has us all wearing the same damned underwear
Thursday, December 13, 2007
The mass appeal and accessibility of America's largest lingerie brand has us all wearing the same damned underwear. Sue us if we want a little bit of originality down under.
Victoria's Secret has a monopoly on our private parts, and we get it. It's accessible, relatively affordable (so we tell ourselves), full of options—and synonymous with some of the hottest models on earth (Heidi! Giselle! Naomi!). Who doesn't want to think of herself as an Angel or Very Sexy woman who enjoys a Secret Embrace? But while these styles are flattering and fashionable (some of us around here have yet to find a better strapless bra than any of the VS numbers), they're not the only unmentionables around. Sirens' recurring nightmare: New guy sees skivvies for the first time, thinks, “Hey, my ex wore those last New Year’s when we did that one thing on the hotel balcony …”
So we set out to find some awesome lingerie that has nothing to do with Vicki, but still fits, keeps its shape, supports what needs supporting, and looks damned cute. (And some of which is absurdly affordable to boot.) Here are our faves:
Gap Body
Stretchy cotton, lace, and satin that fits like second skin and is almost always on sale. We recently bought three bras for $50 (yes, three!) and five pairs of supercute hip-hugger lacy panties for $20. Even at retail price, you're walking out with something fab for under $40.
Elle MacPherson Intimates
Why not trust a Victoria's Secret model to make some awesome lingerie alternatives? The prices are on par with VS, and sometimes higher, but worth what you're getting: Handmade-looking lace and satin sets, bustier bras, garder-belt sets that aren't even close to Frederick’s of Hollywood skanky, and curve-flattering boy shots that are so pretty you'll run around the house in them just asking for a surprise visitor. (Available at Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, and online at BareNecessities.com.)
Felina
Speaking of gorgeous, original intimates, you’ll love yourself in these nature-inspired creations so much you won’t want to take them off, even for him. The LA-based company makes everything from practical seamless and padded push-up bras to the cami-and-panty sets that we are total suckers for. And hey, if they’re good enough to be featured on Oprah, they’re good enough for us. (Available at boutiques around the country and online at DesinerIntimates.com.)
Hanky Panky
You'll want to live in these stretchy, lacy numbers, including the “world’s most comfortable thong” (which we’re taking their word on, as we are decidedly anti-thong) and some awfully scrumptuous boyshorts. And don’t even get us started on the babydoll nighties, chemises, and pajamas that make us wish we still had sleepover parties to go to. The bridal collection, incidentally, also has us hoping for a shower invitation, and we really don't normally do that. (Available at Bloomingdales.com, Nordstrom.com, and FreshPair.com, and at boutiques around the country.)
American Eagle Outfitters
The casual-basics retailer’s Aerie line offers an overwhelming variety of adorable cotton underwear at ultra-affordable prices—and cute bras perfect for gals on the small side. Teens and college girls, after all, are the target demo here, but if you brave the loud music and giggling customers, you get flirty pieces for a bargain. Plus you can pick up some great T-shirts and denim minis while you’re there.
Mary Green
When we first spotted Mary Green’s sheer, lacy boyshorts and matching camisoles in a random Hawaii boutique, we stocked up for fear of never seeing such comfort, beauty, and affordability in one place again. (Not to mention sweetly surprising color combos, like bright red and pink, turquoise and celadon.) And yet we were oddly distressed when we found the line a year later at our local Urban Outfitters, kinda like when our favorite indie bands hit it big. But that hasn’t stopped us from going back for more Mary Green satin, cotton, and lace boyshorts and briefs in all kinds of colors, perfectly fitted camis to match, and even a few of their triangle bras (of the cute-but-pointless variety). (Available for purchase at MaryGreen.com or at Urban Outfitters.)
posted by LeBlues @ 12:40 PM,
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Six Reasons to Have Sex Every Week
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Studies show that regular sex (with all due precautions taken) provides a host of surprising health benefits.
Sex is good for adults. Indulging on a regular basis—at least once a week—is even better. Research links sex (with all safer-sex precautions taken) to an astonishing array of physiological benefits, from longevity to pain relief. Many studies don't address whether the health bonus comes from the act itself or from the corresponding emotional intimacy, but the bottom line is that getting physical has some great side effects—especially for women. Here are six ways that sex boosts your health:
1. It Fights Colds and Flu. Sexual intercourse once or twice a week raises the body's level of the immune-boosting antibody immunoglobin A by a third, according to research at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.
2. It's a Beauty Treatment. In a study at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, a panel of judges viewed participants through a one-way mirror and guessed their ages. Those who looked seven to 12 years younger than their age (labeled "superyoung") were also enjoying lots of sex—four times a week, on average. OK, maybe they were having so much fun because they looked young. But it's likely the sex was helping, researchers say. One reason is that it raises a woman's estrogen level, which helps make hair shiny and skin supple.
3. It Burns Calories. A little over four calories a minute, or the equivalent of four Hershey's kisses in a half hour of love. Think of it as part of your weekly exercise regime, and burn, baby, burn.
4. Yes, Honey, I Have a Headache. For a woman a migraine might actually be a reason for making love rather than avoiding intercourse: the increase in endorphins and corticosteroids during arousal and orgasm is analgesic.
5. It Promotes Regular Menstrual Cycles. A series of studies by behavioral endocrinologist Winnifred Cutler and colleagues at Columbia and Stanford universities found that women who have intercourse at least weekly (except during their period) cycle more regularly than abstainers or the sporadically active. (Related research found that lesbian lovemaking also smoothes out menstrual cycles.) Cutler argues that intimacy is essential, not orgasms: "Regular exposure to a loving partner has extraordinary effects on health and well-being."
posted by LeBlues @ 12:46 PM,
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The original political vision: sex, art and transformation
Friday, December 7, 2007
'Everything as it is, infinite' ... detail from The Good and Evil AngelsDissent and emancipation were holy for William Blake. He could teach our prime minister so much about how to be radical
One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain's greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called "the vision thing" in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God's head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. "House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools," he wrote. "They seem to me to be something other than human life."
Like Brown, Blake grew up in a lower-middle-class Christian milieu. But the culture from which Blake sprang was one of the most precious Britain has produced, in which Jacobin artisans and Republican booksellers rubbed shoulders with Dissenting preachers and occult philosophers; the country was effectively a police state, ridden with spies and hunger rioters. Brown's Britain is not yet a police state, but its technologies of spying and surveillance surpass the wildest dreams of the autocrats of Blake's day. Blake himself was tried for sedition and acquitted, having allegedly cried in public: "Damn the king and his country!" Today whole sectors of the labour movement bow the knee to monarchy, or at least tolerate it as a minor irritant. The history of labour from Blake to Brown is, among other things, how dissent became domesticated.
Blake's politics were not just a matter of wishful thinking, as so many radical schemes are today. Across the Atlantic one great anti-colonial revolution had held out the promise of liberty, and to the poet's delight another had broken out in the streets of Paris. Together they promised to bring an end to the rule of state and church - "the Beast and the Whore", as Blake knew them. Most of our own writers, however, seem to know little of politics beyond the value of individual liberties.
In this, they are faithful to the libertarian lineage of John Milton; but Milton knew rather more about politics than freedom of expression. In his greatest poem, he mourned the paradise that radical Puritans had hoped to witness on earth. As mythologer-in-chief of the English 17th-century revolution, he urged the cutting off of the king's head, and was lucky to escape with his own. It is hard to imagine Craig Raine or Ian McEwan posing a threat to the state.
In his own mighty epic - Milton - Blake turned back to his great Protestant forebear from a Britain now scarred by industrial capitalism. He raided Milton's work to foster his own visions of liberation, passing on the revolutionary torch to WB Yeats. This self-appointed mythmaker to the Irish war of independence was inspired by Blake's notion of the poet as prophet and public activist.
Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," he claims, "everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations.
They do so, too, by persuading us to be "moderate"; Blake, however, was not enamoured of the third way. The New Testament that Gordon Brown reads in his Presbyterian fashion as a model of prudence, conscience and sobriety, Blake read as a hymn to creative recklessness. He sees that Jesus's ethics are extravagant, hostile to the calculative spirit of the utilitarians. If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak; if they ask you to walk one mile, walk two. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and those who restrain their desires do so because their desires are feeble enough to be restrained.
The energy captured in Blake's watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.
Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of "moving on". Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that "everything that lives is holy", and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem.
posted by LeBlues @ 12:46 PM,
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