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https://www.ted.com/talks/yve_blake_for_the_love_of_fangirls

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A perfect clip of footage that captured what C. Delores Tucker fought for in regards to the degradation of Gangsta Rap on women and society. (1993)

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A perfect clip of footage that captured what C. Delores Tucker fought for in regards to the degradation of Gangsta Rap on women and society. (1993)

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C Deloris Tucker Crusader Against Gangsta Rap 1993 - A Moment in Black History

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What Hollywood Thinks About Film’s Gender Problem

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http://images.edu.rs/en/2018/07/23/how-balanced-is-gender-representation-in-media-2017-2018/

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A lot has changed in the past 18 years, according to film director Louisa Wei. In 2001, realising that the female pioneers of Chinese cinema were repeatedly being missed from the history books, she took it upon herself to rewrite the narrative. "There were very few things on women directors. I knew they existed but when you come to study and read about them, they were basically not there," she says.

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By 2009 Wei had published a book featuring interviews with 27 Chinese and Japanese women directors, as well as several academic journals on the subject of Chinese women in film. She documented the work of women directors like Tazuko Sakane, born in 1904 in Japan, who in 1936 wrote: "I want to portray the true figure of women, seeing from the realm of women." She also wrote about Chen Bo'er, the actress and perhaps the only Chinese woman working as a producer-director in the 1940s; Tanaka Kinuyo, who made her directorial debut in 1953; as well as Dong Kena and Wang Shaoyan, who were both prolific in the 1960s and 1970s. "[I had] to rewrite the whole film history," she says.

There was only one major issue: the public wasn't interested in Wei's research. "The book basically had no impact, no one was reading that kind of book yet," she tells BBC Culture.

Despite a slow initial uptake, it turned out her efforts were not in vain. While teaching film classes as an associate professor at City University in Hong Kong, Wei started to notice more and more female students in her audience every year, and they wanted to know about the women who had come before them. Young female filmmakers started reading and sharing her work.

Momentum gathered more widely, with Wei being invited to speak publicly on her research. "Last year I [gave] a talk, there were 300 people in the hall, it was filled up, and the title was 'Chinese Women Directors Since 1916'. You can hardly imagine it!" she says, laughing and shaking her head in disbelief.

They discovered that Eng had travelled the globe and explored taboo topics

Film experts began using Wei's work to update their knowledge of the history of film globally. One of her most prominent works as a director is a documentary called Golden Gate Girls, which celebrates the work of Esther Eng, China's first female film director who was prominent in the 1930s and 1940s in both China and Hollywood. "I showed [Golden Gate Girls] in Paris in December [2018], a film scholar who has covered this his whole life came to me after and said he was so touched to watch it - he didn't know about her," she says.

Eng was not only missed out of history in the West. At the beginning of her research, Wei says, "I looked through the Hong Kong film archive and came across Esther Eng's name, she [was named] national heroine in 1937 - I found an article saying this. But this was the only thing I could find!" It took years of work with researchers, historians and journalists to uncover her extraordinary career for the documentary. At one point, the team even had to rescue hundreds of photographs of Eng's life from a rubbish bin in San Francisco. Together, they discovered that Eng had travelled the globe and explored taboo topics at a time when many women didn't have jobs at all, directing nine feature films in the US and Hong Kong including National Heroine, a film about a female pilot who fights for her country.

Fast forward to today, and Wei proudly shows off the March 2019 issue of Life Magazine, featuring a huge spread on Wei and her work celebrating Esther Eng. This is particularly exciting for Wei, not only because the work of female filmmakers is finally being covered, but because the magazine is Chinese, and information is hugely censored in the country, making sharing Eng's story particularly challenging.

'Me Too' really got people focused...Women's issues are circulating on WeChat - Louisa Wei

There seems to have been a momentous shift in thinking according to Wei. On 8 March 2019 - International Women's Day - articles circulated around China's biggest social network WeChat titled, 'Chinese Cinema is Only Complete with These 100 Women Directors', '60 Independent Women Directors of China' (in which Wei is featured), and '100 Greatest Films in History by Women.' This is a new phenomenon: "This is unheard of! [International Women's Day] would usually be about thanking women for doing their job at home but nothing like this, celebrating women directors," says Wei.

All these events - the WeChat conversations, the rising numbers of female students in the film school classrooms, the media interest in Esther Eng - signal a clear trend, an appetite for more information about women in film and a growing acceptance of women as filmmakers.
Paying tribute
What's driving the world's sudden interest in Chinese female filmmaking talent? Wei believes part of the answer lies in feminist initiatives that have swept the globe in recent years like #MeToo. "#MeToo really got people focused... now if I say 'I'm a feminist' people have a better understanding [of what that means]. Women's issues are circulating on WeChat," she says.

Across China, a rising number of film festivals paying tribute to female directors are also helping change the conversation. One such example is the China Women's Film Festival, a bi-annual event that takes place in Beijing and Hong Kong, which was launched in 2013. Its aim is to highlight the work of female filmmakers around the globe and spark discussion in China and Hong Kong about women's rights. The 2019 Hong Kong edition was held in March, and featured films including Ava, a film by Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi about a girl coming of age in Iran, and #FemalePleasure, a documentary about five women in patriarchal communities who break their silence on their mistreatment.

It's always been Batman, Superman: man, man, man - Nicola Fan

Festivals like this are particularly exciting for young filmmakers like Nicola Fan. Art cinemas are essentially non-existent in Hong Kong and without the festival it's hard to access this kind of content. Speaking after the China Women's Film Festival in Hong Kong in March, she says, "[The] China Women's Film Festival is interesting because it brings rich [female-made] documentaries to Hong Kong and China. It exposes audiences to films like Ava which is quite unusual - you don't get to see that type of film at the box office. Hong Kong is drawn to the big Avengers or superhero movies. I wouldn't know about [films like Ava] without the festival."

Yet, despite the significant progress women filmmakers are making in China and Hong Kong there are still big challenges. Technology may have made making films cheaper and easier, but without art cinemas or much public funding it's still difficult for emerging filmmakers to make a name for themselves. Young filmmaker Sharon Yeung says, "Now lots of us are waving cameras around and shooting anything, but it surprises me how little [we] earn... Newcomers are struggling. Movies come from veterans still. Marvel, superhero, big budget - that's what people go in for."

Film is a good way to make social issues mainstream - Li Dan

And the #MeToo movement might be raising awareness, but it still has a long way to go in China and Hong Kong. One of the first victims to speak out after #MeToo went viral, 23-year-old athlete Vera Lui, was pilloried by the public and the media in 2018 for revealing the sexual abuse she suffered by her former coach. Many women have been frightened back into silence.

Li Dan, founder of the China Women's Film Festival, believes film is a crucial way to reach Chinese people and encourage public debate on these types of issues. "[In China] we can't spread any information through mainstream media or big new media, that is all controlled or censored by government," he says. "But film... is a good way to [make] social issues mainstream."

Despite the challenges still faced, Fan believes it's an exciting time for women in film, citing the rise in big blockbusters featuring female leads and directed by female filmmakers: "It's always been Batman, Superman: man, man, man. It's encouraging to see films like Wonder Woman coming from Hollywood, it helps the audience demand a bigger variety of stories," she says.

Indeed, three of the top 10 grossing movies of 2018 in China were directed by women (in Hollywood all 10 were directed by men), and women are changing things. Director Angie Chen has personally challenged stigma facing women on the films she leads. "When I started to work [in film] women on the production were told they were not allowed to sit on a camera case because they would bring bad luck to the film. When I [directed] my first film I would deliberately sit on the cases. No one dared say anything - I was the director!" said Chen.

When it comes to the future, the only thing not drastically changing are the dreams of young filmmakers in China and Hong Kong today, which echo those of women in the 1930s. Like Japanese director Tazuko Sakane in 1936, Sharon Yeung also wants to use her view of the world to make films: "I'd like to make films about the female experience," she says. "It's so exciting that there's more and more films about that, and I can't wait to make more, especially from an Eastern perspective. It's just so unexplored, we've watched films made by men all these years, and we're about to discover all these new perspectives."
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A lot has changed in the past 18 years, according to film director Louisa Wei. In 2001, realising that the female pioneers of Chinese cinema were repeatedly being missed from the history books, she took it upon herself to rewrite the narrative. "There were very few things on women directors.

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You shouldn't really judge a film by its trailer. But few have inspired quite as much premature outrage as the one released for Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, the new biopic about mass murderer Ted Bundy starring Zac Efron. When the first trailer arrived back in January, it caused widespread consternation for the way it seemed to glamorise Bundy, with its rock 'n' roll music and natty title cards suggesting the tale of one of the US's most notorious serial killers had been turned into a kind of Tarantinoesque romp. Under fire, director Joe Berlinger was at pains to disassociate himself from the "false impression" the trailer gave. "I want to assure those concerned that our film in no way glorifies Bundy or his atrocious acts," he said in a statement to BuzzFeed News, responding to the criticism.

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Was the trailer really so deceptive though? Now the film is on worldwide release (on Netflix in the US and other territories, and Sky Cinema in the UK) audiences can judge for themselves. But even if you watch it very much aware of Bundy's crimes, the film makes it easy to forget that this was a man who raped and murdered at least 30 women across the US. It is ostensibly told from the point of view of his deluded girlfriend Liz Kloepfer (played by Lily Collins) who, for a significant while after he came into the orbit of the police, protested his innocence - a partial perspective which ultimately renders him more palatable than he has any right to be for much of the film's running time. That palatability is only increased by its stylised packaging, from the seductive '60s and '70s soundtrack to the way it captures Efron in enraptured slow-motion - in the scene, for example, which recreates Bundy's escape from an Aspen courthouse during a pre-trial hearing.

And then, most crucially of all, there is the central casting. Discussions of Bundy have always made a point of his relative physical attractiveness. But putting Efron, one of the world's most conspicuous male sex symbols, in the role? It feels like a considerable - and calculated - exaggeration.

But if Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is guilty of fetishising its depraved lead, then it is arguably not in isolation. Popular culture in 2019 is heaving with tales of male killers, abusers, and psychopaths - and more often than not, these paragons of toxic masculinity are played by blue-chip Hollywood heartthrobs. Two of Netflix's most talked-about shows of recent times have been You, a drama about a seemingly 'nice guy' stalker and killer played by former Gossip Girl pin-up Penn Badgley; and Dirty John, based on the true-crime podcast about serial con artist and abuser John Meehan. It stars the hunky Australian actor Eric Bana, who made audiences swoon in The Time Traveller's Wife and Troy, among others. Meanwhile, next month sees the hugely-anticipated return of the starry and soapy HBO drama Big Little Lies - a show whose first series hinged around a much-discussed domestic abuse plotline featuring Scandinavian dreamboat Alexander Skarsgård.

And while Bundy has been the subject of both a feature film and a four-part Netflix documentary series in recent months, another serial killer known for his charm and allure is also having a moment. Charles Manson, who notoriously gathered a cult of devoted young women around him, is played by Matt Smith in new biopic Charlie Says, while the Manson murders are set to be a key component of Quentin Tarantino's latest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Stories for the #Metoo age?
Should we be disturbed by this seemingly endless fascination with what one might crudely term the 'sexy psychopath'? On the one hand, there are valid reasons for wanting to address toxic masculinity - and the fact that it may not come in an obviously toxic package. Meanwhile some of these works, as well as dealing with violent men, reflect the wider cultural drive, in the light of #MeToo, to centre on the perspectives of female victims. "I think there's more and more of a desire to understand women's experience and to back away from victim blaming," says Jean Murley, an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York and author of The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture. "In the past, we said 'how could she date this person? Didn't she know?'...[there's a] moving away from [that] into looking at how easily anybody can be taken in by this kind of man."

But, on the other hand, you could argue that many of the films and shows are themselves in thrall to these men - trading on and exploiting their aberrant charisma for entertainment, rather than anything more enlightening. You, for example, lavishes all of its attention on its stalker anti-hero, going so far as to furnish him with his own alluringly caustic voiceover. By comparison, his target, Beck, is a sorely underwritten figure; a few episodes in, she is jarringly, and very briefly, given her own inner monologue, which only serves to highlight how little the show cares about her point of view otherwise. In the case of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, setting up the Bundy story from his girlfriend Kloepfer's perspective is a disingenuous conceit given, again, how cursorily drawn a character she is, and how much more interested the script is in Bundy's twisted charisma.
Glossing over abuse
Beyond characterisation, there is also the wider issue of how these narratives of male violence and psychopathy are packaged. Dirty John and Big Little Lies are both, as much as anything else, 'lifestyle porn', flaunting beautiful people in beautiful houses - and that seductive quality cannot help but adulterate their dark storylines. "If you wanted to make that without it being glossy, you wouldn't get it funded," says Bridget Lawless, an author, screenwriter and vocal critic of the proliferation of gendered violence in fiction, who last year founded the Staunch Book Prize, awarded to novels in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered. "You can't really pretend it isn't anything but cynical. It's just a business."

The way in which male psychopaths and abusers continue to be glamorised and fetishised by popular culture is arguably reflected in viewers' responses to these films and TV shows. From the moment the first pictures of Efron in character in Extremely Wicked... were released, the internet has been abuzz with talk of the 'hot Ted Bundy' movie. What's ironic is that the film shows how Bundy became a deviant pin-up during his trial, the first to be televised nationally in the US, attracting scores of female groupies to court - and yet it seems to be enabling him to receive equivalent attention all over again. "It's a vicious feedback loop that does nothing to encourage a better understanding of how these crimes occur [or] who these people are," says leading criminologist Professor David Wilson.

Similarly, some of the lustful responses to Netflix's Bundy documentary series resulted in the streaming service using its Twitter account in January to remind its subscribers that "there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service - almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers." That same month, You star Badgley went viral with a series of tweets dressing down fans who were pining after his character.

However it's difficult to see such interventions as anything but hypocritical. (Indeed, Badgley later admitted that his response "was partly disingenuous because the whole point is [Joe] is meant to garner a conflicted reaction.") In such cases, Netflix are a "victim of their own success," says Lawless. "What did they want to happen? [With] this hunky guy in You, you are being seduced as a viewer just as the characters in it are. And then they go 'oh crikey' and try to wheel it back, but they've actually succeeded."
Lecter's legacy
Wilson traces the romanticisation of male serial killers back to one fictional character in particular: author Thomas Harris's creation Hannibal Lecter. That Chianti-swilling, opera-loving aesthete most iconically played by Anthony Hopkins, really proffered the idea of the murderer as a perversely aspirational figure, But, as Wilson points out, readers and audiences were also led to mistakenly believe Lecter was an authentic representation of a serial killer, because of the way the books were sold on the research that Harris had done, including visits to the FBI's behavioural science unit.

Wilson has spent his career busting the myths propagated by those like Harris, in books including this year's My Life with Murderers: Behind Bars with the World's Most Violent Men: chiefly the false perception "that [you're] dealing with a super-predator that's incredibly intelligent and is going to be quoting Nietzsche or discussing fine foods or Florentine architecture... actually serial killers are very ordinary and banal, and will usually not discuss their offending at all," he says.

When it comes to true-crime stories, meanwhile, Wilson says it's clear that there is a hierarchy of killers that the entertainment industry are interested in. Bundy has been a repeated source of fascination - there have been numerous films and books directly about him, and many more inspired by him and his actions, including Harris's Hannibal Lecter series and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. By contrast, the body of work focusing on the late Dennis Nilsen - the Scottish civil servant who murdered at least 15 young men in London in the late 1970s and '80s, and who Wilson came into contact with early in his career - is minimal.

Wilson links that both to Nilsen's appearance - which he has described in his work as that of a "weedy geography teacher" - and the gender and sexuality of his victims. "It's not appealing to talk about a man who used society's homophobia to continue to kill young men, many of whom were gay," as he puts it. "We're much more interested in a young attractive man killing young attractive women. What we don't talk about is the misogyny that allows [Bundy] to continually become a source of our gaze."

Murley agrees that there remains an evident bias at play in the heinous people and acts we depict, or choose to reflect upon. "I'm not a criminologist but I know that most victims are not beautiful young women. The biggest demographic of victims are young men of colour in this country. And those stories are never told. Nobody is interested in making those stories or buying them." However, in general, she has faith in the increasingly sophisticated critical discussions around the portrayal of violence, and violent men. "We're seeing attention [being paid] to the issues that are inherent in these representations," she says, "and the ways that these stories are beings told. And I really welcome that, because we need to be more critical of these representations, and to tell more sides of these stories."

Certainly, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile has received enough pushback that, in future, one can but hope that filmmakers looking to compel audiences with yet another charismatic male psychopath figure may think more carefully about their choices.
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The troubling obsession with the 'sexy psychopath'

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You shouldn't really judge a film by its trailer. But few have inspired quite as much premature outrage as the one released for Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, the new biopic about mass murderer Ted Bundy starring Zac Efron.

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Madonna -- a global icon who extended her record as the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time in 2016 -- was honored as Woman of the Year at Billboard's Women In Music 2016 event on Friday (Dec. 9). And during her acceptance speech, she was fully ferocious, funny and brutally honest -- in other words, she was the Madonna we've known and adored since she debuted more than 30 years ago.

Madonna, unsurprisingly, stole the show the moment she took the stage. Her weapon? Something you can't contain, fake, reproduce or put a price on: Blunt, personal truth.

After opening with a joke -- "I always feel better with something hard between my legs" Madonna said, straddling the microphone stand -- she got candid very quickly.

"I stand before you as a doormat. Oh, I mean, as a female entertainer," Madonna said. "Thank you for acknowledging my ability to continue my career for 34 years in the face of blatant sexism and misogyny and constant bullying and relentless abuse."

Madonna's sprawling, revealing speech took us back to her life as a teenager when she first moved to New York.

"People were dying of AIDS everywhere. It wasn't safe to be gay, it wasn't cool to be associated with the gay community," Madonna recalled. "It was 1979 and New York was a very scary place. In the first year I was held at gunpoint, raped on a rooftop with a knife digging into my throat and I had my apartment broken into and robbed so many times I stopped locking the door. In the years that followed, I lost almost every friend I had to AIDS or drugs or gunshots."

From that, Madonna told the Women In Music crowd she learned a vital lesson: "In life there is no real safety except for self-belief."

Madonna also talked about a lesson she thought she learned from David Bowie... only that lesson, it turned out, didn't quite apply to her. "I was of course inspired by Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde and Aretha Franklin, but my real muse was David Bowie. He embodied male and female spirit and that suited me just fine. He made me think there were no rules. But I was wrong. There are no rules -- if you're a boy. There are rules if you're a girl," Madonna said.

Among those rules: "If you're a girl, you have to play the game. You're allowed to be pretty and cute and sexy. But don't act too smart. Don't have an opinion that's out of line with the status quo. You are allowed to be objectified by men and dress like a slut, but don't own your sluttiness. And do not, I repeat do not, share your own sexual fantasies with the world. Be what men want you to be, but more importantly, be what women feel comfortable with you being around other men. And finally, do not age. Because to age is a sin. You will be criticized and vilified and definitely not played on the radio."

Madonna also opened up about the time in her life when she felt "like the most hated person on the planet," with her eyes tearing up and her nose running a bit.

"Eventually I was left alone because I married Sean Penn, and not only would he would bust a cap in your ass, but I was off the market. For a while I was not considered a threat. Years later, divorced and single -- sorry Sean -- I made my Erotica album and my Sex book was released. I remember being the headline of every newspaper and magazine. Everything I read about myself was damning. I was called a whore and a witch. One headline compared me to Satan. I said, 'Wait a minute, isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out?' Yes, he was. But he was a man.

"This was the first time I truly understood women do not have the same freedom as men," she said.

Madonna also recalled that at one point in her life, during all the public vitriol, "I remember wishing I had a female peer I could look to for support. Camille Paglia, the famous feminist writer, said I set women back by objectifying myself sexually. So I thought, 'oh, if you're a feminist, you don't have sexuality, you deny it.' So I said 'fuck it. I'm a different kind of feminist. I'm a bad feminist.'"

Madonna also looked back on the many pop icons lost during the last decade. "I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around. Michael is gone. Tupac is gone. Prince is gone. Whitney is gone. Amy Winehouse is gone. David Bowie is gone. But I'm still standing. I'm one of the lucky ones and every day I count my blessings."

Closing out her speech, Madonna offered thanks to her haters and advice to other women in music.

"What I would like to say to all women here today is this: Women have been so oppressed for so long they believe what men have to say about them. They believe they have to back a man to get the job done. And there are some very good men worth backing, but not because they're men -- because they're worthy. As women, we have to start appreciating our own worth and each other's worth. Seek out strong women to befriend, to align yourself with, to learn from, to collaborate with, to be inspired by, to support, and enlightened by," she urged.

"It's not so much about receiving this award as it is having this opportunity to stand before you and say thank you," Madonna said, closing out her speech. "Not only to the people who have loved and supported me along the way, you have no idea...you have no idea how much your support means," she said, tearing up for the second time. "But to the doubters and naysayers and everyone who gave me hell and said I could not, that I would not or I must not -- your resistance made me stronger, made me push harder, made me the fighter that I am today. It made me the woman that I am today. So thank you."

Before the speech, Anderson Cooper introduced Madonna with a heartfelt tribute to her ongoing influence. "Madonna is Billboard's Woman of the Year, but as far as I'm concerned in terms of music and impact and culture, she's been the Woman of the Year every year since she released her first single 'Everybody' in 1982."

Hailing her as not only "relevant but revolutionary" up to present day, Cooper noted the importance of Madonna to him "as a gay teenager growing up... Her music and outspokenness showed me as a teenager a way forward. Through her music, she told me and millions of teenagers -- gay and straight -- that we are not alone. We are connected to each other."

Following Cooper's personal tribute, rising British singer-songwriter Labrinth took the stage for a stirring medley of Madonna's Ray of Light ballad "Frozen" and her immortal "Like A Prayer." Naturally, a choir was brought onstage to recreate the church-meets-pop anthem ecstasy of "Like a Prayer."

Prior to Madonna, Shania Twain was honored as this year's "Icon" at the 2016 Women In Music event. Also honored this year are Halsey ("Rising Star"), Andra Day ("Powerhouse"), Meghan Trainor ("Chart Topper"), Maren Morris ("Breakthrough Star"), Kesha ("Trailblazer") and Alessia Cara ("Rule Breaker"). Billboard's Women In Music airs Dec. 12 on Lifetime.

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Madonna Delivers Her Blunt Truth During Fiery, Teary Billboard Women In Music Speech

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Madonna -- a global icon who extended her record as the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time in 2016 -- was honored as Woman of the Year at Billboard's Women In Music 2016 event on Friday (Dec. 9).

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With the rise of social media came body positivity - the act of appreciating and loving yourself in its natural looking state - and yet, many still struggle to accept their bodies for what it is.

"I'm too fat, I'm too skinny, my breasts are too small, my butt is too flat, my face is too round, my hair isn't straight enough, I'm too short and I'm too tall!" That is what we all say at some point in our lives, but no one stops to think about the reasons why they feel the way they do. Our ancestors, I am certain, did not have as many issues with their bodies like we do. Although each new era garnered newer and different trends, back then women were surrounded by a wide range of gender and race relations that were at the forefront of their lives. Not to say that modern women don't, however it's the rise of social media that puts more strain on how women feel about their bodies. For instance, Marilyn Monroe was admired for her curvier figure in the 1940's - 1950's, but even before then in the 1800's, curvier women were often depicted in artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir's paintings as having the ideal body type. Today, being slender is considered ideal. Plastic surgery is at an all-time high and again, social media contributes to the astounding phenomenon. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), surgeries have been on a steady rise during the last 20 years, from 2.1 million procedures in 1997 to well-above 12 million today. There is a stark difference between today's culture and our grandparents'.

There were television shows, films and magazines, all showcasing beautiful women of all different sizes and with different looks, however women weren't as open with their sexuality like they are today, hence the reason our perspectives on our bodies are so negative. Many of us are looking to enhance our appearance because we think looking like Kim Kardashian or Nicole Kidman will improve our lives, but the truth is it will not. Beauty comes from accepting who you are, as well as living a life of purpose. We have to learn how to engage and navigate through Social Media without allowing it to get the best of us. Yes, women are constantly bombarded with enhanced images of other females, which ultimately promote unhealthy obsessions and it says a lot about our culture, but more importantly, the disconnect with oneself. One scroll on Instagram is enough to send someone to an early grave because of the plethora of images suggesting that one must change his or her looks. I can see the empowerment in posting provocative pictures, however the women scrolling through feel nothing, but sheer anxiety and resentment.

Plus size models like Ashley Graham, Tara Lynn and Robyn Lawley are opening doors, showing the fashion industry that there is a market within the plus size community and they are welcome to join. However, it is not enough, especially because to most, these women are not considered plus size, therefore contributing to even more women feeling underrepresented. Some might say there are just not enough diversity in American popular culture because the images you see on television, films, runways, social media and magazines are not of the norm. If the average woman wears a size 16 and up, there is no reason why we shouldn't see more images of said women in popular culture. Personally, I applaud the Tess Holliday's, Gabourey Sidibe's and Yamaneika Saunders' of the world, who are stepping out on faith, with sky-high confidence and talent to put real plus sized women on the map. The fashion industry needs to do more. The typical size zero and size two models are idealized so much in popular culture that women and men are dying every day trying to achieve the beauty standards imposed by these fashion designers. Why do we allow an industry to define what beauty is? Who gave them the power to measure beauty and with what rubric are they using to determine our level of beauty? These are questions we need to ask ourselves before allowing our self-esteems and body image to suffer at the hands of the fashion and media industries.

I am pleased, though to see the little efforts being made to include different body types in mainstream media. We each as individuals must remember that no two bodies are alike and being fat, short, tall or skinny is not so bad as long as you are healthy and happy. You have to decide for yourself that you are beautiful no matter what the scale or popular culture says, you and only you. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Gabourey Sidibe, responds to a question concerning her confidence as, deciding she was beautiful and that she will live her life regardless of what others thought of her. "People always ask me, 'you have so much confidence. Where did that come from?' It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl. I wear colors that I really like, I wear makeup that makes me feel pretty, and it really helps. It doesn't have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it's your home and you must decorate it." This is what we must all do; decide that we are beautiful and go about our lives remembering that.

Just know that there will always be someone, who's viewed as prettier or more beautiful than you, but that should not be the reason why you abuse you with negative self-talk. I remember growing up and telling myself that God wanted everyone to be different and unique because if he didn't, we would all be thin, white and blond. That was my way of justifying to myself that I was okay if I wasn't thin, white and blond, and you need to tell yourself that you are okay the way you are.

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With the rise of social media came body positivity - the act of appreciating and loving yourself in its natural looking state - and yet, many still struggle to accept their bodies for what it is.

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In this exploratory study, boys and men (aged eight, thirteen, and sixteen years, and young adults) gave accounts of body shape ideals, body esteem, exercise, and diet in a series of focus groups. Men and boys in all groups presented discourses where being lean and muscular was linked to being healthy and fit. Being fat was related to weakness of will and lack of control by all age groups, and discourses of blame were used to describe those who were overweight. Sixteen-year-olds described peer pressure to be slender and muscular, and two young men had experienced teasing about their body size. Adult men and teenagers explicitly linked having a well-toned, muscular body with feelings of confidence and power in social situations. Data are discussed in relation to recent suggestions that Western cultural attitudes to the male body are in a state of change and that men are becoming more concerned with body image.

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Body Image: Focus Groups with Boys and Men - SARAH GROGAN, HELEN RICHARDS, 2002

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In this exploratory study, boys and men (aged eight, thirteen, and sixteen years, and young adults) gave accounts of body shape ideals, body esteem, exercise, and diet in a series of focus groups. Men and boys in all groups presented discourses where being lean and muscular was linked to being healthy and fit.

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Harry Styles' 2019 Met Gala look; the focus on his painted nails which Twitter declared made him the 'King of Camp'

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The Twitterverse declared Harry Styles the King Of Camp well before anyone laid eyes on his Met Gala look. No, it's not simply because he's co-chair of the Met Gala this year, but because of his...nails? Like most celebrities, Styles got glammed for this year's big event with all the extras the iconic night demands. He walked the red carpet with a dangling pearl earring, his hair slicked back, and wearing multicolored nail polish.

Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, walked the carpet alongside Styles and was responsible for the look. For the Met, Styles' fingers were perfectly shaped and painted in black and metallic silver polish, which was a celeb-favorite shade this past award season.

Fans praised the singer for his red carpet look, applauding him for continuously breaking gender norms and pushing boundaries with his beauty choices. This isn't Styles' first time rocking nail polish. He's often seen with his fingers painted, and it's only fitting that the singer went all out in on-trend polish for the 2019 red carpet. So what exactly did fans say? A small taste of the replies, below.

Me seeing tweets about Harry styles breaking gender stereotypes wearing black nail polish, an earring and a see through ruffled shirt meanwhile billy porter LITERALLY just gave us a full cleopatra moment.. pic.twitter.com/cGUiknco0C
- James 🥀 (@Just__Me__James) May 6, 2019

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Harry Styles' Nails Just Won The Met Gala Red Carpet

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The Twitterverse declared Harry Styles the King Of Camp well before anyone laid eyes on his Met Gala look. No, it's not simply because he's co-chair of the Met Gala this year, but because of his...nails? Like most celebrities, Styles got glammed for this year's big event with all the extras the iconic night demands.

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Billy Porter Getting Carried By Bare-Chested Attendants Into the 2019 Met Gala Is a Glorious Entrance to Behold

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'Pose' star Billy Porter arrived at the 2019 Met Gala in a golden costume, carried by a team of six attendants.

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Sunday night at the MTV Video Music Awards, Rihanna didn't grace the stage to perform "Stay," her twice-nominated hit with Mikky Ekko. In fact, none of the performances at the VMAs featured women of color - unless you count the women relegated to the background of self-described "twerk queen" Miley Cyrus' performance of the summer singles "We Can't Stop" and "Blurred Lines." Indeed, after the parade of acid-tripping bears joined Cyrus and Robin Thicke performing the latter's hit on MTV's stage, things got really interesting, and really offensive.

Throughout her performance, Cyrus was the messy focal point of a number that was danced by mostly black women. These performers twerked in the background, their faces and bodies masked from the waist up by a psychedelic teddy bear object. At one point during the performance, Miley stopped to slap one of her dancers - who tossed something to the crowd from a basket - on the ass repeatedly.

Yes, Cyrus has fielded cultural misappropriation criticisms before, but Sunday night's performance pushed the matter way over the edge. We'll repeat: The 20-year-old singer used black women and their bodies as the literal background of her show. Cyrus, the white woman, was the focal point of her VMA performance, while African-American women were there to silently lend their expertise in support of her performance. Their faces were masked by silly costumes, their skilled dancing glossed over to highlight Cyrus. Every time she thrusted her pelvis or threw a gang sign, Cyrus carefully cultivated a persona on the backs of these dancers.

In June, Jezebel's Dodai Stewart wrote a compelling piece about the cultural appropriation in Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" video. Much like Sunday night's VMA performance, women of color were used as props to bolster Miley's cultural legitimacy. Stewart writes, "In a white-centric world, putting white women quite literally in the center of the frame while women of color are off to the side is a powerful, disrespectful visual message, and it really must be said: Human beings are not accessories."

In a series of provocative dance moves, Cyrus managed to show everyone that Jezebel, Vice, and Jay-Z were right: Her musical "reinvention" is almost entirely cribbed from black culture - and her VMA performance was a visual representation of how she, literally, has relegated those who inspired her to the background. Cyrus was made aware of these criticisms via Twitter, and she completely ignored them.

So it's no secret that the singer has chosen to reinvent herself by stealing the expressions, dance, and culture of black people. Over the last year, Cyrus been photographed publicly wearing a gold grill. The former Hannah Montana star also rapped a verse on a French Montana single. For her upcoming album Bangerz , Cyrus allegedly said to her producers "I want urban, I just want something that just feels black." Videos of her twerking on stage with Juicy J surfaced, which resulted in a lot of criticism from African-American writers.

The biggest problem, though, is that Cyrus gets to pick and choose the parts of black culture she likes; people may think that the singer has gone off the deep end when she twerks while parading around in a unicorn suit, but they're still tossing cash her way. Number one singles, endorsements, and high-billing at the VMAs still prove that appropriation may put Cyrus on top. And her fans, many of whom are young, white, and privileged, don't understand just how offensive her cultural appropriation is - quite possibly like Cyrus herself.

And her reinvention is encouraging them to participate: A few months ago, 33 high school students in San Diego were suspended for using school video equipment to film a twerking video that went viral on YouTube. The majority of the students in this video are Caucasian, like Cyrus.

Cyrus and I are about the same age. We're both products of a Spice Girls-fueled Girl Power movement. As white girls, we were told that we could do anything we wanted - whether it was go to medical school or grind on the groin of an aging pop star. Cyrus feels like she can do whatever she wants, but she'd do well to be aware of her own privilege, which, in this case, has led to her using African-American women as mere props in her show. The fact that Cyrus is trying to use another culture to build credibility? Well, unfortunately, that just makes her lose credibility.

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Miley Cyrus Can't Stop Stealing From Black Culture

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Sunday night at the MTV Video Music Awards, Rihanna didn't grace the stage to perform "Stay," her twice-nominated hit with Mikky Ekko. In fact, none of the performances at the VMAs featured women of color - unless you count the women relegated to...

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Look at this picture. It's basically the same product but they chose to market it differently. And for what reason? Sex sells. We've been told that time and time again [thanks Sigmund Freud]. And honestly, with the kind of content being produced from television to the print media, as a society we've become pretty immune to it. However, as I peruse through international fashion magazines one thing struck me [and I wonder why I had never occurred to me before]. Doesn't it seem peculiar that an industry trying to get you to buy expensive clothes and accessories, chooses to market them via semi or fully nude models? What's on sale here? The product or the female body?

The industry seems to have always been comfortable with nudity. If Tyra Banks' America's Next Top Model is anything to go by, models must be ready to do casting calls in their knickers and at least one naked photo-shoot, either alone or with others, in their career. Of course that was big with the 90s and 2000s flock but surely the Instagirls don't have to pose this way? But a quick search reveals most of them already have nude campaigns or covers. Some call it art, others will refer to it as objectification / hyper sexualisation.

Objectification: What is it?

Put simply, objectification is treating or viewing people as objects. However NOMAS, the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, has a somewhat more in-depth clarification:

"Objectification [is] portrayals of women in ways and contexts which suggest that women are objects to be looked at, ogled, touched, or used; anonymous things or commodities to be purchased, perhaps taken; and once tired of, discarded, often to be replaced by a newer, younger edition; certainly not treated as full human beings with equal rights and needs."

The media's narrative of women tends to place their value on their sexual appeal that should be for the man's gaze which not only adds to the perception of female beauty and the impossible pursuit of perfection. Whether it's the whole body or just parts of it, this kind of objectification results in stripping women of dignity and ends up playing a role in the mistreatment of women usually for sexual gratification. And that's not all, dehumanization of women also kicks up the level of violence against women. How fashion brands thought themes of gang rape, sexual assault, stalking, or gender based violence to mention a few would be the best catalyst to sell a dress/perfume/ earrings defeats my understanding.

The portrayal of black models
As mentioned in previous articles, despite the growth the fashion industry has made in diversity, other races apart from Caucasians are still grossly underrepresented. And when the black model is featured, historically it hasn't been quite as rosy. From the onset, they have faced having to be compared to wild, exotic animals. An ode to colonialist views of black people as uncivilised if you will. One infamous shoot captured British model Naomi Campbell photographed in the backdrop of the great East African savannah wilderness, in animal-inspired clothing, with wild animals for Harper's Bazaar. Taken by none other than controversial photographer, Jean-Paul Goude.

If you were a fan of Grace Jones, Jean-Paul Goude was the guy extolled for his 'visionary' art of his muse and then-girlfriend in a cage. With raw meat. Under a sign that says don't feed the wild animals. Well, he did say he had jungle fever. He then put out a book in 1981 by the same title "Jungle Fever" with the infamous picture as its cover art. Photographer and former Photo Director for Playboy Enterprises Inc., Matt Doyle then went on to recreate that shoot with American model, actress, and fashion designer, Amber Levonchuck better known as Amber Rose for Complex magazine's September 2009 issue.

Years have passed between the two shoots but the message remains the same. Black women are wild, sexual beasts that just can't seem to shed their animalistic spots. Oh, and remember that 'breaking the internet' image of Kim Kardashian for the Paper Magazine? Goude shot that image too with the original image being a black woman as the subject. Talk about a photographer that's ready to exploit and hyper sexualise a woman's body. But the issues with the shoot go far deeper than the nudity. They touch on an underlying racist undertone that definitely brings Saartjie Baartman (one of the most famous of the Khoikhoi women of South Africa who, due to her large buttocks ( steatopygia), was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe) to mind. Kim's hair and jewellery were styled to stereotyped images of African Americans during slavery era. And her blank stare when facing the camera has been argued to be a common tool to depict the female hyper sexuality of the black community.

Several sexual references towards black models historically lie in the slavery mentality where the black woman's body was owned for the master's sexual gratification or for slave breeding. According to the study 'Stereotypes: Negative Racial Stereotypes and Their Effect on Attitudes Toward African-Americans', slave owners perpetuated the stereotype that black women had insatiable sexual appetites and were promiscuous hence they were branded with the identity of 'Jezebel'. These jezebel stereotypes were reinforced in an international fashion magazine, Numéro, which ran an editorial spread in 2009 called 'Best Friends' where black model R'el Dade appeared topless in every frame next to clothed white model Melodie Dagault. R'el was staged in what appeared to be a subordinate role where she rarely makes eye contact with the camera and is the sexual object. Then there those who just go the whole nine yards in objectification of parts of the body. Terry Richardson (one could argue in the same league as Goude) photographed in really (I mean REALLY) NSFW images that featured model Vanessa Veasley in Supreme's collection.

If it's not making a reference to their "animal instincts" or "racial stereotypes" the shoots emphasize their 'other-ness". Often depicted as different from the other races whether being in bold print, 1920s Harlem Renaissance or being more exposed than the other models. A 2007 Moschino ad series segregated models by ethnicity but only featured nudity in the black models section. Or Italian Vogue's 17 page editorial spread that showed 12 black models. That was commendable and even the models noted that their bookings went up. However they once again relied on print and bold materials, chunky 'ethnic' jewellery, animal inspired fabrics and 1920s references. It almost feels like the magazines or fashion houses release campaigns, editorial shoots or runways stunts to cross of their annual diversity obligations off their list. Black models shouldn't be treated as a 'trend'. Isn't fashion about finding novelty? It really is time to shift the narrative and feature women of colour in interesting, aesthetic situations that are original and contemporary.
Black Male model objectification
It must be noted that men too are objectified by the current media machine. However some of the depictions of black men are similar to the constructs of slavery. Take for example the February/March 2011 cover of Russh Magazine. It featured Belgian model, Delfine Bafort, surrounded by a group of doting black men, who all appear to be lusting after her. While she's full clothed, they're very naked.
The portrayal of black women in the fashion industry plays a part in their acceptance globally and their level of self-esteem; from the models to the black women viewing the imagery. Commodifying black women and women in general occurs when fashion refuses to recognise models as complete human beings. While the industry may have toned down with the wild safari shoots, it still reveals its dark underbelly by the continued representation of black females as sexual spectacles to be gawked at. If it is really about art and creativity surely the industry can do better? And actually show the clothes and accessories you're selling for once.

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Hyper Sexualisation in the Fashion Industry - The Designers Studio

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Look at this picture. It's basically the same product but they chose to market it differently. And for what reason? Sex sells. We've been told that time and time again [thanks Sigmund Freud]. And honestly, with the kind of content being produced from television to the print media, as a society we've become pretty immune to it.

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Blueface - Thotiana Remix ft. YG (Official Music Video)

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This article discusses the outrage towards Kim Kardashian allowing her daughter to wear makeup/certain clothing. It begs the question, why is society sexualising a young child? Key word being CHILD.
- " Why are people projecting these sexual judgments onto a child who cannot consent, nor has the capacity, to understand what sex is in the first place? "
" This sexualization of young girls almost as soon as they can walk is what leads to that same sexualization of them later on as adults. Saying "Let the child be a child" turns into "Leave something to the imagination!""

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As adults, we tend to ascribe a lot of adjectives to clothing. We may describe a shirt as "flirty," a dress as "racy," or a pair of jeans as "sexy," depending on what we like and who is wearing the garment. These descriptions can be all well and goodwhen they're used by the adult wearing the outfit- until, that is, children are brought into the mix. Take, for example, how people have reacted to a recent photo of Kim Kardashian West's daughter, North. There is one huge problem with the way we're talking about North West: The 4-year-old Kardashian is being treated as if she's a sexual being as a result of her outfit and, thus, can be slut-shamed.

In the photo, which surfaced Tuesday, North is wearing a black baseball cap, custom Yeezy kicks, and an orange spaghetti-strapped dress with a corset-like decoration. There's nothing special about the outfit, other than the fact that the cap and the sneakers are part of Kardashian West's new children's clothing line, The Kids Supply, which she designed with husband Kayne West. Yet, according to Yahoo! Style, people took to social media to criticize this little girl and her mother. They claim the outfit is "sending the wrong message" and that it's "too provocative" for a 4-year-old.

People, especially young girls, can't send the wrong message with their clothes. Why? Because they're young children - and young children cannot consent to being sexualized or be sexual beings. According to the Sexuality Resource Center for Parents, kids at North West's age are still trying to figure out the concepts of privacy and modesty. Most kids do not become developmentally ready to understand sex until their pre- to early-teen years. Plus, the United States has age of consent laws to help protect minors from predatory adults behavior; legally, a children cannot consent to sex until 16 or 17 years old, depending on the state.

So, that begs the question, why are people slut-shaming a 4-year-old girl or anyone for that matter? Why are they taking bets on her sexual behavior as an adult? Why are people projecting these sexual judgments onto a child who cannot consent, nor has the capacity, to understand what sex is in the first place?

North West has worn the dress in question before, by the way. It is the same outfit she had on during her fourth birthday party last month; it's not an item in The Kids Supply, as Kardashian West explained, according to Page Six. The only difference is between the two ways the dress is styled: At her birthday shindig, North wore a white undershirt. And it doesn't seem anyone had an issue with her outfit back then.

Whether or not North is donning a shirt under the dress shouldn't matter. She is just a child wearing an outfit that she likes. And that's all.

This sexualization of young girls almost as soon as they can walk is what leads to that same sexualization of them later on as adults. Saying "Let the child be a child" turns into "Leave something to the imagination!" or into the question that rape survivors always get: "What were you wearing that night?" We need to stop it before it can start.

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As adults, we tend to ascribe a lot of adjectives to clothing. We may describe a shirt as "flirty," a dress as "racy," or a pair of jeans as "sexy," depending on what we like and who is wearing the garment. These descriptions can be all well and...

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https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/womens-magazines-objectify-women-just-as-much-as-mens-magazines-do/274330/

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Discussed in McNicholas Smith, Miley
Cyrus used women of colour as back-up dancers who were women of colour including burlesque dancer Amazon Ashley in a routine which involved her smacking the women’s arses and twerking against them – it gathered critique of cultural appropriation as the use of ‘ethical marker to transform her brand identity’ (Gaunt 2015:245) and a sexualised racialisation

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Miley Cyrus Performance icônica VMA 2013

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An informal commentary video which relates to a point made by Goldman (1992) in Gill (2009) that coined 'commodity feminism' as corporations incorporating feminist ideas into advertising and media, with empty political meanings- goes into detail about the companies that do this and challenges the assumption that they are liberating and political, and claims that they are merely an advertising trick

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Feminism and "Girl Power" in Advertising

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Ariana Grande's music video has been accused of 'queer-baiting' and links to Gill (2009) who said that there is a trend of 'queering' something to make it seem edgy or exciting

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Ariana Grande - break up with your girlfriend, i'm bored (Official Video)

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An article exhibiting examples of how transgender people have gained an increasing presence in the media!

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Rhys Ernst, left, and his partner, Zackary Drucker, at "Relationship," their exhibition of photographs being shown in the Whitney Biennial. Credit Credit Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

The first time Rhys Ernst saw Zackary Drucker was in 2005 at a bar in the East Village.

At the time, both were aspiring artists. Rhys had recently graduated from Hampshire College and was working for MTV networks. Zackary had graduated from the School of Visual Arts and was appearing on a reality TV show called "Artstar," hosted by Jeffrey Deitch.

But there was one clear impediment to romance: Rhys had never dated a man, and Zackary had never dated a woman.

"I remember thinking," Rhys said, "if I ever dated a boy, that's the type of boy I'd date."

Today, that consideration is not an issue. Over the last five years, Zackary has transitioned from male to female, Rhys from female to male.

And in "Relationship," a photo exhibition currently on view at the Whitney Biennial, the two have chronicled that process and the evolution of their own love affair. (In a recent preview of the Biennial, Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote that the Ernst/Drucker photographs "put queer consciousness on the front burner.")

That a show by two transgender artists should be so prominently featured at the 2014 Biennial should come as a surprise to no one. It is just more evidence of the increasing presence of trans people at the center of popular culture.

In their spring advertising campaigns, the luxury retailer Barneys New York and the award-winning jewelry designer Alexis Bittar feature transgender models. In February, a memoir by Janet Mock, a former editor at People magazine, which drew heavily on her transition from male to female, made the New York Times best-seller list. Laverne Cox has become a breakout star on Netflix's hit show "Orange Is the New Black," playing a sympathetic character who winds up in prison after using stolen credit cards to pay for her gender reassignment surgery. And Carmen Carrera, a transgender showgirl who first achieved demi-fame as a contestant on the reality television program "RuPaul's Drag Race," has become an in-demand fashion model and muse for the photographer Steven Meisel.

Here are their stories.
Laverne Cox

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Credit Rommel Demano/Getty Images

Laverne Cox grew up in Mobile, Ala., with her identical twin brother and her mother, a single parent who worked two to three jobs at a time to make ends meet.

She enrolled at Marymount Manhattan College in New York in the late '90s, where by day she majored in dance, took her first acting classes and became immersed in gender studies.

By night, Ms. Cox was a presence on the downtown club scene, hanging out at Flamingo East in the East Village and performing operatic versions of heavy metal songs at Squeeze Box, a Friday night party at Don Hill's. (Among the songs she sang were Iron Maiden's "Be Quick or Be Dead" and Pantera's "Mouth for War.")

At the time, Ms. Cox said, she was in a "gender nonconforming space," no longer living as a man, but still struggling with her own "internalized transphobia" as well as a desire to "be myself and not embody some stereotype of womanhood."

"It was a mess," she said.

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Laverne Cox, plays the transgender character Sophia in a scene from "Orange Is the New Black." Credit Eric Leibowitz/Netflix

After completing her transition, she was cast in 2008 on the VH1 reality show "I Want to Work for Diddy." (Ms. Cox made it halfway through the competition.) Last year, she got her big break with a role on "Orange Is the New Black" on Netflix.

On the show, the major characters appear in prison and then in flashback sequences that show how they got there. So Ms. Cox's twin, a musician who lives in Brooklyn, played her character pretransition.

Ms. Cox has spoken at colleges about the transgender experience. She's also done one now-famous chat on a daytime talk show, where she appeared with Carmen Carrera and gently chastised the host, Katie Couric, for being too focused on questions about genital surgery, which not every transgender person undergoes. After Ms. Couric said to Ms. Carrera, "Your private parts are different now, aren't they," Ms. Cox argued that focusing on this objectifies trans people and prevents a more meaningful discussion from taking place.

"Someone called me a man in the airport today," Ms. Cox said in an interview this week. "Just because there's a few trans folks having lovely careers and having moments of visibility does not mean that a lot of trans folks lives are not in peril. We need to remember those folks who are struggling, particularly trans women of color who are on the margins."
Janet Mock

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Credit Aaron Tredwell

Some success stories are neat. Others, like Janet Mock's, less so. She grew up in Hawaii with a mother who had her first child at 16 and a father who battled drug addiction and had numerous children with other women. (One year, Ms. Mock said, her father "had a baby in January, February and April.")

Then, in middle school, Ms. Mock met a transgender girl named Wendi, and at 12 or 13, she began applying lip gloss, wearing makeup and tweezing her eyebrows. At 15, she started hormones.

She was an honor student in high school while she worked as a prostitute on Merchant Street in Honolulu, which is how she saved the money to travel to Thailand and pay for gender reassignment surgery.

After graduating from the University of Hawaii in 2005, Ms. Mock became an editor at People.com, then came out as transgender in a 2011 Marie Claire profile.

This winter, Atria Books (a division of Simon and Schuster) published her memoir, "Redefining Realness," in which she quotes Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou but wrote that Beyoncé was most responsible for "shifting" how she viewed herself as a woman of color.

"Everyone celebrated her because she was the girl of the moment," said Ms. Mock, 31, who has frizzy, Afro-ish hair with blond highlights, and, on the day I met her, looked effortlessly fashionable in a pair of black Theory jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing off her gold-colored infinity bangles. On her arm was a tan leather 3.1 Phillip Lim bag, which she said was a gift to herself after her book became a best seller.

Like Ms. Cox and Ms. Carrera, she has been somewhat offended by the tone of some of her television interviews. Last month, Ms. Mock went on Piers Morgan's CNN show (it has since been canceled), where the host all but began the interview by saying how "amazing" it was that this attractive woman had once been biologically male.

"Had I not known your life story, I would have absolutely no clue," he said, as the scrawl at the bottom of the bottom of the screen read "Born a boy."

Ms. Mock pounced on Twitter, and Slate ran a withering piece on Mr. Morgan's performance that evening, chastising him for being "obsessed with appearances" and accusing the show of promoting the segment in a "sensational and ignorant way."

Nevertheless, the interest in Ms. Mock's book and its subsequent sales is an indication that something is changing dramatically. And, no doubt, she appreciates having a platform now.

As a child, she said: "All I knew was gay. All I knew was RuPaul."
Valentijn de Hingh

Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

A Dutch camera crew followed Valentijn de Hingh around for the bulk of her childhood, chronicling her journey from male to female. By the end of high school, she was walking in runway shows for Comme des Garçons and Maison Martin Margiela. In 2012, she gave a talk at a TEDx event in Amsterdam titled "Why Did I Choose?" This year, she is appearing in the Barneys campaign alongside 16 other transgender models.

Valentijn de Hingh, left, in the new Barneys campaign, which features 16 transgender models. Credit Bruce Weber

Having understanding parents helped, she said.

They first read about transgender children in a magazine when Ms. de Hingh was 5 and took her to a hospital in the Netherlands with a program for gender-variant children.

"My parents were looking for answers, and they found it there," she said.

Schoolmates, she said, were largely accepting, though she did experience some taunting. Being openly transgender but preoperative made dating hard, something she struggles with, even after gender reassignment surgery.

"I still have a hard time with dating," said Ms. de Hingh, 23. "I have some figuring out to do."
Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker

"The Longest Day of the Year," from Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst's exhibition at the Whitney Biennial. Credit Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst/Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Many of the photographs in Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst's show at the Whitney capture them in scenarios most couples can relate to: celebrating anniversaries, lounging around the house while one fights off a cold, sitting poolside on a sunny day.

Others depict circumstances that are perhaps unique to a transgender couple, such as an image of Mr. Ernst's and Ms. Drucker's bandage-covered backsides shortly after taking hormone shots.

According to Ms. Drucker, the exhibition has a couple of aims. One is to show that all relationships are in some way banal. Another, she said, is about "learning to love ourselves and deflect the distortions" that prevent people from doing that.

There weren't a lot of transgender role models for Ms. Drucker and Mr. Ernst growing up. But their parents were progressive and supported their children's gender nonconformity.

In high school, they both became familiar with the writings of Kate Bornstein, a queer theorist whose books "Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us," and "My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely" outlined a way of living that did not ascribe to traditional gender conventions.

"I don't call myself a woman, and I know I'm not a man," Ms. Bornstein once said.

Today, the couple lives in Los Angeles and has been consulting on the pilot of a television show for Amazon called "Transparent." It stars Jeffrey Tambor of "Arrested Development" as an aging man who is beginning a gender transition. (It was picked up on Tuesday.)

They are also part of a wide circle of "gender queer" and transgender creative types that includes Wu Tsang (a filmmaker and visual artist who identifies as "transfeminine" and "transguy") and Amos Mac, a photographer and editor who runs Originalplumbing, a magazine and website, that are devoted to hipsterish transgender types.

This pretty much describes Ms. Drucker, 30, who has a penchant for tight leggings, vintage Yves Saint Laurent heels and Grecian tops - and yet has no plans to have gender reassignment surgery, a topic she discusses pretty openly.

The same goes for Mr. Ernst, 31, who sports a light goatee and on Friday was wearing a button-down shirt with high tops and charcoal pants.

Ultimately, Ms. Drucker said, she'd like to get to a point where we "surpass" the binaries of gender altogether.

"That would be the greatest transition of all," she said.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an article last Thursday about wider acceptance of transgendered people misstated the surname of a longtime New York Times critic who reviewed a photo exhibition at the Whitney Biennial by a transgender couple. He is Holland Cotter, not Carter.

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The Growing Transgender Presence in Pop Culture

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The first time Rhys Ernst saw Zackary Drucker was in 2005 at a bar in the East Village. At the time, both were aspiring artists. Rhys had recently graduated from Hampshire College and was working for MTV networks. Zackary had graduated from the School of Visual Arts and was appearing on a reality TV show called "Artstar," hosted by Jeffrey Deitch.

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Netflix's Grace and Frankie - portraying diverse feminist messages 

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Netflix's Grace and Frankie - portraying diverse feminist messages 

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The show teaches through different stories and issues that despite our differences, women should support each other, we’re not opposites, and we’re not enemies. Also gives a platform to the real struggles that older women face that are not usually shown on tv.

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The event may yoke itself to issues like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, but when it comes to actual awards, women and hip-hop continue to be overlooked

xpecting radical action from an awards ceremony is like expecting the weather forecast to rearrange the skies. These events reinforce cultural norms rather than setting them, even if institutions such as the Oscars and Golden Globes are trying to reinvent themselves in the aftermath of Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter. But rarely has that culture of affirmation been more apparent than at this year's Grammys, which rode numerous political moments without contributing to or rewarding them.

The Grammys' 60th year boasted two advance headlines. One was that hip-hop might finally get its dues at the ceremony. The first hip-hop record to win the album of the year category was Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999; the second, and latest, was Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2004. This year marked the rare occasion when no white men were up for the award, populated instead by Bruno Mars' 24K Magic, Childish Gambino's Awaken, My Love!, Jay-Z's 4:44, Kendrick Lamar's Damn and Lorde's Melodrama. Yet Mars won with his third album of cosy funk and R&B. His acceptance speech nodded to its retro influences - 80s and 90s stars Babyface, Teddy Riley, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis - putting him in stark contrast with his more progressive, political competitors.

Elsewhere in hip-hop, Jay-Z received the most nominations of any artist, with eight nods for 4:44, but won no awards. Lamar won in the rap categories for album, song, performance and collaboration, but lost in the top-billing general slots for album, video and record. The Grammys' failure to recognise hip-hop undermines its flashy overtures to the genre, and fails to reflect its status as the most popular genre in the US.

The ceremony's other advance headline was that this year's Grammys might provide music's inexplicably overdue "#MeToo moment". Following the campaign for Golden Globes nominees to wear black in solidarity with victims of sexual violence, a group of female major-label employees under the name Voices in Entertainment suggested that attendees wear a white rose as a symbol of "hope, peace, sympathy and resistance". Host James Corden said he thought it would be "a moving moment". The Recording Academy had also booked Kesha to perform her song Praying - implicitly understood to reference her allegations of sexual and physical abuse against former producer Dr Luke - as a way of recognising the ongoing cultural dialogue.

Kesha's performance was wrenching. Backed by a choir including Camila Cabello, Cyndi Lauper and Julia Michaels, she cried in her collaborators' arms after the final note. Yet it also felt exploitative on the Grammys' part. Kesha lost her case against Dr Luke, who is now suing her for defamation, and she cannot discuss the case directly; the Grammys put the burden of representing a new era of zero tolerance in entertainment on a woman who remains trapped in its grey areas.

This hypocrisy was further entrenched by the awards' failure to recognise women. Out of 86 categories, only 17 were handed to women, or female-fronted bands. The televised ceremony only featured one female winner, Alessia Cara for best new artist. Lorde was the only album of the year nominee who wasn't asked to perform solo, but reportedly was invited to join a tribute to the late Tom Petty, which she allegedly declined. "We have a box and it gets full," Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich said of the snub. "She had a great album. There's no way we can really deal with everybody." And yet, Sting and Shaggy - Sting and Shaggy - performed two - two! - songs from their forthcoming collaborative album.

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Kesha performs Praying. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

After the ceremony, Variety asked Recording Academy president Neil Portnow about the #GrammysSoMale hashtag circulating throughout the broadcast. He put the onus of change on women "who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be part of the industry on the executive level ... [They need] to step up because I think they would be welcome. I don't have personal experience of those kinds of brick walls that you face, but I think it's upon us - us as an industry - to make the welcome mat very obvious, breeding opportunities for all people who want to be creative and paying it forward and creating that next generation of artists."

Few things leave a bad taste like powerful men undermining their immense influence to suggest that it's up to marginalised groups to better their own fortunes, wilfully ignoring the systemic barriers that women, people of colour and the LGBTQ community face when navigating any establishment. Just last week, a number of reports were published confirming music's gender inequality issue. A study by the University of Southern California analysed 600 songs from the Billboard Hot 100 between 2012 and 2017, finding that women accounted for just 22.4% of artists and 12.3% of all songwriting credits. It also found that women comprised just 9% of Grammy nominees from the past six years. Billboard published its 2018 Power List, ranking the most influential people in the music industry. Universal Music Publishing's Jody Gerson was the only standalone woman in the top 25 (four other women shared billing with male colleagues).

Never mind the Recording Academy's hopes of kickstarting music's #MeToo moment; by systemically underrepresenting women's achievements and contributing to a lack of female visibility, they're helping to entrench its absence. There is a direct correlation between a lack of opportunity for women in music and the underreporting of abuse that is a widely acknowledged failure of the industry. When men such as Portnow admit to not having "personal experience of those kinds of brick walls that you face", how can they know where change needs to happen? When men predominantly occupy positions of power, and a woman has been exploited by a powerful man, who can she trust with her allegations? Unrelated to the Grammys, I was struck by DJ Annie Mac's comments in a recent Guardian webchat when asked if she could name "three male allies" to women's rights in the music industry. "I have been racking my brains and the answer is no," she said. "I cannot name a man who is publicly pushing forwards women's rights and making a point of appointing women."

My version of a white rose - THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM - an excerpt from the greatest of all time, jenny holzer 🕊🌹

A post shared by Lorde (@lordemusic) on

There have been many conversations in recent weeks about whether entertainment and symbolic protests can constitute activism. Many of the performances on the Grammys' stage last night felt like arguments in its favour: Kendrick Lamar's radically black work, Kesha's liberationist balladry, and Alessia Cara, Logic and Khalid's anti-suicide anthem 1-800-273-8255. These displays have provided a necessary image rehabilitation for the Grammys, long dogged by accusations of irrelevance. But image is all it is until the members of the Recording Academy reflect this aesthetic change in their list of winners. Their time to do so is running out.

Rather than wear a white rose, Lorde pinned an edited version of feminist artist Jenny Holzer's "THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM" manifesto to the back of her dress. She left off the line, "do not support palliative gestures", perhaps aware that her placard could be read as one when she still turned up (albeit defiantly swigging from a hip flask). But it was one of several signs of unrest coming from inside Madison Square Garden last night. Lorde's statement was obviously in reference to the reckoning awaiting the entertainment industry's exploiters, as was Janelle Monáe's introduction to Kesha's performance. Both contained subtle messages for the Recording Academy. "Just as we have the power to shape culture, we also have the power to undo the culture that does not serve us," Monáe said.

More and more artists aren't bothering with the event at all. Drake declined to submit anything from his 2017 "playlist" More Life for the Grammys' consideration; Frank Ocean similarly withheld music from his 2016 releases Blonde and Endless, telling the New York Times: "That institution certainly has nostalgic importance. It just doesn't seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from, and hold down what I hold down." By glomming on to the flattering aesthetic of protest, the Grammys has made itself a target.
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Why the Grammys continue to fail women and hip-hop

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The event may yoke itself to issues like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, but when it comes to actual awards, women and hip-hop continue to be overlooked xpecting radical action from an awards ceremony is like expecting the weather forecast to rearrange the skies.