follow up:

"The first man to break the four-minute mile was the Englishman Roger Bannister, on a windswept cinder track at Oxford, nearly fifty years ago. Bannister is in his early seventies now, and one day last summer he returned to the site of his historic race along with the current world-record holder in the mile, Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj. The two men chatted and compared notes and posed for photographs. "I feel as if I am looking at my mirror image," Bannister said, indicating El Guerrouj's similarly tall, high-waisted frame. It was a polite gesture, an attempt to suggest that he and El Guerrouj were part of the same athletic lineage. But, as both men surely knew, nothing could be further from the truth.

Bannister was a medical student when he broke the four-minute mile in 1954. He did not have time to train every day, and when he did he squeezed in his running on his hour-long midday break at the hospital. He had no coach or trainer or entourage, only a group of running partners who called themselves "the Paddington lunch time club." In a typical workout, they might run ten consecutive quarter miles--ten laps--with perhaps two minutes of recovery between each repetition, then gobble down lunch and hurry back to work. Today, that training session would be considered barely adequate for a high-school miler. A month or so before his historic mile, Bannister took a few days off to go hiking in Scotland. Five days before he broke the four-minute barrier, he stopped running entirely, in order to rest. The day before the race, he slipped and fell on his hip while working in the hospital. Then he ran the most famous race in the history of track and field. Bannister was what runners admiringly call an "animal," a natural.

El Guerrouj, by contrast, trains five hours a day, in two two-and-a-half-hour sessions. He probably has a team of half a dozen people working with him: at the very least, a masseur, a doctor, a coach, an agent, and a nutritionist. He is not in medical school. He does not go hiking in rocky terrain before major track meets. When Bannister told him, last summer, how he had prepared for his four-minute mile, El Guerrouj was stunned. "For me, a rest day is perhaps when I train in the morning and spend the afternoon at the cinema," he said. El Guerrouj certainly has more than his share of natural ability, but his achievements are a reflection of much more than that: of the fact that he is better coached and better prepared than his opponents, that he trains harder and more intelligently, that he has found a way to stay injury free, and that he can recover so quickly from one day of five-hour workouts that he can follow it, the next day, with another five-hour workout.

Of these two paradigms, we have always been much more comfortable with the first: we want the relation between talent and achievement to be transparent, and we worry about the way ability is now so aggressively managed and augmented. Steroids bother us because they violate the honesty of effort: they permit an athlete to train too hard, beyond what seems reasonable. EPO fails the same test. For years, athletes underwent high-altitude training sessions, which had the same effect as EPO--promoting the manufacture of additional red blood cells. This was considered acceptable, while EPO is not, because we like to distinguish between those advantages which are natural or earned and those which come out of a vial."

excerpt from "Drugstore Athlete" , a long but excellent read from the New Yorker in 2001. Full article here: http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_08_10_a_drug.htm

“It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more ‘manhood’ to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and the immature mind.”

-Alex Karras

I have no problem with escapism. I just have a problem with people watching these films and believing that the stereotypes are real

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Great read! full article here: http://www.eyeweekly.com/article/71567

"We don't necessarily think it's problematic for women to be portrayed as 'sexy.' But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as 'sexy women' but as passive objects for someone else's sexual pleasure."

In their study, the authors cite a large body of research that has shown a link between sexualized portrayals of women and violence against them, as well as garden-variety sexual harrassment and, in some men, neanderthal attitudes toward women.

This hypersexuality dominates the cultural representation of what it means to be a woman today. And you'd better believe that hurts us all. Because as much as we claim otherwise, the media often becomes another way by which we measure ourselves. Sure, we know all about photo-shopping and air-brushing, and we know it's not real. But still: As much as we try not to, we buy into what is presented as a cultural norm.

"The fashion industry shouldn't be using kids, tweens or teens in mature fashion campaigns because it sexualizes young girls in the name of art. Portraying young girls as fully sexualized adults obscures the fact that they are only 'posing' in adult roles,” pop culture expert Jessica Wakeman says.
“This contributes to a society that's desensitized to the inappropriateness of making little girls into Lolitas for the enjoyment of adult men. I question why young girls are dressed up like adults in revealing outfits, hair and makeup. Do the ad campaigns have nothing else going for them so that they have to resort to sensationalism?"

AND THEN:


However, Los Angeles-based fashion and business reporter, Anne Riley-Katz, said that while such campaigns and couture-driven spreads do push boundaries, that doesn’t automatically make them distasteful.

“The creative and artistic direction in the fashion world is intended to be far afield from traditional commercial advertisement, often by being outrageous. The photographers, makeup artists and stylists will most certainly be adults, and for luxury and high fashion ads, will be very experienced – they want the best for the ads. Does that make them pedophiles? I would strongly disagree,” she said. “The ads make more of a statement. Whether that translates into sales for a luxury label is harder to measure, but it creates unmistakable - and valuable - brand awareness. There may be questionable innuendo in the ads, but short of pornography or something actually illegal, it's near impossible to regulate taste level.”


So... even the contact speaking FOR the campaigns has to admit that it's only for the value (re: $$$) that they are sexualizing little girls. She says that "the ads make more of a statement" but the only positive (?) statement they make is brand awareness. Even someone who's job title is "pop culture expert" (i mean really, that exists?) knows that this is wrong and inappropriate.

thank you matt damon