http://www.ladybeardmagazine.co.uk/ by Ladybeard

Women’s media and the body. It’s hardly an original combination. If anything, it’s such a common theme that it’s more surprising when a magazine doesn’t focus on the body, particularly those defined as female. So call us unoriginal, but that’s where we at Ladybeard chose to start. Our ‘Body’ issue aims to explore the human form in ways that are not found in magazine racks. The work of a range of writers, illustrators, artists and photographers have all come together to open up our pages to the perspectives that are often ignored. Our list of contents on the right is just a snapshot of how many bodies are sidelined by mainstream media. We’re deliberately shying away from describing this issue as being one about ‘real’ bodies, not only because the phrase can feel trite. This a small selection, and not a representation, of the bodies we perhaps see on the street but never read about. It’s an attempt to start creating the media we wish we had. Thank you so much for picking up our first copy. Our next issue, to be released early 2014, will address another giant in the media: Sex. We are very excited about Ladybeard, and hope you are too.

Sadhbh O'Sullivan

The Body Issue Contents

Frog Children In Heaven

Veiling

Julia Stringer

Thurstan Redding, Nick Morris & Tom Rassmussen

Even Hotter Right Now!

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My Body Doesn’t Exist

Jade Starmore

Being Naked

Nadav Kander: Bodies

Madeleine Dunnigan

Mother and Daughter

Brittle Bones

Is This a Man’s World?

Heracles

Confessions

With Thanks To

Fearful Symmetry

Nick Morris

Kitty Drake & Megan McPherson

32 Pregnancy Anon

Gaga Latte

Jacob Mallinson Bird

36 Faces

Tyro Heath

Four Tunes For Eyesight

The Perfect Body is Carrot and Stick

Henry Davey

Frances Docx

The Body: Uncut Johnny Falconer

The Paradox of the Body: A Christian Perspective Naomi Wood

Bryony Bates & Lizzie Marx

Tyro Heath

Abbi Brown

Pete Morelli

My Body Doesn’t Exist

e, in the Western world, exist in a consumerist culture. Our desires and issues relate back to a need – a material need. We pretty much accept that ‘this is the way things are’, not least because consumerism is addictive. Owning “things” and getting “stuff” can put you in a kind of happy daze. In a world where this is the case, a person is not a person but a thing represented by what they own. This is troubling enough in itself, but what happens when the “things” we are sold are not actually objects? The ideal woman we see in advertising is presented and sold as an object, not a personality. Simultaneously, we all represent ourselves through our possessions. Our personalities are projected, sometimes created, by our clothes, our phones, our Facebook profiles. This is not just disconcerting, but destructive as consumerism is marketed as a form of obtaining happiness: new face-cream = new face = new man, but after the purchase the void remains empty and we are taught to move on to exfoliator. Of course, the failure of the system to airbrush reality is creating more and more unhappiness, correlating with rising depression rates in women. According to Laurie Penny in ‘Meat Market’, 80% of everything sold in developed countries is being sold to the “fairer” sex, so it’s hardly shocking that the majority of marketing is aimed at women. Individual physical beauty is sidelined in the desperate striving for one impossible, “perfect” image.

This is not a new observation or phenomenon. Dubbed ‘symbolic annihilation’ by Gaye Tuchman in 1978, the media themselves have used it for years. Yet Tuchman deals mainly with women in television. Women who, though caricatures, are still in some sense living. Advertising has taken that aspect away. The woman is an object more than ever – a 2D prop used to sell anything and everything. Simultaneously, we are sold this prop as an ideal. This is where the double crux arises. Our “self ” is made of objects; things we can buy, hold, and in that sense consume. Yet these purchases are in part sold through this 2D image of ‘woman’. This image, whether geared towards men or women, is almost inescapably white, thin and beautiful. This is the image we are being sold. Yet this is not the woman that exists. Without delving too far into the issues of photoshopping, it is clear that we are not shown “woman”. We all subconsciously exist through our possessions – if this is the case, how do we escape the feeling that we are worth the sum total of our outfit that day? Moreover, if every aspect of the “female” body is a 2D misrepresentation, how can we believe we exist? If we are never shown ourselves, how can we completely escape the feeling of being worthless?

Anon

Cayce Pollard doesn’t exist. She’s a character in William Gibson’s novel, Pattern Recognition. She is cissexual* and, as far as the reader can tell, does not love women. In those respects she’s nothing like me. The gimmick is that she’s allergic, quite literally allergic, to strongly branded imagery like the Nike swoosh or the Michelin Man. To live with this, she wears exclusively block colours in black, grey and white, carefully filing off the logos. Still not quite me, at least not every day. But in the sense that she is forced to make an accommodation to a stylised, content-free world, and that her point of suffering with respect to that world is intensely personal: now we’re talking. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve been branded. Brand Lesbian sells TV shows, club nights and Pride parades. Brand Transsexual is the old-fashioned kind, hot iron pressed deep into the skin. I’ve seen, on posters selling drinks and tickets, images of “lesbians”. One woman was frying breakfast, wearing bra and panties. The spitting fat must have burned her, but she was just an image, so it wasn’t her turn to speak. She wore a wedding ring. I’ve seen fewer images of transsexual women. Perhaps it’s like whispering “bomb” at an airport; nobody wants to get taken for the real thing - that is, mistaken as a ‘fake thing’ - and pulled aside. Like burn scars, ‘tranny’ doesn’t fade so fast. And needless to say, a transsexual woman is never shown as lesbian. I suspect that in their eyes we are made of the wrong pornographic substrate. They’re not wrong; their deliberate mistake is in thinking that any woman is.

One wonders how Cayce, if she existed, would live with being woman. Not ‘a woman’, the human, but woman, the brand. Her writer is male, but perhaps he sensed the problem when he created her protective camouflage. Blacks, greys and whites for the concrete jungle, for sanitised office walls. (Since then, inevitably, Cacye’s style has become a brand of its own. You can buy a replica jacket online for five hundred and eighty American dollars.) For Cayce, the coded violence of (mis)representation is made physical. For me also. Just the imagery of lesbian women is violent to us. Just the imagery and un-imagery of transsexual women. Lesbian women are pornographic and cissexual, or womb-blessed and cissexual, or, sometimes - still cissexual - folded back to butch, an inverse, ironic cool. Transsexual women are a joke or we are dead; preferably both. We are certainly not sexually whole (though we are treated as sexless or predatory at will), and further still, not lesbian. Once I brushed a stand of Giant Hogweed, notoriously allergenic, and my throat began closing up. In every brush with reality, my future closes up. Not even pornography. Not even a joke. Not even dead. At least with Gibson’s metaphor I know what it is that’s choking me. Perhaps, like Cayce Pollard, all I can hope for is to pass unseen. *A person whose biological sex and gender identity are aligned

Fiona

Bisexuals in the media are both under-represented and misrepresented. My man-and-woman-loving body barely exists to society, partly because many bisexuals are labelled either gay or straight, depending on their current relationship. Bisexuality is far more common than the mainstream media seems to imply, and it can be isolating to grow up thinking otherwise.

It can often feel like an attempt to gain ownership of my sexual orientation and how I express it. According to the media, as a bisexual, my body’s function is primarily sexual (even more so than for straight women’s bodies, which is saying something). It is part of society’s obsession with who is having sex with who, that our sexual orientation is seen as our defining feature.

When bisexuality is portrayed in fiction, it is often shorthand for a particularly unstable and sexually experimental character/ , with a high libido and many partners. I cannot think of a single well-rounded female character in mainstream media whose bisexuality is not stereotyped . It is never an incidental feature of her identity, instead it’s the focus of the story. Growing up with the message that, if you love more than one gender, you must fit in this particular box, cannot be healthy for a young woman.

I was raised in an evangelical Christian family and church and went to a Catholic secondary school. The messages about sexuality I received at home, school and church in my formative years were negative, particularly towards non-heterosexuality. So, from my religious upbringing I learnt that as a bisexual I should refrain from same-sex relations altogether to please God; from the media, I learnt I should have as many sexual relations as possible, with as many people, to please the straight male audience. I’m not a psychotherapist, but that sounds to me like a recipe for a confused self-image, at best, and the media should take its fair share of the blame. I know I’m not alone in suffering from this lack of realistic range of bisexual role-models in the media.

Bisexuality is hyper-sexualised in society. This may seem an odd statement, given that bisexual has “sexual” in its name. However, bisexuals are rarely depicted as forming romantic attachments, or in monogamous relationships; their role in the drama is purely sexual. As someone for whom romantic attachments are important, and who is in a long-term monogamous relationship, I often encounter assumptions based on stereotypes of how bisexuals and straight people are different. The only difference is the number of genders we’re interested in forming sexual and/or romantic connections with. In common with gay women, our sexuality is portrayed in a way that is palatable, and even arousing, for the straight male viewer.

So where does that leave bisexual women in a world where our bodies, actions and identities do not exist as they truly are, only as some kind of repetitive caricature? We can hopefully connect in person and online with other bi women, and gain a sense of community. That way we can see that there are just as many ways to be bisexual as for any other orientation, and so help to defeat in our own lives the lies that the media force-feeds us. And maybe, one day, we can get ourselves represented in the media in all our diversity. 11

Isabel

As a mixed-race girl growing up in London, I’ve often felt out of place - considered black by my English peers, but seen as an “abroni”, a foreigner, in Ghana. But despite my dual heritage, what I’ve always felt most isolated by is the fact I was raised to love myself and other women, regardless of appearance or class, by a mother who was lucky enough to see through the veil of delusion and commercialisation that we are surrounded by as Westerners. I have grown up among girls who weren’t so lucky. At my state primary school, we young black girls idolised Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne and Mary-Kate and Ashley. The only coloured faces we saw in mainstream media were barbies re-cast in brown; Hollywood-ised and polished, with any trace of natural African beauty buffed and bleached away. The girls in Destiny’s Child and TLC were pale, with straight glossy hair and hips only as wide as some guy in a bar in Ohio might find attractive. Black models were shapeless like I’d never seen in real life before, so that I could imagine them flopping around the streets of London as thin as the paper they were printed on. Then there were the stereotypes. I could never understand why proud black actresses were willing to play these 2D comic roles which had them screeching and making funny faces, always dating black men and never on screen for more than 5 minutes in total. Our only role models seemed to be the sassy friend (not much use when you’re starring in your own life), or the righteous, faintly masculine false icon, in the “traditional” clothes some hollywood flunkie had found at the Indian market on the other

side of town, who was as much a real woman as the plasticized lead white girl. Even now I wonder why people sometimes ask if I’m a singer, and when I reply, asking what gave me away, they say “I could just tell”. What they mean is, I’m the same colour as Beyonce. The sad fact is, there are plenty of great role models representing young black women in the world today - Zadie Smith, Hannah Pool, Naomie Harris, Shingai Shoniwa, Nadia Latif, Jennifer Hudson and Azealia Banks (to name but a few) are making beautiful art, writing fascinating books, acting, campaigning and teaching the world over. They are just being sidelined. But what gets me almost more than that (because I do think racial prejudice is declining by the second in the structure of the western world, if not in its psyche) is the positive discrimination. Whenever a black girl does something which is deemed to be of interest to the rest of the world, she is immediately pigeonholed into the “ethnic” department, and we read endless articles in which she’s questioned about how close she is to her roots, what advice she has to other black girls hoping to do something worthwhile, how she feels about “Africa”. Don’t get me started on offhand references to our entire beautiful continent. In fact I won’t even get myself started. I think India Arie puts it best “I am not my hair, I am not this skin, I am not your expectations no, I am the soul that lives within”. Give her a listen if you haven’t yet. Iasabel Adomakoh Young 13

FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Nature has programmed human beings to be drawn to beauty and symmetry. The fashion industry capitalises on this predilection and uses technology to create idealised female faces – ageless, characterless and predominantly white – which power a multi-million pound industry. Fearful Symmetry examines

the deception of digital technology in relation to the female face. Each sitter is manipulated to become a perfected symmetrical self – where features are moved and arranged according to the findings of recent scientific studies into the ratios of female beauty.

Photography & Styling: Jade Starmore Hair & Make-up: June Long Models: Lee Ann McCall & Sarah Jane Walker Images copyright Jade Starmore 2013 www.towzietyke.com

Being Naked “it’s just life really”

I entered my friend Mary’s room, which was dark, save a couple of inexpertly placed lamps, and was greeted quietly by the few others already there. Mary emerged from the bathroom, naked, and placed herself in the dimly lit circle central to us. It was the first time I’d seen her naked, and in such a small space, surrounded by relative strangers I suppose it should have been (at least a little) weird. But it wasn’t, and like the others, I began to draw, selecting my tools from the eclectic paraphernalia we had managed to gather together. Last year, spear-headed by Clare Fanthorpe, a small group of us started a Life Drawing group. However, as none of us could draw and didn’t particularly want to pay to draw badly, we decided to be the models, with a different person modelling each week. A little under a year on and we still hold the sessions, albeit chaotically organised with the room changing weekly, the materials to draw on sometimes no more than wrapping paper, and the poses lasting no longer than twenty minutes, in accordance with our amateur level. However, when we do manage to have them, the relief and peace in the room is audible: everyone is a little happier and a little calmer. It’s an open group, with anyone able to join, on the one condition that they model at some point. Daunting as it may sound, a surprising number of people model the first time they come, regardless of whether they know many people in the room or not. In fact, getting naked, for me, is probably the most relaxing part of life drawing: it’s the only time in my week when I’m completely still, physically removed from the stresses and pressures of Cambridge life. It’s strange because, on the one hand nudity is normalised and formalised within the group as the model is there for a very specific reason; on the other, the atmosphere is informal, with eating, drinking, talking and music being welcome features. We’re also all friends - or at least, if you come to Life Drawing you become one. It can be frightening to be so exposed in front of people you know and love, but to be able to do that, to be celebrated and praised because of it, is really comforting. Others expressed similar views when I asked them what Life Drawing meant for them, and how they felt about stripping off in such an environment.

‘It is not getting naked that I like per se. But getting naked has facilitated the creation of a quietness and peace that is so rarely found at Cambridge. To be with a group of people who are producing separate things in community is unlike any other experience. Everyone is preoccupied by the drawings in front of them and there is no need to speak (although no resentment when someone does). The places and the people vary but the feeling of calmness stays the same.’

Aliya Ram

‘Sometimes it is easy to forget what our bodies look like. It’s a bizarre feature of us humans that we cover our bodies so painstakingly. Of course, I’m glad of my jumper when stepping out into Cambridge’s chilly November nights, but we cannot pretend that we bedizen purely for warmth purposes. Instead, we are usually reluctant to be naked for one of two main reasons: either some sense of shame about how we look, or a feeling of discomfort because of our association of nudity with sex. Both of these, of course, are uncalled for and entirely irrational when we think about it. Being naked around friends reminds me of this, and seems to take me back to some original, obvious - almost childish - knowledge, encouraging self-acceptance and love.’

Jessica O’Driscoll-Breen

‘Our Life Drawing class is one of my favourite times of the week. Just to be able to be naked, and have people smile and appreciate your naked body just for being there, for standing in front of them - it’s a perfect Sunday evening antidote to essay deadlines and the low level competitive undercurrent which fills so much of the week. No one’s self-conscious - you very quickly realise how all bodies are imperfect, but still endlessly fascinating and beautiful. And I suppose some of it is just a nice way to feel all eyes on you; for those twenty minutes lying naked on the table, you are the centre of attention.’

Julia Nicholson

‘Life Modelling is a fantastic way of getting comfortable in your own fabulous birthday suit in a really friendly, non-sexualised, non-judgemental environment. Because all body shapes and sizes are genuinely interesting to draw, there is literally no ideal physical formula, and (apologies for the triteness) it really does make you appreciate the individual beauty of each person’s body. There’s also an element of high-risk fun, trying to make up bizarre naked poses in unexpected venues and hoping no-one’s double-booked the room...’

Mary Galloway

Such an easy attitude towards being naked may not be remarkable to many, but in a day and age that constantly aspires to physical perfection, it is difficult to be confident in one’s own body. I fully realised the unique nature of our intimate group when I attempted to take my modelling skills to a professional sphere. Five minutes into my second pose my heart rate increased and I began to sweat uncontrollably. Whilst I thought I would be comfortable Life Modelling in any situation, my body shut down. My vision blurred, I couldn’t hear anything and I almost fainted. A few minutes later I found myself sitting nibbling a bourbon biscuit and sipping a cup of water, whilst ten pairs of middle-aged eyes blinked down at me. I was still fully nude. The ridiculousness of the situation lessened my embarrassment and perhaps brought me into greater sympathy with the group. Needless to say, I lamented my body’s shameful reaction: it seemed to contradict the easy-going and liberal attitude towards nakedness that I had always supposed I held. San Francisco’s recent prohibition of the act of being naked in public indicates the deep shame and disgust toward the naked form that exists within Western society. Such legislation demonstrates the societal compulsion to constantly cover up – a dangerously post-lapsarian attitude towards the human body, where the naked form (itself and our embarrassment of it) is evidence of the sinful nature of Man. I was not allowed to indulge in such an attitude in my childhood, as my family likes to bare-all fairly regularly. Despite my vehement protest and adolescent disgust, my Mum, Dad and sister would carry on with their day, acknowledging me absent-mindedly, ‘in the nuddy’. One day on entering the bathroom, I was faced with a curious 84 year old, fully nude. It was my Nana. Unabashed, she stood there, enquiring mildly, ‘Are you alright dear?’ in a trilling Edinburgh accent. ‘Right-o’ were her passing words as she lightly tapped me on the bum and then began to climb the two flights of stairs up to her room, if a little shakily. At the time I was mortified, but, in retrospect, there’s no denying that my Nana’s un-inhibited attitude towards her body was illustrative of her enviable freedom. Perhaps it’s to do with getting older, when perspectives and priorities shift, so that the glory of living (and having a body to prove this) really comes into relief... I asked her recently how she felt about being naked and, as she was finishing off the scrambled eggs I had made for lunch. she summed up the banality and brilliance of it: ‘No, why would I mind? It’s just life really.’ Perhaps our obsession with, and focus on the naked body is what creates the conception of the disgusting/shameful/ beautiful/sexual body. Perhaps if we all spent a little more time naked, and a little less time worrying about it, such epithets would cease to be applicable and we could get on. Words by Madeleine Dunnigan

Illustrations by Life Drawing Group

by Nick Morris

IS THIS A MAN’S WORLD? It’s often assumed that women are the sole sufferers of body anxiety, with internal and external pressures being something that men don’t experience. In this series of interviews, we explore this misconception, speaking to four men about their body image. All our interviewees have felt the desire to transform their bodies, and whilst each is differently motivated, it is clear that our society’s desire for ‘perfection’ is far from exclusive to women.

Simon Metin, 21, is a student of medicine at Kings College Cambridge. When he was 13 years old Simon began to develop anorexia. By the time he was 14, he weighed just 4st. He sought help in London clinic Rhodes Farm in 2007 and successfully recovered. His treatment there was featured on BBC’s ‘I’m a Boy Anorexic’. Since recovering Simon has become a YouTube sensation, passing on advice and support to other sufferers of the illness. Here he tells of his experiences and opinions on anorexia. Did you feel at the time there was any sort of pressure from your peers or from magazines? I didn’t feel that there was a pressure to do it; I just felt I was too big at the time. They say anorexia is all about trying to seize control. At school I was being bullied and at home there were arguments between my mum and dad…there wasn’t really a good place for me to be at any point in time. So I began controlling what I ate. Did anyone comment on your weight loss at school? How did girls relate to your weight loss? Many people realised that I was eating abnormally and losing a drastic amount of weight. The only person who didn’t was me. The comments came at me daily but I just blocked them out. Girls didn’t really relate to my weight loss at school because of how quickly I lost the weight. I often heard girls saying they thought they were too large in the classroom, but they never really talked to me about it. I was an outcast really because my friends never had to deal with a mental illness like I had. What is the difference between being a boy anorexic and a girl anorexic? Very similar fundamentally. However, girls with anorexia appear to be more willing to step out and/or are diagnosed more easily by doctors because anorexia is usually associated with women. Men are often less willing to step out because they feel as though it makes them look weak. The goal for a male anorexic is a more muscular physique – to make them look strong. If they come forward and say they have an eating disorder it negates that goal. You were quite young when you entered the clinic. Do you think that the pressure to look a certain way begins at an earlier age now?

I think it’s becoming more so now, because a lot of people are reading these magazines and watching these TV shows. I occasionally go back to the clinic and they say it’s incredible how young they are now. When I was leaving, there was a six-year-old there. What do you think the relationship is between food, body and power? Initially, you try to seize the power by controlling what you eat. It might be that you’re trying to look a certain way, but when the disease takes hold you don’t have any power anymore. The guilt that you get from eating is awful. I remember thinking to myself at the beginning of every week, ‘right, I’m going to stop this now’, but it just never happened. You’re just a shell for another thing that’s inside you. Do you think it could stem from a desire to maintain the aesthetic of a child? Actually, I remember when I was younger - ten or eleven - I was maybe six and a half stone and then when I was fourteen, I weighed myself again, for the first time in ages, and I was bigger. I thought to myself ‘I was once this weight [6 ½ stone], why am I bigger now?’ Why do you think it is that boys choose to lose weight when thinness doesn’t tend to be the conventional ideal body image? I wasn’t exposed to any of this kind of stuff: at this age I was still watching cartoons. I only heard of the term anorexia when I got admitted: it was only after I got admitted that I saw things like pro-anorexia websites or particular images to which people aspired.

Here the motivations for going to the gym have deeper cultural implications. Our interviewee is part of a SouthAsian community where values of respect, macho-masculinity and a ‘hench’ body are completely intertwined. Why do you work out? Confidence. If you have a skinny body you don’t feel confident about yourself. And were you skinny before you started working out? Yes. I was ugly. I wasn’t confident; I got the idea that girls like muscular men. The community that I am from, it’s got a macho culture. I come from an immigrant south-asian community. There are a lot 29

of gangs… so if you are part of a gang you’ve got to be big. You can’t be skinny otherwise you’re called a pussy. So that is why you keep in shape - to look strong, so you can intimidate, and to feel confident? Yes. But you don’t want to get too big. Other men get too big, it’s disgusting – you’ve got to balance it. You’ve got to be competitive with other men, but you’ve also got to not get too big, cause that won’t look good. The competition drives you – me and my mates are always like, ‘who’s benching what?’ So do you think you do it for other men, or for women? Both. When you’re with men, you wouldn’t say ‘Do I look good’ you would say ‘How much iron are you pumping?’. With women, you don’t talk about gym, it’s just there. You ain’t gonna talk to a woman about how many reps you do. Do you think that women wouldn’t look at you or women wouldn’t be attracted to you if you didn’t work out? It’s a fact, if you’ve got a good body women will look at you more than if you’ve got a skinny body. What about your family, do you have brothers who you work out with? No, that’s another reason why I want to get bigger I only have sisters. In our culture you have to defend the honour and dignity of your sisters. If I’m a skinny shit people think they can take advantage. Men respect you as well when you’re bigger. That’s the main thing: respect. It’s a cultural thing. Tell me more about the place of respect in your culture. Well the interesting thing is that I’m doing my dissertation on why extremism flourishes, so one of the things I discovered that was quite close to home was this kind of masculine identity that was part of the far right movement. It [the far right movement] is empowering: it gives you a medium through which you can enact your masculine identity. Obviously I’m not part of the far right movement, but that culture, the idea of the macho man… A lot of Islamic culture comes from the religion, and in the religion battles, being big, conquering…these things are emphasised. But the other thing is, in my community, you’ve got to remember that men and women aren’t allowed to mix really, so you’re constantly surrounded by men all the time. And men are competitive. So if you’re just sitting there, a skinny shit, surrounded by like

fifty big guys… So would you say it [your body image and its relation to respect and your culture] is about power and old-style virtues of valour? Yes. These old-style macho man concepts of the idea of masculine identity are really interesting. Today actually, one of the political books I was reading said that the idea of violence was natural to man, but that violence is balanced by education, social upbringing, all the rest of it – middle class families… that’s why they abhor violence. But violence is a fact of life, certainly amongst the working class. I think there’s more of a desire to get “hench” in working class communities than within the middle class. What is the role of the media in male body image? Men have to look a certain way: not too big, not too skinny, six-pack chests… What kind of media are you talking about? I would say everything. Let me put it this way, if you’re watching a drama, if you’re watching Sopranos, you don’t have skinny people going around shooting people. You have very fat men shooting people though. Yeah but that’s different, they’re the bosses, they’re cappos, they’re never skinny. Sopranos depicts a hyper-masculine fighting culture where women play a subordinate role. It’s related to women though isn’t it? You can’t be divorced from the fact that in my culture there’s the idea that it’s a man’s job to protect the women in his life. That’s my culture though, I realise it’s not universal. But if you look at prisons, everyone comes back hench, everyone comes back beefed up. If you look at that environment where everyone’s a man….A lot of my friends who were in prison came out really beefed up. It’s quite a competitive environment, if you’re a skinny shit in prison you’re just going to be bummed up the ass.

This university sportsman, who wishes to remain anonymous, offers the athletic motivations for working out and keeping in top physical condition. However, he also admits that it’s not as simple as that and his gym routine is motivated by more than just a desire for improved performance.

Why do you work out? For me it’s sort of split. On the one hand I want to be stronger,to perform better in the sporting realm. On the other hand I think it gives me a lot of confidence. I find when I’m physically fitter I can work better, and sort of feel a lot more confident on nights out. When did you start and why? When I was in school, I was the scrawniest person in our year. I started going to the gym with a friend and became a bit bigger. I suddenly noticed that I went from being the skinniest person in the year, to someone that people looked at a little bit. You feel confident because people… girls take more notice of you, and the hormones build and give you confidence. Do you work out for girls or for boys? How would you feel if a girl didn’t respond well? I found that there was a really positive vibe from all the guys, we supported each other. It’s also a very healthy thing to do. But if a girl didn’t like it [my body] I would be quite taken aback. But you rely on the magazines to give you the objective view on what is attractive, so if you know you are conforming to that, it wouldn’t be as hard a blow. What is the relationship between your sense of who you are and your body shape? I got ill over Christmas and I didn’t really feel attractive anymore. In first term of university, [people] would admire me for having good arms. By people giving that…pressure almost, it encourages you to keep it up…you think that without that…would people still feel the same? So then I suppose quite a large amount of my self-worth is bound up in it. Is home a more body-focused culture? I was discussing this with a friend: he said in Newcastle, when you go out you’ve got to have a good bod. No one is going to look at you if you’ve got small arms and stuff. Do you think it’s a compulsion to exercise? You could almost view it as one of the greatest drug addictions. It takes up loads and loads of time, it disrupts the routine of your normal day, it costs money… How much money do you spend? I spend about 10 pounds more a day on food… protein shakes included. So looking at it like that, it seems like a drug addiction. But then it is healthy… Do you ever strain your muscles when 30

you’re training? Yes, that’s a major principle of how to gain mass. You have to tear the muscles whilst exercising which obviously hurts a lot at the time. Not tearing in a kind of injury way, but tearing in the way that the next day it really really hurts. Is that good for your body? To an extent… but you risk long term joint damage, you’ll get a lot more wear and tear, living that kind of lifestyle. I think rapid weight loss like I experienced over Christmas would only happen if you got ill. I don’t think it’s a very unhealthy thing to gain muscle weight for sport. It is controlled.

Nick Davies, 20, reads French and German at the University of Cambridge and is from Bolton. Though he plays many sports, such as football and cricket, last summer he decided to embark upon a muscle-building programme in an attempt to bulk up. Here he tells us why and what this new body means to him. Why did you first start working out? To be perfectly honest I think it’s about self-confidence. I wasn’t happy with my body image at the time. Walking round these bars and nightclubs I would see these guys looking pretty hench and I saw the way that women would approach them and it was very different to the way they approached me. Purely to boost my self-confidence and to change the image I had of myself I decided to start working out and I’ve definitely noticed the difference. Were you trying to be more ‘masculine’? Did you feel a pressure from the men you saw in clubs or the men you saw in the media? I don’t know…I don’t exactly equate masculinity with muscles and body size. Masculinity is more about character traits for me. I do feel a bit of pressure from magazines and TV. If you look at all the heartthrobs on TV all of them work out. They’re not really skinny guys with a little paunch, they are people on a strict workout regime. Do you think the reason why the women approach you in the bars now is because of the association between muscles and ‘masculine’ traits like power and virility? Two girls I know were talking about what they find attractive in a man and they put a lot of emphasis on the muscles. I know they’re not representative of all women but I remember thinking I should start hitting the gym. You’ve made it very clear it’s for women. Yeah, it’s not for me. It costs a lot – the cost of the gym, the cost of the protein, the cost of the food. When I had to have 8 weeks off it was absolute heaven because I actually find it very difficult to find the time and energy to go. I don’t enjoy the process but I do enjoy the result. How much does it cost? I spend about £300 a year on a gym membership. The protein and supplements is probably about £60-£70 a

month. And then the increase in the food costs, so probably add on like £30 a month. So if you work it out it’s over £100 a month and if you work it out for a year…well, I don’t even want to think about it! [laughs] Do you think it’s worth it? I honestly think it’s the best investment of my time and money I’ve ever made. I don’t think there’s any replacement to feeling good within your skin and your body. Some guys take it to the extremes though, which I wouldn’t do. Loads of guys also go onto steroids. I once spoke to a guy in the gym and he was telling me about a bull hormone, where you’re taking the hormone out of a bull and taking it yourself and it gives you a massive amount of testosterone. He said ‘if there was a pill that I could take to make my body absolutely perfect but I would die when I was 50 years old then I would take it right now’. What do you think about that? I think that’s very ridiculous and extreme. I would never sacrifice my future health. What I can do, I can do safely. Do you think the guys in the gym subscribe to the Geordie Shore/Jersey Shore versions of men who tan and extreme groom? Particularly in the gym I’m in at home [Bolton], yes, but not the University gym. At home the guys with the steroids go straight on the sunbeds – there’s a sunbed in the gym, then off for their haircut. They’re completely shaven, including armpit hair, which I think is taking it to a whole new level. Do you think it’s a regional thing? I think it’s a certain type of woman who finds that attractive. So yeah I definitely think it is a regional thing. These TV shows [Geordie Shore, TOWIE] have definitely made it more popular How do you feel when you miss a training session? Pretty bad actually. I had to miss 7 or 8 weeks recently and I didn’t feel comfortable with myself anymore. I felt like I was constantly lacking in something. I didn’t like the fact that when I was in a bar seeing other guys in tight t-shirts that guy wasn’t me anymore. Do you think there’s only one aesthetic for men? Now I’ve come to Cambridge I’ve seen the thin guy, the ‘alternative’ type, top button done up. You really need the thin body for it. Anything in between ‘built’ and ‘alternative’ you wouldn’t at31

tach a title to it…you’d kinda look past it. Whereas for girls, there are a lot more variations. There is a larger group of men than women think who like a woman who is more full. How much of your self worth do you think is bound up in your body image? A heck of a lot. I don’t try to be a funny guy, I don’t try to strike up a conversation about Rimbaud or whatever. So yeah, for me, body image is really important.

Words by Kitty Drake and Megan McPherson

Pregnancy One year, for a few months, I was thin. I had come out of a particularly destructive long-term relationship and stopped eating for a few months. Just in time for my sister’s wedding I was a sexy size 10. I look amazing in those photos, but I am acutely aware that I have never been so unhappy. Over the years I have developed a similar relationship with my body that most of my female friends have with theirs: cool contempt on the good days, serious hatred on the bad. And then I got pregnant. And gradually, things changed. Like many people, I associated pregnancy with a big, round fooball-like stomach, and that’s what I wanted. I didn’t realise that the football took 7 months to grow and that I would spend many months waiting. As I waited, my relationship with my body changed. Suddenly, all I wanted was to be healthy and feed my baby. To say I didn’t care about how I looked would be a lie, but I didn’t care how much I weighed and I certainly didn’t care how I looked to other people. I had stopped comparing myself to anyone else. Those thin, beautiful women in the magazines suddenly became irrelevant because I was pregnant and about to balloon. As I started to show, I began to feel beautiful. My belly was round, smooth and soft to the touch. I no longer wanted to hide, and began to enjoy figure-hugging clothes like never before. People said I was ‘bump proud’, and pregnant acquaintances had ‘bump envy'; I just felt good. I should mention that I didn’t experience pregnancy as “the most amazing thing that had or could ever happen to you”. I was happy to be expecting a child but I was not one of those women, like my mother, who raved about its miracles. I was content, but the way I felt about my body was something separate. It was a slow process of discovery, of building a new relationship with my form over the weeks and months that it changed. There were the odd, difficult occasions when I felt like my body wasn’t my own anymore. My adoring husband would fawn over me and imagine our baby growing inside me. This gave me the uncomfortable feeling that my body partly belonged to him now that I was carrying his child. When my husband watched me naked or touched me, I couldn’t distinguish between intimate, sexual gestures and the loving caresses intended for my pregnant body and the baby. As I reflected on this and talked to him about my fears, I realised this was rooted in my anxiety about becoming a mother, about how much of my identity I would be able to retain in that role. I realized that I had not lost ownership or control over my body. So I let myself go… I was initially puzzled by the women who worried about their weight during and post-pregnancy – I wanted to tell them

that they had been set free! But there are elements of pregnancy that are far from liberating. If pregnant women aren’t vigilant, their changing body can become public property. Suddenly, anyone and everyone has an opinion about what you do, what you eat, what you drink, whether you cycle, walk or drive and what you should or shouldn’t be doing. Many pregnant women also complain of being groped by people who want to ‘get a feel of the baby’. Under the guise of ‘helpful advice’ I was criticized for drinking coffee, cycling too near my due date, and not giving up work. I didn’t know who Kim Kardashian was before I got pregnant but incessant news of her body spiralling out of control compared to the ‘glow’ of the Duchess of Cambridge is enough to illustrate the subjection of pregnant bodies to patriarchal control of a different kind. I feel lucky to have mostly escaped that. Before I gave birth, I wondered what my body would look like in the immediate days postpartum. Would I still look pregnant? Would I look fat? How long until my abdomen returned to a somewhat normal size? I realised I had never seen a woman who had just given birth: where did they hide? Friends had stayed well covered, and any photos of women I had seen were taken weeks or months after they had lost their ‘baby weight’. I wondered what clothes I’d be wearing. Would I be so consumed with love for my new child that I wouldn’t care what I looked like? How would this affect my relationship with my husband? And how would our sex life change? And now, I am a mother. I gave birth to a gorgeous little girl on July 1st. The labour was extremely difficult, as it is for so many first time mothers, but from the moment our daughter was placed on my chest, as promised, it became a distant memory. Within hours my stomach was soft, and in a few days it was vaguely normal looking. I had stretch marks that had appeared in the few weeks before I gave birth. I was clearly rounder than I was before getting pregnant, my belly was very floppy and I have no abdominal muscles, having not exercised them for 9 months. But I have found myself looking in the mirror with fascination. I don’t feel the heroic sense of achievement I’m told many women feel. I don’t feel that my stretch marks are like war wounds and a testament to the miracle of life. But I don’t feel any horror or disgust. I don’t feel the need to hide my body from my partner, my friends, people in the street or myself. I look in the mirror and I see myself, I see my body and I can finally accept that this is who I am now. I am not eager to lose weight and I am not on a diet. I am just me. Me and free. Long may it last… Anon Illustration by Stella Phipps

“It was a slow process of discovery, of building a new relationship with my form over the weeks and months that it changed.” 33

Gaga Latte I am a victim of consumerism. I love a good fad. Whether it’s the chic new Jil Sander paper handbag (yes, just a paper bag, for £180), or some new exercise regime (I’m all over yogalates), I want to be a part of it - the bandwagon is leapt upon. And normally, this isn’t overly detrimental (well, it has caused some pretty hard hits to my overdraft). On the whole, they’re relatively harmless. A few, however, have darker sides. Something that is always praised is thinness - thinness above all else. After reading a few glossy mags, and the occasional blog, suddenly all I can hear is “thin is in”, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, and the macabre classic, “at least I’ll be thin when I’m dead”. Dread. Being thin is deified as the epitome of chic, and therefore I want to be thin. This is where what I have coined the “Latte Complex” kicks in. I am a thin man. In fact, I find it actively difficult to put on weight. If anything, I should be gaining weight. But, I suffer from the Latte Complex. I always order a skinny latte. I prefer full fat milk and I need to put on weight and yet ... “thin is in”, and drinking a skinny latte makes that coffee infinitely more fashionable. This is a problem, and it extends beyond my morning latte. This thinking stops me from double-carbing at dinnertime; it stops me from taking that muffin; it forces me to swap the dauphinoise potatoes for iceberg lettuce. It has, essentially, made me gastronomically dull. I do not aspire to dull. However, I have seen the light, thanks to that glorious entity of glittering wonder: Lady Gaga. Last year, Gaga came into the firing line, and her figure was lampooned after photos of her performing during her Born This Way Ball this year hit the web. She received torrents of abuse calling her fat. Having watched the concert through a slight teary haze, I can say anyway is completely false. The second drama arose from her cover-shot for the September issue of American VOGUE. Here Gaga stood in a stunning Marc Jacobs ball gown, gracing one of, if not the most influential fashion magazines in the world. The shot shows Gaga in an editorial pose, looking incredibly thin. At closer inspection, her thinness is a little impossible – she appears

to have only one leg, and her cheekbones seem to have been dramatically enhanced since her “Love Game” days. Indeed, it was impossible. VOGUE also published a behind-the-scenes video montage of the shoot, in which the true extent of the cover’s photoshop is revealed. The circumference of the waist and knees of the cover-shot have been dramatically shrunk, her wig tamed, her face made more strikingly angular. Her body had been made into an unobtainable fallacy, portrayed as a covetable reality. The combination of people slating her weight and at the same time being outraged by the distortion of her actual body caused Gaga to lash back. To quote Tyra Banks in her own speech against comments on her own weight, if Gaga “had lower self-esteem [she’d] probably be starving [her]self right now”. Luckily, Gaga is more self-assured. She looked great - she wasn’t too thin, she was healthy. She may have had a muffin or two, even a full fat latte (how devilish) but she still looked beautiful. And she knew it. She didn’t need photoshop to prove that. And so, she published photos of herself, wearing nothing but a particularly unflattering yellow lingerie set, on her Little Monsters website, inviting the world to judge her Body Revolution 2012. The abuse stopped. Instead, thousands upon thousands of people posted their own photos. Suddenly phrases like “thin is in” vanished, and in their place appeared “if size 2 is good, then my size 22 must be amazing”, a message accompanied by a photo of a woman in her underwear, like Gaga, proudly displaying her body. Obviously being healthy is always important, but any form of bodily abuse does not a healthy body make. And that means starvation, as much as anything else. So now, as I crawl to Starbucks in the morning, and as I stand before the barista, prepared to reel off my peculiarly exact order - venti caramel macchiato extra hot extra shot (try it, it’s heaven) - I think of Gaga and fight the urge to add “skinny” to my order. So, as with all of life’s great questions, think “what would Gaga do?” Woeds by Jacob Mallison Bird Illustration by Stella Phipps

“I have seen the light, thanks to that glorious entity of glittering wonder: Lady Gaga.” 35

Portraits by Tyro Heath

four tunes for eyesight by Henry Davey

music from an earlier commercial plays for that giant in talk, sizing up Contemptibles with implements of the oversize (granted by Office, bequeathed by Medical Authority). failing to stare on, through the glass-light sheen, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll condescend to twitch, blink, flick and blame the switch, up-rooting the wiring and asking about faults,

once Sterility deceases into Stability â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Knighthood to coat of Heather, male into the mail age, peak of civic Kingdom into the midway-tether, axe Axed from fight, joust Jousted out of sight, knuckles Buckled into straps Red from bruises, (a Scarlet of dirt), and the sword put aside for other uses â&#x20AC;&#x201C; he encounters the hue of his hands, stately, reading his own skin like Braille.

III

his tidal eyes settle, in a shrunken aftermath headached, aches obtained via the route as proscribed and specified by manual usage â&#x20AC;&#x201C; he better think to call the Operator. but curving tints of new dark relay Youth in a list of beatitudes, attitudes, reiterattitudes, glosses, glosses, glosses, forgetting his triptych of decades finished decades ago.

glancing at screens through spectacles, those wires and cruces impede what were his eyes, coiling over residual vision, right through each breach with ranks of white or black, with noughts and crosses. teeth-whites barely in sight, he perceives only through nostalgia, sepia-dulled by growth and death whilst still, set smiles move smooth via wires, playing music from an earlier commercial.

The Perfect Body is a Carrot and Stick Articles such as Harpers Bazaar’s ‘Eight Minutes to the Perfect Beach Butt’, feed our perfection delusion, this is nothing new. But what should be brought to our attention is the relativity of the concept; what is perfect now was not then and will not be in the future.

17th Century Rubens trumpeted the 17th Century’s preference for the larger lady in his painting entitled The Three Graces. The ladies of Rubens paintings were appealing because they could afford to eat well at a time when many could not…

1450’s In the 1450s women shaved to avoid lice and then donned a pubic wig known as a ‘merkin’.

Ancient Egypt

Pornography revived pubic pride in the 17th Century as it would again in the 1980s. Carraci’s 1 Modi (The Ways) depicted erotic scenes with female nudes bearing the bush, in the same way that Helmut Newton would go on to do in his 1980s work which featured models wearing nothing but shoes and pubes.

In ancient Egypt, the mysterious dark triangle was a staple of art-work.

18th Century

1990’s

18th Century indulged in unnatural emphasis of the body almost comparable to our own; hair became higher, hips became larger and breasts brimmed over low-cut necklines.

The 90s rolled on and we shaved. Then pubic hair became a shock tactic in Richard Avedon’s iconic portrait of Stephanie Seymour (1992) and later in Amanda Palmer’s priceless pro-pubic hair song ‘Map of Tazmania’ (2010).

19th Century The corset speaks for the Victorian waistline ideal, a good thirty-two inches short of Rubens’ Women.

1950’s - 1960’s The British public would go on to bathe in the ‘Man-Tan’ culture of the 1950s and the ‘Coppertone’ tanning adverts: ‘Don’t be a paleface’. As we move between the 1950s and 60s, the polka dot pinny resting on the rounded hips of the domestic goddess was hung up in favour of the shift dress, sported by alien-eyed and boy-figured Twiggy.

1920’s Traditionally, pallid western skin would betoken ‘refinement’. The more arsenic and lead you were willing to inflict on your skin, the higher your social standing.

Modernity Modernity approaches, and the swinging pendulum of perfection becomes rapid: in the early 90s curvaceous Pamela Anderson leapt over Californian beaches, less than ten years later Kate Moss was denying anorexia rumours.

Fast forward to 1920 and Coco Chanel has just arrived back from the Mediterranean blaze of the Cote d’Azur, her skin is darker and her status unquestioned. The tanning phenomenon is conceived.

But speculation, too, is an endless pursuit. The larger issue is that perfection is not a fixed entity, and by definition it is never achieved because never complete. The contradiction is inherent in its latin roots perfectio a completing and perficere to finish. But the rapidity with which the beauty industry redefines perfection makes it anything but complete. The pursuit of perfection is the lifeblood of cosmetic consumerism. The sector continues to thrive because it is selling an unattainable ideal, the goal posts are ever changing. ‘Perfection’ is a marketing ploy. 43

THE BODY: UNCUT by Johnny Falconer

A medical student’s first experience of the human dissection room is bizarre. Upon entrance, we are confronted by 40 sheet-covered corpses, a number of which have died sitting upright and remain true to that position 18 months later. This creates a picture wherein some lie flat while others sit serenely to attention. That, together with students fainting onto their corpses as the sheet ıs removed (which of course means they come to buried in a dead body, promptly knocking them out again) leads to a slightly hysterical atmosphere: at one extreme people look grave and ask to leave the room briefly to reflect; at the other, people bounce from table to table with a sinister enthusiasm, comparing their corpse to others. It is in these early sessions that the significance of small differences between cadavers becomes apparent. The 78-year-old lady that I studied, for example, had a thin face but a thick layer of fat around her abdomen and thighs. Aesthetically, this created a look of permanent gleeful surprise as the taught skin pulled her mouth open, and eyebrows sideways and down. Practically, it meant we had to spend much of the two-hour session dedicated to dissecting her legs,‘fat shovelling’: using fingers and scissors to remove inches of greasy fat that obscured underlying muscles and blood vessels. But time wears on and novelty wears off. As the year went by mystery was replaced with anatomy: ‘bits that were different colour’ became ‘areas of varying blood supply’; ‘she’s only got one boob’ changed to ‘a right-sided mastectomy’. With this progression the atmosphere changed from agitation, to ease, to experiment. I saw one of my friends study a diagram of the prostate gland in his notes for a while and then mutter to himself, ‘learn by doing’, before plunging a finger into his cadaver’s anus. Instead of recoiling in disgust I lamented the fact I had a female cadaver and wandered coyly over to his area, hoping to be invited to share in his discovery. Equally,

when I was dissecting the gluteal muscles and a bit of poo - 18 months doing little to dull its identity - oozed out on to my fingers, I took it stoically, simply reminding myself not to forget gloves again. That’s not to say you become entirely unaware: I still winced when I saw a table of six girls each ‘having a go’ at slicing a testicle in half. Nonetheless, the threshold had been recalibrated. I was struck by the lasting effect dissection had on my approach to the body in general. As you engage on increasingly intimate and intricate levels with another body, and watch everyone else around you doing the same, it is difficult not to become relaxed about nudity, bodily functions and sex – subjects that were previously addressed only in the dark, with the promise of embarrassment and stilted apologies at the end. After spending a year of cutting indiscriminately – seeing, hearing and smelling unidentifiable excretions – warts, farts and faeces cease to disgust. Equally, before I get self-conscious about the size/shape/dexterity of my penis I think back to the catalogue of uninspiring specimens I saw just the day before. When constant exposure takes away the mystery of concealed organs, the hierarchy of anatomical intimidation can be more accurately organised. After all, the mouth is in many ways merely a vagina with teeth and is therefore legitimately much more terrifying. Towards the end of the year we had to write a ‘tribute’ to the cadaver’s family, thanking them for their generous act of donation. Such a letter consists largely of platitudes which aim to circumvent the basic premise of ‘I am thankful your loved one died because...’. I never had the confidence to say it in my tribute letter - and it is perhaps a skewed conclusion borne of working with a corpse rather than a body - but spending so much time poking around in another’s made me wonder if the body has any real character of its own at all. Maybe bodily acts are misinterpreted as demonstrative when they are simply anomalous: ‘they’ve got such a cute sneeze’ seems to inform little more about a character than my remarking that a cadaver has an endearing little embolism. It is an attempt to attribute emotional significance to something that is essentially just an arbitrary feature of constitution. That’s not to say that physical traits can’t become external manifestations of the characteristics you believe an individual to possess, but it is too easy and too often that the two are viewed as inextricably linked. While such a tendency may be quite harmless, one can see how it might extend beyond such innocuous examples to create significant social divides centred onrace or gender; divides that arise from sheer laziness of interpretation.

The Paradox of the Body: A Christian Perspective

It is the book of the Bible that pre-pubescent boys love to snigger at in Sunday School: the ‘Song of Songs’, a representation of a conversation between two lovers, who are rejoicing in the beauty and glory of the body. Somewhat surprisingly for those who associate the Bible with a puritanical set of instructions, the poem exalts in the joy of physical sexuality: How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful! Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn, coming up from the washing... Your two breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies.

(Song of Songs, 4:1-5)

This is a highly eroticised account of the female body, filled with a sense of awe and wonder right from the repeated breathlessness of ‘Oh, how beautiful!’. The beauty of the male lover, too, is extolled: Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. (Song of Songs, 2:3-4) Personally, I have no desire to have my hair likened to goats, my teeth to sheep, or my breasts to fawns. However, the aesthetic pleasure of the passage reminds me of the pure delight of a God who formed a perfect creation, declaring it all ‘good’ but humans, the apex of all he made, to be ‘very good’ (Genesis 1). Conventional images of Christianity as solely concerned with bodily denial, the evil of the flesh and the rejection of the earthly, forget this passionate celebration of the physical. Christians should not oppress and cover beauty, but rejoice in its goodness.

And yet, as I look at myself, my friends, and the world we inhabit, I cannot help but be aware of the embarrassment that far too often envelopes the human body. We cloak ourselves with the most expensive garments we can afford, mask our supposed imperfections with foundation, diet until our skeletons obtrude from our skin. Our society is sick with shame. “Blame the media!” is one frequent battle-cry. Perhaps glossy magazines are responsible, or the false expectation offered by pornography, or the advertisements that sell us a lie, or the misogyny of centuries. I do not wish to deny or belittle the impact of any of these factors. But may I be permitted to offer an alternative perspective? ‘Body issues’ are not specific only to our time and location, as evidenced in the corsets worn by the Victorians or the practice of ear lobe stretching of the Mursi tribe of Ethiopia. I have come to believe that the Bible offers an explanation that fits far better with our experiences of the shame that pervades all societies than surface factors: something much deeper, that is part of our human condition, as explained in the creation story. Adam and Eve walked naked and unashamed in the Garden of Eden, in perfect communion with the God who created them. It was when they turned from him, denying his love and goodness, that they were consumed with the desire to hide themselves, fashioning make-shift coverings from leaves. Shame is thus a symptom of our rejection of the creator, explaining the aching feeling in every human of an unknown perfection we seek yet are lacking. Creation has fallen from the perfection in which it was created, and so the body becomes a locus not only of beauty, but of illness, brokenness and frailty. My body is no longer as it was created to be, and my attitude towards it is no longer the unashamed rejoicing that Adam and Eve were able to enjoy. Being separated from the creator means the creation, while maintaining much of its splendour, is fundamentally flawed. So how can I reconcile this tension between beauty and brokenness? What hope is there for a world wracked with shame? The consequences of our separation from a loving Father must fall somewhere. And so it is that at the centre of the Christian faith is the emblem which now most commonly features as an item of jewellery: a broken body hanging on a cross. A body that was scorned, rejected, despised, flogged, and eventually crucified, holes pierced through living flesh, limbs stretched and distorted, bones breaking under their own weight. Another part of the Bible describes it thus: But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5) All the guilt, brokenness and shame caused by my rebellion against the source of beauty, the creator, is placed on the body of the most beautiful of men, Jesus, who never had cause to feel shame. No longer must I face the punishment that I deserve for the pain I have caused others and God by living with myself at the centre of the universe: God has loved me so much that he has offered himself, incarnated in Jesus, as a sacrifice. No longer must I feel guilt or embarrassment about my physical or spiritual self: I am seen as perfect in God’s eyes, for Jesus has dealt with my guilt. No longer must I measure myself against society’s warped standards of beauty: the source of all goodness and beauty rejoices over because, through Jesus, I am his daughter. To know all of this is a wonderfully freeing experience. I can also look forward to a perfect new body, in a perfect new creation, of which my present body is a beautiful, but broken, template. For Jesus’ body did not remain mutilated upon the cross. The accounts of Jesus’ life record a resurrected, physical body, as Jesus ate and drank with his disciples, appearing before hundreds of people and touched by a disbelieving Thomas. For the Christian, heaven is not a place of floating clouds and disembodied spirits playing harps. Rather, the Bible promises a new heaven and a new earth, a physical place where we will be the humans we were made to be. There will be no more shame or embarrassment at our corporeal, resurrected bodies: only glory and rejoicing as we celebrate a perfect creation and the Father God who made it all. For the time being, I can wonder at the beauty of the body just as did the writer of the ‘Song of Songs’. I can glory in the variety of shape and colour, in the creativity and individuality of each human being. I can look at myself in the mirror and know with certainty that my worth does not depend upon the artificial measurements with which my society determines beauty. But I can also recognise with sadness the fragility and pain of our temporary bodies, looking forward to a day when the world will be perfectly restored and my body along with it. All Biblical quotations taken from the NIV 2011

Words by Naomi Wood 47

by Julia Stringer

Thurstan Redding & Nick Morris

VEILING

hy is it so much easier to ‘be you’ when part of you is hidden? Whether we know it or not, our bodies are the visible sites of both power and subjection. With every passing glance, we put and are put into boxes; we categorise as we are categorised. This photo-editorial ex- plores the theme of veiling – a term that here describes the shroud of words, costumes and stereotypes that are hung on our bodies. In particular, we’ve focused on the interesting ways that people might conform to, or replicate this ‘veil’, to demonstrate solidarity, or hide in- security. Equally, the piece looks at how subversion of an image, body or category, can cut through the ‘veil’ to create something new, challenging and interesting. The piece aims to ‘unveil’ the body, and bring into the light some of the beauty and absurdity of what we do to it, how we look at it, and why we seek to change it.

Photographers: Thurstan Redding & Nick Morris Styling: Tom Rassmussen Storyboard: Evie Howard; Jacob Mallinson Bird; Nick Morris Models: Philippa Bywater; Maeve Doherty; Joni McKenna; Isabel Adamakoh Young; Tom Rassmussen; Jacob Mallinson Bird

EVEN HOTTER RIGHT NOW! RITA ORA ALMOST BURSTS OUT OF HER TINY BIKINI AS SHE HOLIDAYS IN IBIZA She is used to showing off her assets in revealing attire. And when Rita Ora holidayed in Ibiza she chose a tiny string bikini which struggled to contain her curves. The singer, 22, wore a pretty studded pastel-coloured two-piece for a day out with friends on a boat on Saturday. The star looked chilled-out and happy as she sunned herself in the tiny swimsuit, which she seemed to be bursting out of. She was seen holding onto her bikini top to protect her modesty as she climbed back onto the boat after a swim. Oops: The singer seems to be struggling to contain her curves in the skimpy swimsuit She also wore a pair of black cat eye sunglasses and wore a cute pink miniskirt over her costume after the swim. Bryony Bates I like to take things and put them through Google Translate lots of times and see what comes out. The first section is quoted from an article about Rita Ora on holiday in The Daily Mail. As you can see, the language employed about her body in the article produced some interesting results,. The sections that follow are either taken directly from translations, or are based on translations. When I read those kinds of articles, it feels like they’re written in a different language – the way they conceive of women’s bodies, and what’s interesting or noteworthy about them is so alien to me. I hope this conveys some of that confusion.

Illustration: Lizzie Marx

Even hotter right now! Rita Oraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s small bikini almost blew it in Ibiza When Rita Ora holidays in Ibiza, they choose a small string bikini for her, which strives to contain her curves. The star looked happy and chilled when basked in a small bathing suit that looked as if it had exploded. To protect her modesty, the bikini was seen holding to her breasts, and after swimming he climbed back onto the boat with her. They were accompanied by a couple of glasses of the black cat, and a cute pink mini-skirt. Hot right anyway! Rita Ora blows her bikini on Ibiza vacation When you choose a string bikini, with a small effort you can include curvy Ibiza holidays, and Rita Ora. She looked happy, and her little bathing suit looked like he was having a blast while relaxing in the sea. The singer, 22, wore two pieces of candy while her bikini climbed back to his boat in order to protect her modesty. He had a couple of glasses of the black cat, and wore a cute pink mini-skirt. Because it's true! Ibizaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a little bit hot about Rita. With a little effort and the use of a solar bikini, Rita crowned her coppers. To protect her honour, and to care for his ships, the bikini holds on. She struggled to look like she was having a blast as she bared her assets. He moves like a cup of black cats, and used a pink mini-skirt on her, post-swim. This is the real news! Ibiza hot small Rita. The singer, 22, was spotted on a boat with them last weekend, sharing two pieces of candy with her breasts. She used a small solar bikini. To honour his memory, Stella and her little swimsuit kapandeng kapandeng explosion, and strength. They took with them one of his many black cats, and the candy gave way to a pink mini-skirt, after the operation. This news! Hot Rita, Ibiza. No effort, curves, Rita undresses. Burst assets, curves, boat, breasts. A small bikini. A black cat.

Why did you choose to photograph these particular people? It was for a variety of different reasons. I advertised on my website for those who wanted to be photographed nude and some jumped at me: these people would really work well, whether it was because of their figure or their face, or simply how they presented themselves to me. It wasn’t about their personalities but their shapes. I wanted to move away from the tactile flesh to something much more solid and stony. These are very sculptural photographs. This is why I photographed them in white dust mixed with cream. I started very cleanly applying it but then became much rougher with it.

Bodies, 6 Women, 1 Man Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander is a world renowned photographer, living and working in London. He is known for both his portraits and landscapes such as Diver, Salt Lake, Utah 1997, and his 2009 portrait of Barack Obama. His work is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2009 he was named International Photographer of the Year at the 7th Annual Lucie Awards and was also winner of the Prix Pictet award.

What was the cause of this development? I am interested in the idea of beauty and purity in the Renaissance. Women kept themselves very white as it was a sign of beauty, but I was also attracted to the whiteness of the sculptural effigies in this period. These Sculptures are always a little disconcerting, beautiful but also uncomfortable. Can you explain why in Bodies the models faces are mostly obscured? As human beings we always study faces. When you can’t see a person’s face you are forced to study a person’s body and so communication becomes only about the body. You are far more interested in the picture that doesn’t tell you everything. I read that you painted the models white because it formed a connection with death, but my first impression was that the painting accentuated the reality of the flesh or skin, a backlash against airbrushing; is this something you had in mind as well? I never thought of them as deathly. I personally have never associated white with death but I can see how the whiteness brings a powerful connection with the human condition, our fragility. In that sense we are very programmed as the human race. But do you view this series as a reaction or protest against the way the human figure is often portrayed in the media? It was not a protest. I think I once said that popular imagery airbrushes all true beauty away. There is no truth left in a beauty which is common and popular. We are saturated with pictures that hide what actually is very beautiful which is vulnerability.

BRITTLE BONES by Abbi Brown

It is hard to love a body which lets you down. Having lived with osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bones) since birth, my concept of the body has always been inextricably intertwined with pain, restriction and disappointment. My teenage years were largely overshadowed by the frustration and shame I felt towards a body which had long since abandoned all attempts to keep up with its peers. Ribs protruded where breasts ought to have been; my gait was the ungainly waddle of a rheumatic Pingu; my hearing aids whistled in a manner which reminded friends of their grandparents. Scoliosis twisted my spine into an ugly â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; shape which, once straightened, developed arthritis and left me at the whim of a mysterious, uncontrollable schedule of debilitating flare-ups. Pain management teaches the patient to take a step away, to analyse and treat the body and its complaints not as elements of the self, but as a separate entity to be compartmentalised and put aside. At school, hearing support workers taught me to rise above my increasingly deafened ears. From a position of absolute dualism between mind and body, the latter is easy to abuse. On my fifteenth birthday, I stood at four foot five inches and weighed a pleasingly symmetrical four stone five ounces. My body would never resemble the bodies of my friends, of the Olympians who adorned BBC screens that summer, of the supermodels who stalked the pages of magazines. But at least it was thin. The smaller the body, the lesser the significance of its flaws.

We live in a world in which crutches are grey and splints are beige, where disabled models are managed by segregated, specialist disabled-modelling agencies, and where crossovers into the mainstream hit the news. On ‘Britain’s Missing Top Model’ (of which only one series was ever produced,) photographers frequently directed paralysed model Sophie Morgan to pose for shoots without her wheelchair. I am ashamed to admit that, like many other part-time wheelchair users I know, I will go to almost any lengths to stand up out of my wheelchair before being photographed myself. Three years ago, amidst a stint of what the textbooks optimistically call ‘recovery’, I attended a talk by wheelchair dancer Caroline Bowditch, who also has brittle bones. ‘People stare,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think it’s because I’m disabled. They stare because I have beautiful eyes.’ It is hard to love a body which fails in both form and function, but I am learning. I have learned to feed my mind with the sustenance my body requires. I have learned to embrace the flatness of my chest, going cheerfully braless for weeks on end. I have learned to let my own arm rest on my naked thigh. Last summer, I wore shorts without tights for the first time in six years. I am still learning to treat my body patiently, to allow it time to rest and recuperate. I am learning to forgive it for the countless trips to A&E, for the ten months of my degree in which it has been broken. I am learning to believe that I am capable. The truth is, the human body is incredibly resilient. Mine has survived six operations, numerous fractures and mild starvation. It has learned to hear again. At the time of writing, it has just learned, again, how to walk. My body may be closer to a dilapidated lean-to than a temple, but it’s the only one I have. I refuse to apologise for a form which does not conform to the geometric patterns of curves and angles which make up the idolised female figure. I refuse to spend my twenties saving for a boob job. I refuse to believe that wheelchairs cannot be beautiful. My body bears the battle scars of its own artificial normality, of the rigorous programme of refurbishment it has survived, and I am learning to wear them with pride.

I never think about it until someone notices. When people show an interest though, I am very open about the fact that I am missing my right pectoral muscle. I am happy to show and tell. In this case I was happy to be photographed. Occasionally people want to touch to understand, and feel the way my body has naturally compensated for possible weakness by reinforcing the skeletal structure of the region. The one time that I thought about it rigorously was when I studied Classical art during my undergraduate degree. I was struck by representations of the male body. The ideal of naked physical beauty represented by Greek kouroi was a form that I felt my body shape would not allow me to achieve. Those statues were too slight, with slim Apollonian thighs, and narrow upper bodies. It seemed the sculptor had knocked off my entire right pectoral with one chisel-blow. I identified more with the burly shape of Heracles, who had a rougher, freer physicality than the slender form of Apollo. The kouros arguably still represents the ideal masculine physique. I am still without my right pectoral. So how do I make sense of my form today? Having long since accepted this idiosyncrasy, it has become something that gives my body its own peculiar significance – if not in the eyes of others, then in my own. Margaret Visser writes in Be- yond Fate that heroes are often marked by some sort of distinguishing physical imperfection. If I ever think about it, I wear my ‘imperfection’ as a badge of heroic distinction. Peter Morelli

Design: Scarlet Evans

I. Adomakoh Young, S. O’Sullivan, T. Redding, K. Drake, T. Heath, A. Perkins Ray, M. Dunnigan

Editor: Sadhbh O’Sullivan editor.ladybeardmagazine@gmail.com Deputy Editor: Kitty Drake deputyeditor.ladybeardmagazine@gmail.com Design: Bronya Meredith design.ladybeardmagazine@gmail.com Marketing: Lewis Taylor marketing.ladybeardmagazine@gmail.com Publicity: Augustus Perkins Ray publicity.ladybeardmagazine@gmail.com

N. Morris, T. Rassmussen, M. McPherson, J. Mallinson Bird

Events: Bridie McPherson bm426@cam.ac.uk Styling: Tom Rassmussen Head of Photography :Nick Morris Commissions Editors: Madeleine Dunnigan; Isabel Adamakoh Young; Megan McPherson comm.editors.ladybeardmagazine@gmail.com Arts Editors: Tyro Heath; Jacob Mallinson Bird; Thurstan Redding arts.ladybeard@gmail.com

With Thanks To WORDS Isabel Adomakoh Young Bryony Bates Abbi Brown Henry Davey Frances Docx Kitty Drake Madeleine Dunnigan Johnny Falconer Fiona Jacob Mallinson Bird Megan McPherson Pete Morelli Sadhbh O’Sullivan Naomi Wood ARTS/ILLUSTRATION Scarlet Evans Mary Galloway Tyro Heath Nadav Kander Lizzie Marx Bronya Meredith Nick Morris Julia Nicholson Jessica O-DriscollBreen Charlotte Quinney Aliya Ram Thurstan Redding Philip Richards Rosie Skan Jade Starmore Julia Stringer Stella Phipps

ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS Katherine Backler Maeve Doherty Elizabeth Doy Evie Howard Ella Hubbard Emily Kell Louisa MacDonald Jacob Mallinson Bird Marina Matilda Joni McKenna Emer Phelan O’Donnell Carrie Piper Tom Powell Tom Rassmussen Salena Richard Thomas Olivia Waddell

WITH THANKS TO Lauren Allpress; Tania Amado; Rachel Amey; Victoria Veronia Aubrey; Bolajoko Awogboro; Siana Bangura; Alex Barrington; Debbie Bates; Alexandra Becker; Catherine Bevin; Rajan Bhopal; Calum Bowden; Cath Boyle; Sarah Bradley; Laura Brewis;

Maggie Bridge; Lucy Brownridge; Charlotte Bröker; Caroline Burrows-Burke; Anna Butterworth; Jackson Caines; Sim Canetty-Clarke; Will Cartwright-Harwood; Francesca Cassidy; Ben Charles; Polly Checkland; Rebecca Chesshyre; Adam Chester; Mandy Chun; Guy Clark; Kate Coffe; Ben Comeau; Lucy Curtis; Kirsty Danks; Amanda Dickens; Aydin Emre Dickerdem; Peter Downer; Belinda Drake; Lydia Drake; Nicholas Drake; Susan Drake; Kate Dudley; James Anthony Eager; Hetty Einzig; Sarah Ellen; Sarah-Jane Ewart; Freddie Feilden; Julia Fine; Caroline Fish; Molly Flatt; Anthony Fort; Carol Foster; Queen’s College Arts Fund; Meredith Gallop; Judith Gardom; Sinead Ga r r i g a n - Ma t t a r ; Marina Garvey; Molly Gavriel; Louis Gibson; Mirren Gidda; Jill Gillard; M.E Gilligan; Jessica Grander; Cas-

sandre Greenberg; Hannah Greenstreet; Felix de Grey; Judy Hallgarten; Reuben Hamlyn; Nina de Paula Hanika; Thea Hawlin; Robert Haylett; Cathy Hearn; Susan Hearn; Amelia Heath; Emma Heath; Harry Hickmore; Edward Holberton; Jessica Holland; Gill Horrocks; Janice Hughes; Anne Isger; Monica Jana; Girton College JCR; Antony Johnson; Emma Jolley; Penny Jonas; Emily Rees Jones; Paul Kaffel; Priyanka Kanse; Stefan Karakashian; Jonathon Kram; Lanikai; Tina Lasisi; Helena Laughton; Ricky Leach; Gee Linford-Grayso; Alexander Lopez; Lucy Makinson; Paige Mason; Ciara McGlade; Bridie McPherson; Neil McPherson; Serrie Meakins; Emily Medd; Fred Mikardo-Greaves; Alex Mitchell; Klarissa Munz; George Nicholson; Tor Nordam; Olivia O’Dwyer; Susanna Oram; Susie Orbach; Kaite

O’Reilly; Brendan O’Sullivan; Orla O’Sullivan; Lili Owen; Sophie Padgett; Hayley Page; Fiona Parker; Thomas Phelan; Clunie Phillps; Stella Phipps; Kamla Pillay; Helena Poole; Kellie Preston; Jack Rans; Briony Rawle; Benjamin Redwood; Laura Robertson; Margaret Robertson; Laurence Rowley-Abel; Anna Sanden; Freddy Sawyer; Hildegarde Serle; Karen Shook; Nicola Silverleaf; Jenni Smiles; Ali Smith; Anna Smith; Gwendolyn Smith; Lucinda Spearman; Rebecca Spence; Henry St; Rachel Standish; Lauren Steele; Karen Sykes; Kate Symington; Claire Tallan; Oliver Tattersall; Laura Thomas; Amy Tiare; Deborah Tighe; Chris Trueman; Julia Turner; Laurie Unwin; Pablo Uribe; Olivia Vaughan-Fowler; Ann Warner-Casson; Kirsty Wilkins; Stephen Wilkinson; Seana Wilson; Jane Wyer; Louisa Young