Entries Tagged 'Body Image & Self Esteem' ↓

I know it could be perceived as controversial. I realize it might be taken wrong. I know I’m on a tight rope, walking a very fine line . . .

Still, I want you to know that TGR Body was born of Love. Love . . . the kind you feel for your kids, and you wish you felt for your self. The kind that knocks you to the floor when you see sex and violence mixed on television and you want . . . better. Better for these beings you’ve taken the trouble to birth, teach and raise. Love . . . the kind that makes you look at advertising and marketing towards girls and you know it’s condescending . . . hateful. . . minimizing . . .painful . . .heartbreaking to internalize. It’s so poisonous to their very selves. Intrusive to their sense of wholeness and being. It. Is. Not. Who. They. Are.

TGR Body was born of the love that answers that media conflict. The labels. Oh, how important they are. Labels have a choice to say . . . the creators have a choice to say . . .You’re enough. or You’re not. The labels can say, “I love the incredible miracle that is who I am.” or they can say, “I am not good enough as I am, unless I devote a portion of myself to improvement with the products of this bottle, which might improve my flawed, imperfect self.” Or they can choose to say, “I am. I am a beautiful human being, which has a right to exist and be heard just as I am and seen as beautiful in the way I was made, by a miracle of birth and natural selection and holy creativity.”

Yes. All of that is what I hoped to provide with the labels of TGR Body. See, the thing is . . . we’re here, all of us, to serve a purpose and that purpose can get derailed by the wrong marketing, advertising and labels.

The wrong messaging to our reflections in our mirrors. The kind we see on beauty products and television commercials and Internet ads. It can. Get derailed. And we can lose our place in the knowing of the incredible miracle that we actually are.

TGR Body – me – knows that every person born IS a miracle. IS the person who was supposed to be born. Is the person who was supposed to look in the mirror with gratitude and joy and say, “Yes, this. This is the miracle that I am. This is who I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to look like and it. is. good. It is a miracle, after all. Miracles are bountiful and beautiful and I am one of them.”

Is that too much to ask of a skincare or haircare product? As I am the creator of TGR Body, I have to say that No. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. I think it’s the minimum we should ask of every experience we have and every product that we buy. It should be something affirming of the miracle that we are. The miracle we were created to be.

Share and Enjoy

One reason I chose to offer sunless tanning products on TGR Body was personal. I laid out, went to tanning beds and never wore sunscreen or sunblock as a child or teen.

In my 20s, when I got pregnant, the hormones and my previous sun damage had a war on my face: melasma. Melasma is a darkening of the skin. Which was exactly what I was shooting for when I was sun worshiping. The problem was, it was a blotchy darkening of the skin. Blotches on my cheeks, forehead and around my mouth.

I had it in my first pregnancy and even more pronounced in my second. And it didn’t go away after the births. I kept waiting. Then I started spending dough on over-the-counter creams. When that didn’t work, four years after my son’s birth, I plopped down some more dough and bought the pricey creams that finally faded those blotches. Except they can come back, which is why I am adamant about sunscreen use.

The other reason is that I interviewed several dermatologists for a skin cancer article I was hired to write. It wasn’t pretty. Every single doctor I spoke to – doctors who treat people for melanoma from sun exposure – was crazy in love with sunless tanners. They love the invention. Understanding they weren’t effective in fighting the beauty ideal which promotes a tan, they praised sunless tanners as the happy medium. The solution to a practical issue.

Girls, seriously, stop laying out and hitting the tanning beds. It’s dangerous. It feels good now and by virtue of youth, you think it won’t matter to you whether you have great skin when you’re over-the-hill at like 30. But, when you turn 30, you still care about your skin. You do. When you’re 60, you care. Mothers, promote sunless tanners and sunscreen. It’s a safer alternative.

Share and Enjoy

Deborah Siegel asks some compelling questions in the Ms. Blog Magazine, Are We Too Isolated to Fight the Pink v. Blue Battle?, about gender stereotypes and gender identity. I’d like to answer some of them, from my own perspective. My perspective being one where I started The Girl Revolution to both talk about gender issues, knock down stereotypes, and as a mother of both a boy and a girl.

The author and I have a lot in common in that we both held the belief several years ago that gender is mostly a social construct and that we, as parents, had the power to alter the social construct for our kids.

My views on this have changed with the experience of raising a daughter for nine years and a son for five years. It’s also drastically changed with additional knowledge about the powerful role hormones play in our lives, experimentation with my own gender identity and what feels good to me and observing the greater cultural picture about gender.

The author asks if we (I assume she means those of us who see gender stereotypes as a problem), are too isolated to really break down the barriers of gender stereotypes. I would have to say that in my experience the opposite is true. If I moved myself and my family into a bubble in which there was little to no contact with the outside world – and by outside world I mean grandmas and grandpas, other children, parents of other children, teachers, pediatricians, television, all media, literature and abstained from visiting a grocery store – well, then it would be really, super easy to raise androgynous children completely unaware of gender identities or stereotypes.

Practically the second my son was born, my mother-in-law who was in the room, said, “Oh he’s such a boy!” Then she said it over and over and over and over. Now, academically, I was sure that if dressed exactly the same as his girl cousin and taken into a mall not a soul would be able to tell if he was a boy or a girl. But, instead I just couldn’t resist giving him the most adorable mohawk, which identified him as a boy. Add to that the plethora of toys, games and clothes with gender designations given to my children for birthdays and Christmas and it didn’t take me too long to figure out that I, in truth, was not powerful enough to control the gender identification or stereotyping of my children.

Nor, I realized, did they want me to.

My daughter, it would seem, really did love the color pink. She really did like to be a girl. She liked to identify as one and she had absolutely zero desire to be androgynous, forsaking all gender roles and stereotyping. When I would try, it would irritate the dickens out of her.

My son, likes the color pink too, enjoys watching Dora over Diego, but you know what, even as a tiny baby if we walked by a television display with a football game on, he was profoundly attracted to that. He could also pick out the sound of a train, tractor or diesel and was entranced by it in a way that neither my daughter or I could relate to.

I had to reconsider my position.

The other day, I watched Lisa Ling’s Our America about transgendered people. These are people who feel they are born in the wrong gendered bodies. Even small children who are born in bodies that they feel are the wrong gender find it incredibly painful. Their families, even if they were supportive of a gender change, also found their children’s gender confusion incredibly painful. What I took from that show is the gender is somehow, inherently important to who we are. It is the basis for much of our identity. Enough so that if you are born feeling like a girl and the world wants to identify you as boy that person doesn’t feel whole, complete or happy until they are acknowledged to be a girl and visa versa. They will go to drastic, painful surgical and hormonal lengths to ensure the outside world identifies them as their chosen gender.

So, what’s wrong with a gender stereotype?

Well, it’s wrong when it limits our choices. Feminists are especially irked by it because gender stereotyping limited our choices and our freedom to express our full selves. The box they were trying to shove us in was way too small to allow the full expression of our gifts and talents. This type of gender stereotyping forced us into economically and physically dangerous positions. Which is never okay. Which felt horrible.

But, being a girl and identifying as one and being allowed the full freedom to express ourselves as feminine isn’t dangerous, shouldn’t be fought and feels good.

We’ve made a great deal of progress. Essential progress that our daughters have really benefitted from. The box, is disintegrating. There are more and more ways to be a woman in today’s world and gender stereotypes are less damaging. Yes, there are still problems and in some cases the pendulum appears to have swung too far in one direction, but consider that my mother had to wear a skirt to college because pants weren’t allowed. Consider that I was taught that the only way to be a good mom, was to stay home and forsake work. Consider that women weren’t allowed to have many of the good jobs because they were women.

My daughter doesn’t identify with any of that. The entire concept is foreign to her. When she hears about it she thinks it’s just stupid. When I try to insist that she fight the fights of my youth, or my mother’s youth, she thinks I’m being stupid. In her world, women are chemists, scientists, accountants, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, therapists, writers, bloggers, executives, presidential and vice-presidential candidates, pastors, clowns, stay-at-home moms, furniture saleswomen, Oprah and anything else they decide to be. Those fights are fought and won. There is still enough to do that she can pick her own battles, choose her own barriers to break down. I’ll keep hacking away at the barriers I still see in front of her.

My son doesn’t identify with it either. He doesn’t have any of the old paradigms in his head about what men and women do or don’t do.

But, they are not the same. They do appear to think differently. They do seem to be attracted to different sorts of activities and they do like to express themselves in some different and gender-identified ways. And I’m glad of it. What’s so great about androgyny anyway?

Share and Enjoy

Today I’m taking Ainsley out of school to launch TGR Body at an International Women’s Conference in Denver. Tomorrow too.

We launched online last month, which is honestly somewhat anti-climatic. You rush and fret and boom – you’re live and nothing really outwardly changes in your day-to-day life.

But, at the conference, we will get to see real women try our products, spray them, smell them, try them and react to them. In a lot of ways, this is much more exciting. We get to practice our sales skills and Ainsley is just dying to make change from the cashbox.

We have high school standards in this house, but I prefer her to have this kind of Real Life educational experience for a few days, even if she has to miss school.

We’re lucky because we’re bringing my Posse. Two of my very dear friends are accompanying us on this conference and one of them is also checking her daughter out of school for this Real Life experience. Because, come on – it’s not everyday a close family friend launches a skincare company that’s going to turn the beauty industry on its ass by saying, “I hate the messages you have for our daughters about beauty, so I’ve created something better! Something that acknowledges that girls’ bodies are more than clothes hangers and props for whatever you’re selling. Something that acknowledges that what we believe about our bodies impacts how we feel about them. Something that acknowledges that girls possess inherent beauty as their feminine birthright and beauty should be fun and experimental and creative and not this absurd, pressured, media-driven psychosis of gentrification of the female form, that it’s morphed into! Something that has bold feminine imagery that’s worthy of seeing one’s self in, signifying that this is the dawn of a new paradigm for girls – because it is.”

Yes, this is something our daughters must not only witness, but actively participate in.

Share and Enjoy

Never say “dreaded period” again!

It is not dreaded. At all.

It is a lovely gift of heightened women’s intuition. It allows one’s inner wise woman to speak louder and be heard, because one feels more quiet and slow. That’s my latest theory about early puberty. That girls simply need the heightened intuition and meditative going inside that the menstrual cycle offers us a couple of years sooner, because they are bombarded with more choices, more outside influences and more media telling them the wrong things about who they really are.

The menstrual cycle is about our reproductive cycles in the sense that it comes from our second chakra, our womb space – that of CREATION – that human element of us that is most like God.

To create we have to clean out the old crap we’re holding on to and our menstrual cycles allow us to do that. PMS is the sane, oh so sane, process of recognizing shit we don’t want in our lives. We take it out on husbands and children because they are the humans who most cross our boundaries. It’s the feeling guilty about slapping those boundaries in place that makes the natural normal emotional process of PMS so horrid for us. But, the boundaries are blessings.

If you really want to go there you should check out this brilliant woman, Miranda Grey of Red Moon who writes books (and has resources for girls to implement this in their lives as well) about how to USE our menstrual periods to become more efficient and live happier lives. I have The Optimized Woman and that has both changed the way I viewed my period (which has barely registered as a nuisance in my life). It has also drastically changed the way I want to share the blessing and joy of a period with Ainsley.

She writes about how there are optimum times during the month in which women are able to do things best. She breaks it down into 4 weeks: Expressive Phase (ovulation, passive and outgoing), Creative Phase (PMS, active), Reflective Phase (menstruation, we are not more open to meditation, we literally become meditation) and the Dynamic Phase (pre-ovulation, active).

What does Ainsley need to know? That her period is about biology and that it is natural, normal, healthy and all the biology about the sperm and egg and how to manage it and take care of herself. But, more importantly, that her period is a Spiritual Gift that heightens her ability to perceive bullshit and know which course of action is best for her. That all the marketing around menstruation products – the smelliness, the grossness, the PMS medication, the weight gain, the irritability is just a load of marketing crap – meant to make her feel bad so she’ll spend more money on their products. That there are certain times when she will feel more like going out and more like being intimate, and then there are times when she’ll get a hell of a lot more done and other times, while she is on her period, when she is meant to rest, meditate, cleanse herself and go inside. Don’t fight those times. Use them to her advantage and accept them as the spiritual gifts that they are.

On Red Moon is a resource PDF for young girls, Moon Magic for Girls, to help you share the Spiritual Gift of her monthly moon cycle with her. Midol and Tampax have been around for a few decades.

A woman’s menstrual cycle has been around since the dawn of time, it’s time we go back into our sacred feminine heritage and reclaim it for ourselves and our daughters.

Share and Enjoy