This story by Sara Newman came to my attention recently. It provides useful info for families with cleft lip and palate kids. I've added the info about Cher and her facial differences camps."Anti-bullying messages are prevalent in today’s schools, but some kids still may not understand how mocking someone for their differences can have profound effects that last well beyond the school day.“It breaks my heart,” Michelle Aftimos of Pomfret, [Md] said of the bullying her son, Kyle, 8, has received … [Read more...]
Lookism & Halloween: witch or bitch face?
It is Halloween and the time that witch faces show up at parties and at neighborhood trick-or-treat outings. All sorts of other faces show up, too—esp some representing lookism gone wild (for example, sweet faces from Disney's studios and pretty ones from Hollywood's glamor factories).Among meme-loving sophisticates, moreover, there's now the chance to put on a "resting bitch face" mask as well as a witch mask. In the last couple of years, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have … [Read more...]
Facial symmetry & why some clowns scare us.
Stephen King's It— a 1000 page epic of a shape-shifting evil from beyond time— features a clown named Pennywise. The clown doesn't This dancing clown grins through all the horror and gore in It and exudes malevolent wit. While King’s villains are often frightening, Pennywise's wit approaches camp without really being funny.Zach Handlen describes It as "set largely in a single small town in Maine. [W] hile it spans decades, the main action takes place in two distinct time periods.—1958, which … [Read more...]
Facial symmetry is sexy, but why?
Facial symmetry has been felt to be attractive, even sexy, because our DNA correlates symmetry with good health. But Stephanie Pappas reports on a recent study that calls all this into question:Despite the widespread assumption that symmetry might be a sign of good health, studies have turned up little evidence of a link between the two. A few small studies have linked facial asymmetry with some short-term health woes, like scratchy throats, but many others have found no links at all.However, … [Read more...]
Measuring facial symmetry in cleft lip kids and everyday people.
How the heck did Dr. Coe manage to visualize the tangle of my oral tissue and muscle when he sewed me—Humpty Dumpty— back together? As I wrote in my memoir, "With final form and functionality in mind, Dr. Coe set about joining the two sides of my face. The union had to be exactly right so that when the scars contracted, they would not notch the red vermillion of my lip or distort the area between my lip and nose. ...All this had to be figured out fast, as tissues begin to swell … [Read more...]
Lookism: fat & body shaming (even by a Playmate).
Lookism surfaced once again with a vengeance earlier this month. During Labor Day weekend, a Playboy playmate body-shamed a woman working out at her gym. Lookism: body shaming.One of the original stories about this appeared at TheWrap: "The woman who Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers secretly photographed and body-shamed in a gym locker room is in her 70s, and she wants Mathers prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, TMZ reports.The site said the woman — whom police were unable to identify or … [Read more...]
Beauty varies by country/sex, but lookism still fuels surgeries.
As we try to fight lookism, we see one obvious factor supporting our cause. It is the fact that beauty and attractiveness vary by sex and by country. That is, men and women have different ideals regarding attractiveness as do people from different countries. (Not so commonly referenced is the factor that attractiveness ideals change over time, e.g., the 1800s, the 1920s, the 1950s, now).Most distressing, however, is the fact that western media (films, magazines, the internet, etc.) are spreading … [Read more...]