Can you say disconnect?

That's the only word that came to mind when I read this story on Time.com about the extra costs women pay for being obese.

According to researchers at George Washington University, women who are obese lose twice as much money—nearly $5,000 a year—as their obese male counterparts. But not because they use more health-care dollars. The difference comes mostly from discrimination.

Fat women are paid less than women who aren't fat; fat men, on average, earn comparable salaries to men who aren't fat. So women are penalized by employers for being fat.

This says something about how women are perceived in our culture, and it's not news. But it is newsworthy, because, damn it, it's 2010 and we're supposed to be better than this as a society. All the young women who don't identify as feminists because they don't have to fly that flag anymore should take note of studies like this one. Gender discrimination is alive and well in 21st-century America.

But that's not where the writer of this story went. No, her conclusion was quite different. She wrote, It's bad news, but maybe it will help fund better prevention strategies and new treatment methods for this growing scourge.

Excuse me? Did I hear you right? The answer to discrimination is getting rid of the quality that's being discriminated against? How about taking on the concept of discrimination instead? How about educating people about the emotional and other costs of fatphobia, and about how discrimination (and its attendant stressors) actually makes people fatter?

I'm not surprised; this is exactly the kind of disconnect I've seen over and over in the media. It's as if we are constitutionally unable to see the logical extension of our behaviors around weight, especially when it comes to women.

Big fail.

Annals of retouching disaster: The Ann Taylor shirt

Thanks to a technical screw-up by someone at Ann Taylor (I'm thinking heads will roll over this), Jezebel was able to grab screen captures of a model before and after retouching.

Here's what the site ran:



You can see the work that's been done. As Jezebel put it, the "unretouched thumbnails . . . transform [models] into ribless monstrosities."

The model on the left--the unretouched one--is beautiful, shapely, and wears the clothing well. So why, why, why turn her into the absurd image on the right? I don't think it's enough to cite the pursuit of thinness. The model on the left is already thin--you can see her ribs, for God's sake. I think there's something more at stake here. Something that has to do less with beauty-qua-beauty and more to do with how women are perceived in 21st-century America--and how we perceive ourselves.

I can't help thinking about the timing of all these retouching debacles. There was the Calvin Klein photoshop disaster:



Then there was the Self magazine Kelly Clarkson debacle (see below).



Technology has something to do with it, of course. We photoshop because we can, because human beings are compulsive changers-of-reality and even more relentless self-improvers, and can't pass up an opportunity to "iimprove" ourselves.

Except that these kinds of "improvements" are so far out of the mainstream, no one (I hope) would confuse them with reality. Which brings me back to the idea that there's something more going on here.

Women have never been as powerful in America as we are today. And even though we still have a ways to go (can you say "woman president in my lifetime?), we've made enormous progress since I was a young thing. And thanks to the Great Recession, women's work and employment levels may be surpassing men's for the first time.

And maybe that's the problem. Maybe the Trojan Horse of self-loathing embodied in images like these is meant to put us uppity women in our place. I've said it before and I'll say it again: So long as we're obsessed with our appearance, our looks, how thin we are or aren't, we're missing the boat on a whole lot of more important issues.

I can't help thinking there's a connection.