All Bodies Beautiful

Call for images.

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Samuel) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 04:22:00 +0000

This is a call for people to post images of beautiful women in their lives. There are very few rules to posts here -- mostly obvious:

No frontal nudity please. I want to keep this page open to people of all ages. I have nothing personally against nudity, but it may prevent younger people from being able to see it.
1. No porn, please. Mostly: no adds for porn sites, and the like. Really, I reserve the right to remove anything that looks like spam.
Keep it positive. The point of this site is to bring people up, not cut them down.
Respect copyrights. Please only post pictures that you have the right to post -- Pictures that you've taken or that you have permission to post. Most of the historical pictures that I'm posting are from war archives, because pictures taken by US government personnel (including soldiers) in the course of their duties are, by law, in the public domain. Most other pictures taken after 1922 are of questionable legality.

Coda: On being thin

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Samuel) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:30:00 +0000

In having my first post read back to me, I realized that some may come to the conclusion that I don't like thin. That would be an incorrect conclusion. I have friends who are naturally thin, and who I find quite attractive in their thinness. What I find problematic is not that some women are (naturally) thin, but rather that there seems to be an overriding theme in popular media that thinness is, somehow, a prerequisite to being beautiful.

I say that it is not.
I say that women of various shapes and sizes can be (and often are) exquisitely beautiful. Christina Hendricks of the "Mad Men" series is an example of a non-thin woman who is getting publicity for her beauty (In this case, she was chosen to represent the '50s/'60s standard of shapely beauty, which is quite different than the current standard).

Marilyn Munroe (wikipedia) is a perfect example. Considered one of the most sexy women of the 20'th century, she was somewhere between a size 8 and a size 12 -- compared to today's commercial standard of size 0 or 1.

If her clone were to arrive at a casting agency today, they would probably show her straight out the door again .... But that still doesn't stop her from being considered beautiful by millions of people.

QED

Why I'm here

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Samuel) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:17:00 +0000

To put things simply: I know too many beautiful women who don't realize that they're beautiful. I consider this a tragedy because these women can't enjoy the beauty that they have. Instead, they pick an ideal that's different than the body that they have, and then beat on themselves because they don't match that arbitrary ideal.

Hint: Definition

Ideal \I*de"al\, a. [L. idealis: cf. F. id['e]al.]
. . .
3. Existing in fancy or imagination only; visionary; unreal.
[1913 Webster]

The odd truth of the matter is that just about every body type has been in vogue over the years. Tall, short, shapely, thin and buxom have all had their heyday. Even now, if you check out the world of porn, you can find proof that people are willing to pay to view bodies of just about every type. Think about it -- If you're not beautiful, then why would somebody pay to look at somebody who looks like you?

So, then why not just enjoy and celebrate the body we have? That's not to say that we shouldn't continue to work to make sure that we stay/get healthy, but there's just no reason to pretend that some body other than the one we have is needed to be 'beautiful'.This site is about celebrating the beauty of the women in and around us. The method is pictures of women who are beautiful -- and especially women who don't fit the standard commercial TV/Movie/Fashion-model standard of bamboo-with-pants thin models that have resulted in would-be models literally starving themselves to death in an attempt to get 'thin enough'. (You know you're in trouble when people get refused for reasons like "You look too healthy, or one woman who stopped modeling because agents thought that she got too beautiful -- I kid you not!).