My first-ever guest post! I'm so excited--particularly because it's over at Beauty Redefined, which was one of the first (and best) sites I found dedicated to examining the value we assign to beauty.

The brains behind Beauty Redefined, Lindsay and Lexie Kite are twin sisters working on their PhDs in communication at the University of Utah, studying representations of female bodies in popular media. What I loved about their site from day 1 was how it gave me specific numbers and terminology for things I'd always sensed or noticed about magazines but didn't ever examine from a data-based perspective. Whether they're breaking down why it's not men who are to blame for women's body-image issues (the patriarchy, after all, is separate from "men"), examining our willingness to accept normalized pornography, or giving us images that make us question our obsession with the numbers of weight and clothing sizes, the Kite sisters are doing excellent work worth following.

(If you've already read last week's essay about body policing, know that it's the same post--but with a better headline and far cuter graphics, even if we'll all miss the stripper-cop from the original post. Enjoy!)