People can be ten thousand things, and really, looking beautiful is only one of them. I recently participated in a photo shoot, and the photographer posted one of the images on Facebook. Most of my Facebook friends posted underneath, You look [insert fabulous adjective here]! However, one person commented: This is the true essence of you. […]
Let’s see who we are and like what we see. Enough already. I love glossy women’s magazines. I’ve always loved clothes, and shoes, and beautiful objects beautifully shot. Of course, as a teenager growing up with an artificial leg, I never saw my body reflected in magazines like Sassy or Seventeen, but at the time […]
I want my daughter to see aging as the expansive process it can be. I want her to remain curious about, and not just terrified of, what’s inevitable about being alive: It is all temporary. I was present for my maternal grandmother’s death. It happened while she was in hospice care at my mother’s home, […]
It should be just hair but our culture actually puts way more weight on women’s heads than our follicles could ever produce. At some point during the last week I entered the world of the surreal. Why? Because I “allowed” my daughter to shave her head a few weeks ago. The response has been overwhelmingly […]
While I’m in favor of encouraging women to feel confident and happy, I worry that today’s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity. In the early 2000s, when I was a burgeoning fashionable fat girl, I stumbled across the LiveJournal community Fatshionista. I loved seeing pictures of women […]
I see beauty for what it is: a mirage and a distraction. Who can forget that famous Pantene commercial of the ‘80s with Kelly LeBrock leaning into the camera, swinging her magnificent tresses, and pouting: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” I didn’t hate her because she was beautiful—I hated her for bragging about something […]
Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org. Dear Dana: I’m 35 and single. I’ve been trying my hand at online dating for the last year and […]
I have seen beautiful women with shapely, healthy bodies stuffed into Spanx, hiding this very precious piece of themselves—their bellies. It was my last full day on vacation down the Jersey Shore—a vacation where I indulged on piping hot donuts and buckets of fries on more than one occasion. My partner and I decided to […]
Every minute worrying about what age you are is one more minute that you could use in a million other ways. There are two types of people who will tell you that “life begins at 40” or that “40 is the new 20” or any of that other nonsense that people feel obligated to console […]
If our bodies tell the stories of our lives, we need to let them say more than that we are desired. About two years ago, a Facebook friend of mine began posting tastefully erotic pictures of fat women. The first time that I saw one in my feed, I physically cringed. I was not feeling […]
If my looks have begun declining, well, I haven’t really noticed. And if I haven’t noticed, should I really bother worrying that anyone else has? Men check out my dog more than me. I only wish I were kidding. I’ve gotten used to catching unexpected smiles creep onto strangers’ faces while gazing at Henny (why […]
I refuse to buy into the idea that a person’s worth is dependent upon a number. My daughter Ruthie is 3. She is a healthy toddler. Her brain is perfect—a neurologist confirmed that in 2012 when she was exhibiting some strange growth patterns that needed to be checked out. She is funny and incredibly smart […]
