Sarah Murdoch's unairbrushed Women's Weekly cover

Just a quick note to say head over to Julie Parker's blog, Beautiful You by Julie, to see pictures from the current issue of Australian Women's Weekly and an intriguing story behind them.

The cover story on model and TV personality Sarah Murdoch includes the usual array of photos of her, and she looks lovely, but the pictures have not been airbrushed or re-touched in any way, at her insistence. She 37 and looks her age - which is a refreshing change.

Sarah has been involved in the National Body Image Advisory Group, hence her interest in appearing natural in the media.

It is a toe in the water for the editors, who are waiting to see if their readers can handle the sight of a wrinkle or two on a woman over 25 in the pages of their favourite magazine.

Julie reports that the editor made this reserved comment: "it's a very competitive industry and I'm at this stage just taking a little baby step and seeing how this goes for now."

I'll probably buy a copy just to show my support for the baby step.

PS. the above photo is of one of my short-fingered, wrinkly, fingernail-chewed, hands. I like them. I'm hoping that the concept of celebrating actual, real bodies in the media (ie. ones belonging to actual people), really takes off.

Young children and horror movie posters?

Pic: http://freeimages.co.uk

I'm thinking they don't, or at least shouldn't, mix.

I saw a poster for a remake of the horror movie The Last House on the Left last week. Normally that would have been no big deal. But I've been feeling a little more sensitive lately about my kids seeing images suggesting sex or violence.

The poster for the R rated movie which they had chosen to put up and the position they chose for it - well it really got me thinking about how much and what kinds of things I'm willing to put up with without voicing an objection.

I wanted to link to the image from here but I could only find tamer versions of it on the Net ie. without a bloodied female body in the foreground.

I wrote about it in my most recently published column.