Why women always have to watch out
We recently moved, and waiting for us at the new house was a magazine delivery for one of the previous occupants - Teen Vogue. On the cover is that Harry Potter actress, the one that plays Hermione. So far so good. The cover also says that there is a spread on "styles for every body shape - tall&thin, petite, curvy and athletic". I'm interested, so I flip to the spread.
They've got seven different outfits for tall, thin girls. Six for petite ones. Curvy? There's a mere three outfits - half of what the other two categories got. And all athletic girls get is the quarter-page on the wrap-up that shows famous people in each category - no outfits at all. None. I flipped the pages several times, looking for "continued on page X", or maybe two pages stuck together. Nope, nothing of the sort. There's nothing there for athletic shapes.
Teen Vogue is obviously preparing young girls for adult Vogue, where you only deserve attention if you're tall&thin or if you're petite.
On the science side, there's this article: Young women have flawed eggs too. It's about IVF pre-implantation testing of embryos for genetic defects. This is a way to test for genetic defects in an embryo before implanting it to achieve a pregnancy. Researchers found that 40-50% of embryos from the eggs of younger women (under the age of 30) had genetic flaws. They concluded that the women's eggs were at fault, and that even young women's eggs have a significant number of flaws.
It's not until the last paragraph that they state that "the flawed embryos might have nothing to do with the donor eggs, and could be a result of problem sperm". Yes, you read that right. Remember that this testing is all on the embryos, not on the eggs themselves. The researchers apparently did not control for problem sperm, age of the sperm donor, or anything like that. Nope, they came to the conclusion that it was the eggs that were at fault.
Now you could say that I should have known this from the start of the article. They were after all talking about IVF and about pre-implantation testing of embryos. But the title of the article (see link above), and all the text in the article up to the last sentence lulled me into a false sense of trusting that they knew what they were talking about. For example, this sentence: "Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) – a technique in which a cell from an early-stage embryo is examined for such abnormalities before being used for IVF treatment – has confirmed that older women’s eggs are riddled with abnormalities." It sounds to me like that testing is flawed as well!
Net net, trust no one, and we women have to watch out for subtle discrimination not only for beauty purveyors, but also from science researchers.
12:12:10 PM 
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