some interesting comments... but I just have to go on record by saying that images like this creep me out. I have a very, very different standard of beauty. [Edit: Please keep your comments polite. Mean-spirited comments will not be published.]

Oh, and by the way...

...operationbeautiful.com is well worth a visit any time, but especially after reading this post.

Take a letter-writing survey, help a magazine about letters

Jackie over at Letters & Journals is looking for a little help from us letter-writers. She's trying to start a magazine, and she's got a little survey going to see what our letter-writing habits and tastes are. I took the survey, and it was very short and painless and even kind of fun. So, if you've got about 3 minutes (that's how long it took me), give her a hand and take her survey. I know she'd appreciate it.