I just love reporting on the shenannigans of the sistahs over at the National Organization for Women. The latest: the seventh annual Love Your Body Day, coming up on Oct. 20. In preparation, NOW has a Love Your Body Day poster contest, in which some 2,500 women who love their bodies have submitted entries. The four winners, in categories ranging all the way from elementary and middle-school students to non-students, will be notified on May 31.


The NOW campaign “encourages individuals and groups to speak out against advertisements and images of women that are harmful, offensive, disrespectful and demeaning.” I don’t think that, say, the Olsen Twins, who love their bodies so much that they don’t have a stitch on to cover said bodies in many scenes of their new movie, New York Minute, are what NOW has in mind.The poster slogans in the NOW contest say things like “‘Make Up’ your mind, instead of your face.” Olsens, toss that lipstick! Dump that toenail polish!
  
NOW’s Love Your Body web-page offers some suggestions for Love Your Body Day activities. One is to host an “indulgence party,” where, once you’ve taken off all that makeup, you put on some really ugly clothes and serve up some really fattening eats so you and all your friends will soon look like Michael Moore:


“Encourage guests to wear whatever makes them feel good’sweat suits, flip flops, pajamas’and serve delicious, decadent foods or silly snacks without the guilt.”


You’ll have so much fun! At the party, NOW suggests, you and your guests watch a video called Redefining Liberation (NOW will supply one free if you host 15 or more guests) that’s all about the evils of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the fashion, tobacco, and liquor industries. The video features guest appearances by Gloria Steinem and former NOW president Patricia Ireland plus all kinds of community activists. Then you and your pals…have a discussion group about offensive magazine ads! After that, you pass around petitions that you can send to corporate marketing directors telling them that you’re just saying no to their “twisted beauty standards.”


I don’t even wanna know what NOW thinks of high heels.