On Wednesday I described an assignment I give to my college Human Sexuality students where they create a media image that incorporates positive sexuality. I am posting three best projects from my class this semester. On Wednesday, I posted about the blog Avant Garde Bodies, yesterday I put up sexy advertisements that showed real women’s bodies. Today, another blog. This is blog truly shines as an interesting, interactive media image of positive sexuality and body image. Even if you skip my description of the blog and Claudia’s explanation and motivation behind it, you should not miss this blog!
Claudia Garate created True Beauty – it’s perfectly imperfect as a gathering place for images, poems, quotes, and writings on true beauty and sexuality. She has this to say about the creation of her blog:
I chose to create this blog for my project on true beauty because everywhere we look there is something telling us how to be beautiful: get shinier hair, softer skin, leaner legs, a harder stomach. Wear this, wear that, eat this, don’t eat that. Get whiter teeth, firmer breasts, longer eyelashes, less wrinkles. It seems like our society has created a pill or product for every part of our bodies to “better” it, which consequently only REALLY tells us that, as we are, we are NOT good enough. It baffles me when I look around at the people I love and while the grand majority of them don’t look like those on magazines, they are absolutely beautiful exactly as they are because in the end, THEY ARE. Beauty is not black and white, despite the Media’s attempts to make it seem that way. Nothing in life is black and white and everything comes down to perspective, just as beauty does. We all see beauty in different things, which in the end only translates into the fact that everything is beautiful, it’s just a matter of perception. I decided to get the word out starting from my friends and family around the world and slowly started networking to people everywhere who were kind enough to send me their picture and what beauty and/or sexiness means to them. Overall, people have really loved thinking about it and writing about it because through that action they realize this truth; I have really enjoyed reading what everyone has to say. We are all different and we all see things differently, but we are all beautiful. We are all perfectly imperfect and that’s what I wanted to show through my blog. What makes a person beautiful isn’t how they look, but how they ARE and what they do. The media always tries to tear that down and get into our heads to sell more and more unnecessary products and I’ll be the first one to admit that as much as I stay away from it, I can get sucked in. This is not the right message to send to our children and it is not the right message to live by. We see beauty in those we love and “love is blind”– we just have to do a little math and realize that beauty is also blind and it is everywhere.
The posts are all reader-submitted, and they range from only words:
“Sexy is…something about the fact that he thinks about energy saving and global warming makes me attracted to him!- Global consciousness is sexy.” -NS
to images:
But it is the posts that integrate images and words that are the most powerful:
One of the most beautiful souls I know: She always has a smile on her face and love to share with everyone around, hugs aplenty. Her beauty grew exponentially when she took that love and went to the darkest corners of the world, to share the beauty, immerse herself in their beauty, and spread more love.
