Dear Ivy, I hope you won’t take this as a personal attack, it’s just for the sake of discussion. Related to your Miss Representation post, I have to say you’re a little hypocrite in your arguments. You defend a documentary that talks in part about the media setting standards of how a woman should look, but you promote that representation in your tumblr. Most, if not all, of the images of women you post are of gorgeous faces and perfect bodies, and that is pretty much the same.

Standard

Hi. I don’t take it as a personal attack, but I do think you need to look at this as a greater issue in pornography than something that is restricted to the confines of my blog. 

The fact is that pornography often excludes women of a variety of backgrounds and body-types. Or, worse, they portray them in ways that are incredibly demeaning and buy into some really awful stereotypes. 

Something I like to ask people is why the girl next door in porn is always white. Not everyone lives next door to a white girl. 

So what I am working with here is inherently flawed. And I reblog pictures from my dashboard and most of that is of skinny white girls because, well, sorry, most of porn is skinny white girls. While I do make an effort to try to get more racial representation up in here, body types are a little more difficult.

Please, find me some well-photographed women who aren’t skinny and made up to look perfect and I will put them on the blog. I just, honestly, don’t like amateur photographs.

But I get the harm that is in these pictures. Within the first few months of using tumblr, I suddenly became obsessed with the idea that I did not have a thigh gap. I’d never been concerned about it until I saw this website’s complete obsession with them and thought it was something I needed to have. It woke up some really unhealthy thoughts and I had to reassure myself that I was being absolutely ridiculous.

So, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t say I promote that representation and I think it’s a little harsh to call me a hypocrite since this blog represents literally a fraction of me as a person. I was just talking to a friend the other day about how, when nudity regulations in films were relaxed in the 40s, there was such a beautiful variety of bodies in the media and imperfect nudity was a gorgeous and celebrated thing. Think about Jane Russell and the fact that it’s so rare now-a-days to see big breasts that actually MOVE on a body that is suited to carry them naturally.

It’s hard to compare mainstream media to porn and it’s hard to get these bodies on my tumblr when they really don’t exist in the stuff I’m sifting through on my dash. 

Best,

Ivy

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