real beauty does not come from buying products

Dove's Real Beauty ads are all over Boston

this ad campaign is truly damaging. one of many truly damaging ad campaigns... it's damaging because it acknowledges the problem and panders to it while at the same time re-enforcing the ideal that women are not supposed to have any lumps, bulges, or cellulite. "you can be bigger than a size 4, but you still must have the perfect contours, skin tones, and not an ounce of cellulose, because men won't love you if you have any imperfections on your body. if they wanted to celebrate the REAL beauty of a woman, they would announce that they were going to stop producing crap and force feeding it to women and girls.

while i do think the second woman from the right is totally hot, i don't think this ad or dove's "self esteem fund" can or will do anything positive towards the destruction of the media and fashion culture's unreasonable demands on the countours of a woman's body. that's like the army having a bake sale for peace... if women really had the self esteem dove claims to be trying to foster, women wouldn't buy dove's "firming cream." i also don't think it is the responsibility of a company who makes intrinsically useless "beauty" products to protray women in any way other than what makes them (the company) more money. this is an unfortunate fact of the hyper-capitalist society that we've created and continue to support with our dollars, our vote for democrats or republicans, and our continued lack of non-violent revolution.

back home... life begins again... but better...

so the honeymoon was OFF THE HOOK! (that means great for you squares out there (pj)). we caught up on sleep, relaxed, played gin, went hiking, kyaking, played catch, explored burlington, toured breweries and wineries, grilled, ate awesome food, we even saw War of the Worlds on the big screen... there will soon be pictures of beautiful vermont up on our web site www.bethandandy.net. we had some more hiking and outdoorsy stuff planned for today and it was rainy and crappy... so we took off a day early to settle in at home before beth goes back to job from hell and i start new job in south boston (commute from hell).

still trying to get used to the idea of not being broke (what with wedding gifts and new income to begin shortly)... very much looking forward to settling in to that and adjusting to the wonderful changes (other than this ring on my finger) life has in store.

married!

it's official. ring on my finger and everything. best wedding ever... ok off to the honeymoon.