Unexpected Surprises - Welcome New Readers!

(royalty free image from Dover books)

I jst checked my stats and discovered I have a LOT of new people clicking through via The Black Rose, who it turns out have linked to me in their Top 0 Goth and Alternative blogs of the year for 2015.

This is a huge unexpected surprise for me, as I've had a bit of a weird year as far as blogging goes, and I feel like I've been a little off the boil lately, but I guess obviously it's not been as bad as I thought?

Anyhow if you have clicked through and you're wondering what the heck creepy guys on instagram, awkward drunk photos and green pumpkin squashes have to do with goth, I've made a list of some of my favourite posts.

The Most Read One

"It's not normal is it?" - A response to the latest Lolita media storm

My most read post of all time, originally posted in 2012, with an update added in 2014, this was a response to the Daily Mail (a UK tabloid newspaper)'s claim that Lolita fashion, was about attracting paedophiles.

Photoshoots

 Kitten has Claws - Peter Lennox Photography

My posts about photoshoots, various shoots with various photographers and creatives, most of the outfits by and shot for Forever in Black.

The Post I Am Most Proud Of

Shot by Greame Owens Photography

Body Shaming seems to have hit a new Low

This post from February 2014 does come with quite a big Trigger Warning as it deals with some body shaming comments I found online about myself and various other people when our photos were used without our permission and photoshopped to meet mainstream beauty ideals. I also phrased part of it in a way I wouldn't do now as I have grown and learned a lot in the last couple of years. Yet still I am most proud of this post, it was the tipping point at which I said that ignoring trolls doesn't work, if you ignore people then they are never challenged, people think their opinion is normal and nothing ever changes. It also eventually led me to my first appearence on Kawaii International and doing a podcast for The Curvy Podcast.

The Time I Was Challenged To Say Things In German

A few months back Ramona of Just Keep Brains challenged me to say some words in German... Hilarity ensued! Don't switch it off straight away at the end as there's a post credit scene.

My Favourite Post

The Sahara

Not very goth (I was wearing a punk scarf to keep the sand out of my face for a start) but still my favourite.  

Back in September 2013 my partner Kev proposed to me in the Sahara Desert, in January 2014 we finally uploaded the video!

So I hope that's a decent TL;dr of my blog. 

Fit and Fat Shaming – This Needs to Die. Now.

Regular readers will know my opinion on how stupid I find body shaming to be, but the majority of articles and thoughts I can find relating to it tend to be written by plus sized people, so I was pretty thrilled when I found this one by the awesome Nia Shanks of Lift Like A Girl, the women's body building blog.

Body Acceptance

I ran across a meme a few days back that said body acceptance should be about burns victims and paraplegics rather than "people who can't stop eating."
I find two major problems with this.

The first is that I am pretty sure people with a lot of burning or who are missing limbs still eat, eating is a fairly essential part of life.

The second is that body acceptance already includes those people, body acceptance is for everybody that has a body and accepts that it is the way it is, however burns victims and paraplegics tend to get less media attention since people are generally too busy pearl clutching over the notion of fat people who don't hate themselves to even notice anybody else.

Body Shaming seems to have hit a new Low (trigger warning)

photo by Graeme Owens Photography 

A few weeks back I had a photo shoot with Graeme Owens Photography, he was very fun and easy to work with and was very professional. I am delighted with the pictures and all in all very happy with how the shoot went.

I get that not everybody likes the outfit, I’m fine with that, the world would be boring if we all liked the same thing. I get that not everybody likes my body, I get that, some people hate plus sizes, I got over it.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the email that was sent to me last week that gave tips on how I would look “so much better” if I lost weight and featured a poorly airbrushed version of one of the photos from my shoot, edited without Graeme’s permission.

edited version on the left, original on the right.

I was pretty gobsmacked that someone thought that it was appropriate and helpful to do something like this.

At first when I thought this was just one person I was genuinely worried that maybe this person had some issues with someone perhaps body policing them and they chose to take it out on me, and in ways that is still a concern for me, and I do see how that can happen we’re fed a diet of shame culture every day by the media. If we don’t fit some impossible standard we’re supposed to starve ourselves of the things we enjoy, exercise until our muscles start to devour themselves  and spend all our money on surgery to please other people’s eyes so it must be a bit of a shock to encounter someone who doesn't want to play ball and is quite happy how they are.

Then I discovered that actually this was just one of many manipulations from a photoshop thread on 4chan where I was described as “Hard Mode” (thread archive link ).

Now let me straighten something out, I have absolutely no issue with people practicing with photoshop, photoshop is a wonderful tool. I also have no issue with people who photoshop their own images or ask someone else to alter their images, but a line is crossed when someone’s photo is taken and altered without their consent, and all but a handful of the photos in this thread appear to have been used without the consent of the person in the picture or the photographer.

“Chose something random off Cosplay.com”

”I have no idea how to fix that crotch.”

”someone photoshop this to something fappable”

a few quotes from the thread

People do not exist to please your eyes or your genitals, attempting to force someone to become your wank bank material is disgusting. You have a problem with fat people, ugly people, people with skin that is darker than yours and your response is not to get over your prejudices but to digitally alter people’s faces and bodies than you are a far more disgusting person than I am.

The point of this post isn't to baww that bad people on the internet did bad things to me, yes it did upset me that my photo was used in this way, but the reason I wrote this is to expose that it’s not just me that this has happened to, (if you use the text search at the top of the archive page there are hundreds of threads like this), and my point is to say that this is not ok and we shouldn't let this culture of policing each other’s looks go any further.