When it Comes to Women’s Health and Wellness, Ms. Fit Editors and Contributors Lay it on the Line

For the Faith issue, we asked Ms. Fit writers and editors to share a belief they hold about feminism and women’s health, fitness, and wellness. Join the conversation: add your own belief in the comments!

The workshop flier said, “Yoga for Women”, and I thought, this workshop could go one of several ways:

·         The teacher could be a tight-bodied Lululemon model in fuchsia lipstick and eyeliner, who played acid jazz and dubstep to our vinyasas.  She could try to bend us into crazy positions and coach us to use our feminine Shakti to make ourselves hotter, more luscious beings (presumably in order to snag or keep some man);

·         Or, she could be an “Earth Mother” with hairy legs and no sense of humor, who told us to do malasana over a mirror to look at our yonis, and who would coach us to breathe through our vaginas and smile at our uteruses.

Celebrating the Choice to Be Wild and Free

The first time I saw a woman with body hair, I was thirteen. She was my teacher for a summer creative writing class. As she stretched her arms above her head, I was transfixed by her curly black hairs. After that, I waited for her to do it again, because, wow, I’d never seen a woman with armpit hair before. Every so often, I’d sneak a peek at her leg hair. I thought I was being casual enough about it, but now that others pull the same move on me, I realize how obvious I must have been. She knew I was looking, the same way I know when others are looking at me.

Taking a Closer Look at Faith-Based Diets

The recent controversy surrounding the “To the Fatty Running on the Westview Track” letter brought into sharp relief the ways in which many people believe you can tell almost anything about a person just by knowing their body size—their food choices, exercise habits, their innermost thoughts, and, according to some faith-based diet plans, even how moral they are.

By making the way someone looks a test of their faith, by encouraging the judgment of people’s morality based on their body size, and by linking dieting success with success in one’s religious practice, everyone involved is done a disservice. How? Let’s start by looking a little more deeply into four popular faith-based diets.

Backstory

So a couple of years ago, my wife, Nikki, and I are at a party where we encounter a few friends we haven’t seen in a while. Conversation gets around to how we’d just run the Prague marathon, which our friends meet with the typical incredulity non-runners feel towards the willful madness of running 26.2 miles. A half hour later we’re all on the porch having a smoke.

“Oh my god,” one of the friends exclaim. “I can’t believe you smoke cigarettes and run marathons. I thought you were super healthy.” We laugh and shrug it off, “not that healthy.”

 Our Digest of Feminist News and Opinion from Around the World

High school student Jada, whose assault was recorded and went viral, courageously chose to take control by revealing her identity amidst a climate of mockery and hostility. Online, the recording was received by an unsettling barrage of ridicule from social media users. The atrocity of the brutalization and its aftermath offers us no answers, but does pose a question: when will we begin taking rape seriously?

 Our Bi-Weekly Digest of Women’s Sporting News

Iranian women continue to voice opposition to the unwritten regulation barring them from stadiums. The ban, which came about after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, forbids women from attending public sporting events but does not necessarily illegalize their presence. Furthering frustration is the admission of foreign female fans—only Iranian women are excluded. The ludicrous nature of the ban has inspired creative protest, like that of the Women in White Scarves, who write their slogans on their required head coverings.

Our Digest of Global Feminist News and Opinion

Resurgence of the Western media’s morbid fascination with sexual assault in India has sensationalized the country’s “deeply embedded rape culture.” However, the US and its European brethren have yet to resolve domestic sexual assault, and their statistics are just as disturbing as nations further east—in some cases, they’re far worse. When the luxury of distance results in hypocrisy, a human rights crisis is reduced to a news headline, and an entire culture becomes recognizable only by its lowest common denominator.

Our Digest of Women’s Sporting News

For decades now, tennis has been the great equalizer among sports. Female competitors receive as much media coverage—in some cases, more coverage—than their male counterparts, and tennis remains to be the only competitive athletic in which a woman can hope to earn as much as a man. So is it the money that legitimizes the sport in the media? A more in-depth analysis offers a historical perspective to consider alongside the financials.

Our Digest of Global Feminist News and Opinion

Eighty years after the 1934 ruling guaranteeing women’s suffrage and the right to run for office, Turkish women begin to emerge in local leadership positions. The recent materialization of these mayoral madams can largely be attributed to Turkey’s Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the rising political affiliation known for its promotion of egalitarianism and female representation. Child bride survivor Berivan Kilic, co-mayor of Kocakoy, and others like her hope to push critical women’s issues to the forefront of the Turkish political agenda, in spite of international qualms.