Crystal Renn wasn’t altered to look bigger or smaller in this photo shoot, she just lost weight.

This is a more recent editorial she’s done:
http://fordmodelsblog.com/2011/03/24/crystal-renn-vogue-mexico-abril-2011/

This is an interview in which she discusses her weight: http://fordmodelsblog.com/2011/02/07/crystal-renn-interview-special/

While there are men’s “Big and Tall” departments and stores, regular men’s departments carry a much broader range of sizes within the standard offering.

Both genres commodify and fetishize the body to an extent that can erase most recognizable human traits. Both present the human experience through the deeply distorted lens of fantasy. Both tend to normalize the extremes of artifice in a way that can, in aggregate, make you feel the need to change your appearance and behavior in order to be desirable. Both are consumed as escapist entertainment, making the subtextual elements more insidious. And both are, ultimately, about the pursuit of sexual power (i.e. “this outfit will drive him wild!”)

But they also have important differences. With pornography, the fantasy itself IS the commodity; consumers pay for the privilege of having some ideal – which may be horrifying or hilarious in reality – visualized, and the product’s success can be gauged by how closely it represents what the consumer wishes to see. But with Glamour, the commodity is the ad space that occupies most pages – the crucial “context” aspect of the images shown above. Every fashion spread is an advertisement, and its success is not in how much it panders to viewers’ absurd fantasies but rather how effectively it manufactures a new set of desires.

Which brings us to the other point – the desires they are in the business of manufacturing are obscenely expensive and accessible to a far smaller market than the actual readership, largely because of the enormous marketing budget required to propagate them. Now, I realize that when the topic is female body imagery many commentors here default to feminist critique – observing through the lens of the marginalization of women. But I don’t recall any rule stating that all comments must be cast through this filter.
If the question is of whether glamourizing or fetishizing more body types while advertising luxury goods is “a step forward,” I think the socialist critique – observing through the lens of class inequality – is equally relevant.

A better example – I’ll never forget an anecdote (could have the facts wrong) about how the NAACP lobbied in the 1960s to have more black models featured in cigarette ads. Now that smoking is considered more transgressive and tobacco ads more restricted, this protest reads as utterly absurd. Rather than considering how ubiquitous and influential tobacco ads were in the urban landscape at that time, we’re more likely to think how ridiculous it is that a reputable org would want more people of color to be seduced into a life-threatening addiction. We think it’s probably better to have no cigarette ads than more diverse ones.

I might be alone here in perceiving the pursuit of “glamour” as an equally frivolous and destructive habit, but that does not make me any less sincere. My own preference for fashion models would be for them to all have neon green skin, two penises, three breasts, one eye, and giant sporks for legs, just to demonstrate how detached their images are from virtually all human reality – including their own – and how grotesque it is to project our own aspirations onto the products they want us to worship. Porn, I’d be happy for it all to just be made by hobby-exhibitionists playing themselves.

(Full disclosure: before I’d had enough experience in my job to take on my own projects, I had to take work in both the fashion and the porn industries. Both creeped me out, but only one made me lose sleep).

because, you know, reproduction is not possible in instances of rape.

“I could address anal bleaching if you really want, but first you’ll have to show me a porn film or magazine that exists for the purpose of selling me anal bleaching products, and that repeatedly insists to me throughout its “text” that I’d look better with a discolored bunghole.”

I find this funny because watching porn did actually successfully convince me for a long time that I needed to shave my vulva, have smaller, pinker labia, and a lighter-colored anus. I can see your argument that perhaps it isn’t intended that way, but having women like that paraded in front of you as being sexually desirable goes a long way toward influencing what you find sexually desirable. It also successfully eroticizes male sexual power, which convinced me that I needed to be passive and emotionally distant and pretty much let any man do whatever he wanted to my body because I’m supposed to be sexually desirable in that way. I don’t know for certain what it does for guys, but I think watching Max Hardcore walk into a room and [trigger warning] rape a woman’s mouth until she vomits with the assumption that both parties had consented to this in advance when in reality they had never met doesn’t do much to remedy the rape culture we live in.

Your argument about porn featuring people of all shapes and sizes fails in that porn fetishizes and essentializes those groups. Lesbian porn is hardly representative of the sexual experiences of real-life lesbians.

Maybe it’s not worth it to try to argue, but I disagree with your point that porn is better than using average-sized models in soul-sucking beauty mags just because porn isn’t inherently intended to be so detrimental and sex is supposedly accessible to everyone. I don’t think the neutral intentions of porn really do much to mitigate how damaging mainstream porn really is. And even if sex is accessible to everyone, porn really influences how people think it is supposed to be performed and it seems to damage women more than it damages men. At least using an average-sized model in a beauty magazine, whatever the intentions, might inspire some women to make healthier choices than they would have otherwise.

That being said, bringing up an argument about the number of poor and starving people in the world is so patently derailing that I can’t believe I spent the time to reply to this thread except that using that kind of silencing tactic irritates me so much that I couldn’t help myself. We are talking about one kind of experience about being marginalized members of society; bringing up the marginalization of other people IMPLIES that our conversation is insignificant and that we should just stop complaining and do what we can to improve the lives of other, more oppressed people instead. I’m not saying that you intended for that to come across but the tactic has been used to silence so much in the past. It’s also used in personal relationships, as in, “Hey baby I may be a jerk but at least I don’t beat you like other men might so you should really appreciate that I am your husband and I own you and at least you’re not a starving orphan in Africa so if you leave me it means you don’t care about them because you have it so much better than they do really so you should be quiet and never speak about this again”.

tl;dr: don’t bring up off-topic and unrelated categories of oppression in discussions about a specific type of marginalization because that will make you a derailing and silencing asshole.