Teen Vogue offers up another serving of gender agitprop, this time featuring a troubled young actress who identifies as nonbinary (and, lo and behold, the reporter is ‘nonbinary,’ too):
I suspect that (at least for her, but my guess is for many who get mastectomies) "non-binary" means "I hate the way my body changed during puberty and wish I was still a child."
Could be discomfort with male attention, could be discomfort with adulthood and the attendant responsibilities, could be something else. I just see a tragedy in people needing to mutilate themselves to become comfortable.
It's because she's mentally ill and hates herself, hates the idea of being treated like shit by men (which women are supposed just tolerate, as signaled by society), and this is her way out. She's been taken advantage of by a greedy medical industry and disgusting media industry.
This is a shame. She has mental problems. That is why she mutilated herself. It's no different from cutting.
Agree. Back when I was growing up, we just called it gender-bending and it was fun and a little subversive . This picture is creepy, the way the pictures of emaciated people on Pro Ana sites are creepy. Maybe she feels like she’s showing off her body like a badge of honor? I hope she truly is satisfied with her life choices, I wouldn’t wish that kind of regret on anyone.
because the "nonbinary" label to people like that means "you can do and be whatever you want, there is no rule on how to look and 'pass' as nonbinary" which is something they dont perceive the same way with the label of woman and man. they see it as freedom like making a custom avatar whereas binary labels are seen as straitjackets full of pressure and anxiety. A flat chest on a woman is seen as unfortunate, ugly, a concern or a developmental failure; a flat chest on a nonbinary is seen as brave and cool and hot.
Thank you Eliza. As a therapist who retired out of Alaska in 2014, before this stuff really took off, my heart just breaks seeing this new "gender-cult" rebrand the very common psychological struggles - of what was not very long ago seen as normal Western adolescence - as instead a set of new and compelling ideological reasons to engage in self-mutilation of all things. There is a tragic "irony" in the young both claiming to "reject" gender-stereotypes - while their thinking is in fact clearly "completely captured" by those very same regressive gender stereotypes that lie at the heart of "trans" ideology. As a 71 year old man I really thought that second wave feminism had put the gender madness behind us once and for all. Watching its "rebirth" in the form of a quasi-religious scarification cult is completely Orwellian and tragic.
As a 62-year-old woman, I feel exactly the same way, Gary.
Although, for me, there is the added slam that these young women feel compelled to mutilate themselves into gender madness so they won't grow into being ME: a perfectly normal older woman. That's how horrifying my existence is to them.
But, sure, let's pretend standing up for perfectly normal womanhood is an attack on the existence of. . .people horrified by womanhood?
“Move this kind of extreme body modification from sexualized and objectified body parts like breasts to less loaded territory—fingers, kidneys, kneecaps—and the idea that a part of your body can be anything other than part of your self becomes utterly bizarre”
this line in particular got me. I just find it heartbreaking really.
Perhaps you've written about this already, but another thought I had seeing that photograph from Teen Vogue is that there is a long history in fashion and modeling of promoting the careers of women who look like teenage men.
Most supermodels have had masculine jaws, or foreheads, or angular bodies, wide shoulders and slim hips. So--not only thinness as a characteristic to aspire to, but a vaguely masculine appearance.
One explanation for the preponderance of masculinized female fashion models is that, for decades at least, the gatekeepers in fashion were homosexual men. They promoted the women who embodied their own ideals of attractiveness. I'm not sure if that's fair or not, but once I noticed it, I saw it everywhere.
So I wonder: are fashion/beauty editors sliding so easily into the "nonbinary" and "trans" aesthetic *because* a fully feminine aesthetic (full breasts, wide hips, soft faces) has never been as highly valued in fashion/beauty as a masculinized one (thin, angular, flat, etc)?
Not to mention their height: "It's so they can all wear the same clothes." "It's so they can be seen on the runway only 10 feet from the audience."
BS.
It's so we can normalize women starving themselves into a misogynist male standard of female beauty that--not coincidentally--depends upon the intense, unhealthy physical suffering of girls and women.
Is it a coincidence that this comes from gay men? Not necessarily. Although I have close gay male friends who love me, virulent hatred of women is not uncommon among gay men.
We know that anorexia is a form of self-harm. It's *meant* to cause intense suffering. So why do the gatekeepers of women's fashion insist upon it?
It can only be overwhelming hatred of actual girls and women and the desire to make us suffer.
I have moved away from misogyny as the sole or even most useful explanation for these cultural phenomena. Yes, I have encountered various expressions of misogyny among gay men, but I'm not sure that those gay men who set those aesthetic fashion standards really care about anything other than what they themselves like to look at--people who look like teenage boys.
IOW, it might be a more complex interplay of repulsion and attraction rather than an effort to diminish women. That said, it is also true that the effects of this aesthetic on many women has been terrible.
The older I get, the more obvious it becomes to me that misogyny is the underpinning of our entire world.
If men in power didn't constantly, eternally regenerate and sustain among both women and men an intense hatred of women--intense enough to justify constant, inescapable, casual verbal and physical violence against us--they wouldn't be able to keep us out of positions of power in our own world.
It is hatred that fuels violence, and it is violence against girls and women that maintains patriarchy.
Otherwise, men would lose their monopoly on power and wind up just like us. And we couldn't have that, now, could we?
Men are the problem. They are the origin of the problem, and their hatred of women drives this. It's not the only reason, but I would argue its the origin (original problem).
> now we’re living in a time when a 2024 presidential candidate compared puberty blockers to chemical castration
Puberty blockers are, quite literally, chemical castration. Lupron is given both to confused children and to registered sex offenders upon their release from prison. The linked article grudgingly acknowledges this, but it maintains that the "action mechanism is different" in the two cases. How could that possibly be true? Same drug, same physical effects, different marketing. It's the same as the finger analogy: they are on some level aware that the physical effects of this drug are brutal, but because "gender-affirming care" is always and automatically a good thing, they've decided the drug must simply work differently for vulnerable teens than it does for old men with prostate cancer. Anything to avoid confronting the physical reality of endless "meatsuit customization".
Edit: the linked article goes on to say this:
> Comparing top surgery to a double mastectomy — a procedure commonly performed to either treat or reduce the risk of breast cancer — is transphobic and misleading.
Well said, Edie. They (by which I mean both interviewer and subject) are telling us that reason is very unkind, so we must choose unreason lest we hurt their somehow-still-fragile egos.
Yes, somehow, to Liv, it's "misogynist" to worry about someone having a disgust response to her female secondary sexual characteristics to the point of having them cut off. She felt disgust at herself, and rationalized it as being transgender. It's not her internal misogynist, apparently: that has to be projected onto people who like women enough to want her to be the one she was born as and cannot ever stop being, those who wanted her to take care of her body without first spending ten years hating it, mutilating it, rejecting womanhood, and going through a "recovery process".
Oh boy, when you talked about the "history" of trans identities having been borrowed, stolen, or wholly invented, it struck a chord with me. I have also personally encountered the outright stealing of history to justify this ideology:
I'm from East Asia and currently living in the US, and I had an American classmate who posted the link to a Youtube video titled "Why Do Japanese Games Treat Trans Characters So Differently?" Apparently thinking it was a very illuminating video on the East Asian history around queer identity. But uh... it was just a garbage video essay that bends history to conform to the trans narratives, such as "trans people were given jobs at the government in the medieval times" (no, the government hired eunuchs, and not because eunuchs had a special place in society but because they could fill roles that weren't for women but also required working closely with the women in the palace, who were not supposed to have sexual relationships with anyone but the king. That's just how things were in the medieval times duh) or that "transgenderism is viewed more favorably than homosexuality in East Asia due to collectivist culture" (because trans people conform to gender roles and gay people don't(?). In East Asia, as far as I could tell, there's not much of a difference between how the two groups are treated; both are viewed as perverted but not punished by law, so it's like how incest is treated in America).
You've written about the racist element of the trans ideology a while ago and I agree. I swear, this trans ideology stuff is "white man's burden" in disguise.
Watch the transgenderists lose their minds over Oly London. He used to pretend he wasn't taking a dig at them. But now he's totally into it: "If what I do is so disgusting and disrespectful, then what about what you do?"
Interesting that when the body-modification cultists are scavenging cultural scraps to make a history for themselves they completely avoid the psychological phenomenon that was called Body Identity Integrity Disorder until it was renamed Body Integrity Dysphoria. A bit too close for comfort perhaps.
There was a good article in The Atlantic on it in 2000, for anyone who hasn't read it:
“psychiatrists may be unwittingly colluding with broader cultural forces to contribute to the spread of a mental disorder.” Exactly. Stunning that it was 24 years ago. I’m glad I used my ‘last free article ‘ to read this, I can’t believe I haven’t come across it before. I too , will share.
Let me get this straight – a "disgust reaction" is not a valid view or worth considering, unless it's her own disgust with her body, then it can't be questioned.
"What does it serve to call traumatized children “evil?”
Literally NOBODY gender critical calls traumatized children evil. That's a whopping strawmxn of insane proportions. What an absolutely unconscionable thing for Teen Vogue to publish.
The only people calling traumatized children evil are the transgenderists attacking girls (particularly in sports and in detransition) who fight back against the transgenderist lobby. Those men do it all the time.
YES, so true. Thank you. So many of her comments made so little sense, the ones where she's lashing out like that. Her comments were not relatable at all, especially the one you pointed out.
They weren't questions. They were propaganda inserted into the interview. Wildly false propaganda.
The same thing is done with push-polls, where someone calls you from a political campaign, pretending to be an objective pollster, and asks "questions" that assume the propaganda to be pushed.
Male here. I don't think I felt alienated from my body during puberty – in fact, I was kind of excited, because it meant I was about to get tall and strong. (One of those two happened, at least.)
That said, when my body hair came in it did so pretty much all at once, and I did not feel ready for it. I remember I shaved it all off the first time I noticed it; I just wasn't quite ready to look so different from how I had my entire life. Luckily, that was just hair and could grow back.
Actually now that you state this I realize that given how differently young men's and young women's bodies are looked at and seen in our culture, that makes total sense. Thank you for pointing this out.
I therefore restate my question (which I'd thought was rhetorical but now see wasn't): has any girl ever sailed through puberty without feeling alienated from her own body?
In my own case (for instance) I remember feeling both excited and alarmed.
I can't believe teen vogue would run this, and with a picture of her mutilated chest peeking out as well! poor girl - in 2 years when Hollywood has moved on and she's been left in the trendy dust with no new roles to speak of, I'm willing to bet she's gonna start regretting some things.
Or if she has sex with a man who claims he's a woman and gets pregnant. The baby couldn't breastfeed. Nursing my 2 sons was such a wonderful experience, a connection to the natural world. We assume she never wants children, and I say, she should not. Ever.
What struck me the most was the desperate, self-justifying note in both the women’s voices. You can tell even they don’t really believe what they’re saying.
Even the big when she’s saying it’s misogynistic to not trust girls to choose mastectomies...so she’s knows they’re girls??
Well, if you define radical body modification and gender ideology as progress, then anyone who prefers things the way they were (for most of Western history) are conservative.
"I am not going to entertain anybody's disgust over my body. It's my body, it’s healthy and strong and beautiful, and there’s nothing wrong with it."
I don't know how they can say things like this with a straight face. She was the one who felt disgust towards her perfectly healthy body, which had nothing wrong with it.
Her history of anorexia is very telling. She's lost a couple of weights off her chest, giving her that permanently thin, childish look. 🤔
That's what a nipple looks like after it's been surgically disconnected from the breast and reconnected.
It loses its underlying flesh and plumbing, along with its flesh's connection and plumbing to the breast. It is now mostly a piece of skin, attached by its scar tissue to the surrounding skin.
It also loses a lot of the nerves--in parts of it, all of them. So it is no longer the source of physical sensitivity that it once was. She'll be lucky if she can feel anything in it at all.
It now serves the same function to her as a tattoo of a nipple.
Thank you. It's fine. It is what it is. The female body does all kinds of weird things--especially in response to our normal hormones--and I'm glad I had the option of relieving myself of that weight. My back is glad too.
Men have absolutely no idea what it's like to live in this body.
This article made me so sad and angry. I picture a group of young teen girls, flipping through Teen Vogue in a convenience store while waiting in line. They see pics of this smiling cutie with gorgeous hair, empty promises , and meaningless cheers "we deserve it!" They read about her cookie-cutter description of teen angst and say like she did "Oh, that's 100% what my deal is, they thought. That explains everything. "
How many girls will this article push over the line? In five years, when in all likelihood Liv will be filled with regret , will she also be filled with remorse for those she inadvertently lead astray?
Yes, exactly. Does she realize or care what a dangerous example she's setting? And what the heck is going on with her nipplle? And why would anyone risk any loss of sensation in that pleasurable body part?
If she's non binary why doe she have to change her body to look like a boys?
Don't these people even ask themselves the simplest of questions about this?
I suspect that (at least for her, but my guess is for many who get mastectomies) "non-binary" means "I hate the way my body changed during puberty and wish I was still a child."
Could be discomfort with male attention, could be discomfort with adulthood and the attendant responsibilities, could be something else. I just see a tragedy in people needing to mutilate themselves to become comfortable.
It's because she's mentally ill and hates herself, hates the idea of being treated like shit by men (which women are supposed just tolerate, as signaled by society), and this is her way out. She's been taken advantage of by a greedy medical industry and disgusting media industry.
This is a shame. She has mental problems. That is why she mutilated herself. It's no different from cutting.
Or it could be massive attention seeking. Which is awful.
An actor engaging in massive attention seeking? Dont be silly
Agree. Back when I was growing up, we just called it gender-bending and it was fun and a little subversive . This picture is creepy, the way the pictures of emaciated people on Pro Ana sites are creepy. Maybe she feels like she’s showing off her body like a badge of honor? I hope she truly is satisfied with her life choices, I wouldn’t wish that kind of regret on anyone.
That is the eternal question, isn't it?
because the "nonbinary" label to people like that means "you can do and be whatever you want, there is no rule on how to look and 'pass' as nonbinary" which is something they dont perceive the same way with the label of woman and man. they see it as freedom like making a custom avatar whereas binary labels are seen as straitjackets full of pressure and anxiety. A flat chest on a woman is seen as unfortunate, ugly, a concern or a developmental failure; a flat chest on a nonbinary is seen as brave and cool and hot.
Thank you Eliza. As a therapist who retired out of Alaska in 2014, before this stuff really took off, my heart just breaks seeing this new "gender-cult" rebrand the very common psychological struggles - of what was not very long ago seen as normal Western adolescence - as instead a set of new and compelling ideological reasons to engage in self-mutilation of all things. There is a tragic "irony" in the young both claiming to "reject" gender-stereotypes - while their thinking is in fact clearly "completely captured" by those very same regressive gender stereotypes that lie at the heart of "trans" ideology. As a 71 year old man I really thought that second wave feminism had put the gender madness behind us once and for all. Watching its "rebirth" in the form of a quasi-religious scarification cult is completely Orwellian and tragic.
As a 62-year-old woman, I feel exactly the same way, Gary.
Although, for me, there is the added slam that these young women feel compelled to mutilate themselves into gender madness so they won't grow into being ME: a perfectly normal older woman. That's how horrifying my existence is to them.
But, sure, let's pretend standing up for perfectly normal womanhood is an attack on the existence of. . .people horrified by womanhood?
*facepalm*
The many facets of misogyny...
“Move this kind of extreme body modification from sexualized and objectified body parts like breasts to less loaded territory—fingers, kidneys, kneecaps—and the idea that a part of your body can be anything other than part of your self becomes utterly bizarre”
this line in particular got me. I just find it heartbreaking really.
Totally. Eliza is so clear.
Perhaps you've written about this already, but another thought I had seeing that photograph from Teen Vogue is that there is a long history in fashion and modeling of promoting the careers of women who look like teenage men.
Most supermodels have had masculine jaws, or foreheads, or angular bodies, wide shoulders and slim hips. So--not only thinness as a characteristic to aspire to, but a vaguely masculine appearance.
One explanation for the preponderance of masculinized female fashion models is that, for decades at least, the gatekeepers in fashion were homosexual men. They promoted the women who embodied their own ideals of attractiveness. I'm not sure if that's fair or not, but once I noticed it, I saw it everywhere.
So I wonder: are fashion/beauty editors sliding so easily into the "nonbinary" and "trans" aesthetic *because* a fully feminine aesthetic (full breasts, wide hips, soft faces) has never been as highly valued in fashion/beauty as a masculinized one (thin, angular, flat, etc)?
Not to mention their height: "It's so they can all wear the same clothes." "It's so they can be seen on the runway only 10 feet from the audience."
BS.
It's so we can normalize women starving themselves into a misogynist male standard of female beauty that--not coincidentally--depends upon the intense, unhealthy physical suffering of girls and women.
Is it a coincidence that this comes from gay men? Not necessarily. Although I have close gay male friends who love me, virulent hatred of women is not uncommon among gay men.
We know that anorexia is a form of self-harm. It's *meant* to cause intense suffering. So why do the gatekeepers of women's fashion insist upon it?
It can only be overwhelming hatred of actual girls and women and the desire to make us suffer.
I have moved away from misogyny as the sole or even most useful explanation for these cultural phenomena. Yes, I have encountered various expressions of misogyny among gay men, but I'm not sure that those gay men who set those aesthetic fashion standards really care about anything other than what they themselves like to look at--people who look like teenage boys.
IOW, it might be a more complex interplay of repulsion and attraction rather than an effort to diminish women. That said, it is also true that the effects of this aesthetic on many women has been terrible.
The older I get, the more obvious it becomes to me that misogyny is the underpinning of our entire world.
If men in power didn't constantly, eternally regenerate and sustain among both women and men an intense hatred of women--intense enough to justify constant, inescapable, casual verbal and physical violence against us--they wouldn't be able to keep us out of positions of power in our own world.
It is hatred that fuels violence, and it is violence against girls and women that maintains patriarchy.
Otherwise, men would lose their monopoly on power and wind up just like us. And we couldn't have that, now, could we?
This is correct.
Men are the problem. They are the origin of the problem, and their hatred of women drives this. It's not the only reason, but I would argue its the origin (original problem).
This might have some relevance on a big Freudian symbolic level perhaps but it feels deeply misguided when we come to women's agency.
Brilliant insights. Thank you. So true. All of it.
Karl Lagerfeld said he didn’t want the models to distract from the fashion; the models were merely hangers for his clothes.
That's not a dehumanizing, misogynist thing to say at all. . .
Clothes hang more, perhaps, on thin flat chested people?
> now we’re living in a time when a 2024 presidential candidate compared puberty blockers to chemical castration
Puberty blockers are, quite literally, chemical castration. Lupron is given both to confused children and to registered sex offenders upon their release from prison. The linked article grudgingly acknowledges this, but it maintains that the "action mechanism is different" in the two cases. How could that possibly be true? Same drug, same physical effects, different marketing. It's the same as the finger analogy: they are on some level aware that the physical effects of this drug are brutal, but because "gender-affirming care" is always and automatically a good thing, they've decided the drug must simply work differently for vulnerable teens than it does for old men with prostate cancer. Anything to avoid confronting the physical reality of endless "meatsuit customization".
Edit: the linked article goes on to say this:
> Comparing top surgery to a double mastectomy — a procedure commonly performed to either treat or reduce the risk of breast cancer — is transphobic and misleading.
I have no words.
Wait, what-- the article tries to claim that top surgery is NOT a double mastectomy? What, exactly, does Teen Vogue think the difference is?
This is the article that Teen Vogue links to: https://www.them.us/story/ron-desantis-trans-affirming-care-debate
Well said, Edie. They (by which I mean both interviewer and subject) are telling us that reason is very unkind, so we must choose unreason lest we hurt their somehow-still-fragile egos.
Yes, somehow, to Liv, it's "misogynist" to worry about someone having a disgust response to her female secondary sexual characteristics to the point of having them cut off. She felt disgust at herself, and rationalized it as being transgender. It's not her internal misogynist, apparently: that has to be projected onto people who like women enough to want her to be the one she was born as and cannot ever stop being, those who wanted her to take care of her body without first spending ten years hating it, mutilating it, rejecting womanhood, and going through a "recovery process".
Oh boy, when you talked about the "history" of trans identities having been borrowed, stolen, or wholly invented, it struck a chord with me. I have also personally encountered the outright stealing of history to justify this ideology:
I'm from East Asia and currently living in the US, and I had an American classmate who posted the link to a Youtube video titled "Why Do Japanese Games Treat Trans Characters So Differently?" Apparently thinking it was a very illuminating video on the East Asian history around queer identity. But uh... it was just a garbage video essay that bends history to conform to the trans narratives, such as "trans people were given jobs at the government in the medieval times" (no, the government hired eunuchs, and not because eunuchs had a special place in society but because they could fill roles that weren't for women but also required working closely with the women in the palace, who were not supposed to have sexual relationships with anyone but the king. That's just how things were in the medieval times duh) or that "transgenderism is viewed more favorably than homosexuality in East Asia due to collectivist culture" (because trans people conform to gender roles and gay people don't(?). In East Asia, as far as I could tell, there's not much of a difference between how the two groups are treated; both are viewed as perverted but not punished by law, so it's like how incest is treated in America).
You've written about the racist element of the trans ideology a while ago and I agree. I swear, this trans ideology stuff is "white man's burden" in disguise.
Watch the transgenderists lose their minds over Oly London. He used to pretend he wasn't taking a dig at them. But now he's totally into it: "If what I do is so disgusting and disrespectful, then what about what you do?"
It's the "white man's burden," either way.
Interesting that when the body-modification cultists are scavenging cultural scraps to make a history for themselves they completely avoid the psychological phenomenon that was called Body Identity Integrity Disorder until it was renamed Body Integrity Dysphoria. A bit too close for comfort perhaps.
There was a good article in The Atlantic on it in 2000, for anyone who hasn't read it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
Edit... I've found an archived version of the online article which is more accessible:
https://archive.ph/VnKGT
And the author has uploaded a photocopied version of the original onto ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301858827_A_New_Way_to_be_Mad
I love that article. It even mentions transgenderism under the term "a new way to be mad."
I post it everywhere.
Classic. Here’s a full copy of the article (this link is good for only 7 days, but anyone interested can dm me for a copy): https://www.transfernow.net/dl/A-New-Way-to-be-Mad
I would very much like a copy buy can't find how to DM you (may be because I'm new to the app).
“psychiatrists may be unwittingly colluding with broader cultural forces to contribute to the spread of a mental disorder.” Exactly. Stunning that it was 24 years ago. I’m glad I used my ‘last free article ‘ to read this, I can’t believe I haven’t come across it before. I too , will share.
Let me get this straight – a "disgust reaction" is not a valid view or worth considering, unless it's her own disgust with her body, then it can't be questioned.
Make it make sense.
"What does it serve to call traumatized children “evil?”
Literally NOBODY gender critical calls traumatized children evil. That's a whopping strawmxn of insane proportions. What an absolutely unconscionable thing for Teen Vogue to publish.
The only people calling traumatized children evil are the transgenderists attacking girls (particularly in sports and in detransition) who fight back against the transgenderist lobby. Those men do it all the time.
YES, so true. Thank you. So many of her comments made so little sense, the ones where she's lashing out like that. Her comments were not relatable at all, especially the one you pointed out.
They weren't questions. They were propaganda inserted into the interview. Wildly false propaganda.
The same thing is done with push-polls, where someone calls you from a political campaign, pretending to be an objective pollster, and asks "questions" that assume the propaganda to be pushed.
That's all this garbage is: propaganda.
That photo is utterly horrifying, I have to say. To me.
Also: has anyone, ever, sailed through puberty without feeling alienated from their own body?
And are there women who haven't felt uncomfortable being women, in our culture?
It's all just so awful and absurd.
Male here. I don't think I felt alienated from my body during puberty – in fact, I was kind of excited, because it meant I was about to get tall and strong. (One of those two happened, at least.)
That said, when my body hair came in it did so pretty much all at once, and I did not feel ready for it. I remember I shaved it all off the first time I noticed it; I just wasn't quite ready to look so different from how I had my entire life. Luckily, that was just hair and could grow back.
Actually now that you state this I realize that given how differently young men's and young women's bodies are looked at and seen in our culture, that makes total sense. Thank you for pointing this out.
I therefore restate my question (which I'd thought was rhetorical but now see wasn't): has any girl ever sailed through puberty without feeling alienated from her own body?
In my own case (for instance) I remember feeling both excited and alarmed.
I can't believe teen vogue would run this, and with a picture of her mutilated chest peeking out as well! poor girl - in 2 years when Hollywood has moved on and she's been left in the trendy dust with no new roles to speak of, I'm willing to bet she's gonna start regretting some things.
Or if she has sex with a man who claims he's a woman and gets pregnant. The baby couldn't breastfeed. Nursing my 2 sons was such a wonderful experience, a connection to the natural world. We assume she never wants children, and I say, she should not. Ever.
What struck me the most was the desperate, self-justifying note in both the women’s voices. You can tell even they don’t really believe what they’re saying.
Even the big when she’s saying it’s misogynistic to not trust girls to choose mastectomies...so she’s knows they’re girls??
This coping mechanism is paper thin.
"Even the big when she’s saying it’s misogynistic to not trust girls to choose mastectomies...so she’s knows they’re girls??"
I had the same reaction – if they believe their own press, how does "misogynistic" even make sense?
Oops *bit not big
Teen Vogue perpetuating the myth that only "conservatives" oppose such things.
Well, if you define radical body modification and gender ideology as progress, then anyone who prefers things the way they were (for most of Western history) are conservative.
"I am not going to entertain anybody's disgust over my body. It's my body, it’s healthy and strong and beautiful, and there’s nothing wrong with it."
I don't know how they can say things like this with a straight face. She was the one who felt disgust towards her perfectly healthy body, which had nothing wrong with it.
Her history of anorexia is very telling. She's lost a couple of weights off her chest, giving her that permanently thin, childish look. 🤔
YES. Mastecormies are yet another way to look boyish and THINNER.
I cant understand why anyone would mess with what evolution gave us - usually the optimum of healthy cells and tissues.
And would someone please explaj what the he'll is going on with her nipple. Is that intentional? A sunken nipple?
That's what a nipple looks like after it's been surgically disconnected from the breast and reconnected.
It loses its underlying flesh and plumbing, along with its flesh's connection and plumbing to the breast. It is now mostly a piece of skin, attached by its scar tissue to the surrounding skin.
It also loses a lot of the nerves--in parts of it, all of them. So it is no longer the source of physical sensitivity that it once was. She'll be lucky if she can feel anything in it at all.
It now serves the same function to her as a tattoo of a nipple.
That's heartbreaking. Thank you for letting me know. How did you find out all this nipple surgery info, please?
The hard way.
I had breast reduction surgery after menopause.
I'm so sorry to hear it was hard. Thank you for telling me.
Thank you. It's fine. It is what it is. The female body does all kinds of weird things--especially in response to our normal hormones--and I'm glad I had the option of relieving myself of that weight. My back is glad too.
Men have absolutely no idea what it's like to live in this body.
This article made me so sad and angry. I picture a group of young teen girls, flipping through Teen Vogue in a convenience store while waiting in line. They see pics of this smiling cutie with gorgeous hair, empty promises , and meaningless cheers "we deserve it!" They read about her cookie-cutter description of teen angst and say like she did "Oh, that's 100% what my deal is, they thought. That explains everything. "
How many girls will this article push over the line? In five years, when in all likelihood Liv will be filled with regret , will she also be filled with remorse for those she inadvertently lead astray?
Yes, exactly. Does she realize or care what a dangerous example she's setting? And what the heck is going on with her nipplle? And why would anyone risk any loss of sensation in that pleasurable body part?
I am sure she knows she is setting an example and influencing others. She just may not realize yet that it''s not a good thing.
Yes. And will she be there to pick up the pieces and body parts for those she influenced, once she realizes, and pay for their counseling?