I’m a fashion designer and image consultant (which I have recently been doing in Japan (since 2006)) AND avid runner and whole-heartedly support your view and support the All Walks Beyond the Catwalk Campaign.

I believe every woman has great beauty. And it’s my job as a designer and stylist to facilitate that – enhancing that natural beauty. As designers we should make the garment fit the person, not the person fit the garment! After all we aren’t creating art we are created needed and wanted design and design has an end customer – the general public! I work everyday to promote this view. I hope to make in-roads in the fashion industry and try to change it from the inside.

I’m currently unemployed and recently have approached my local jobcentre in Sussex to help them with getting long-term unemployed (mainly single mothers) back to work through the sponsored events they told. I will be offering my image services for free as a means of promoting confidence among those that have struggled with low self-esteem and a discriminating job-market. If you’re interested, I’ll let you know how I get on.

I recently went to Graduate Fashion Week and couldn’t attend the All Walk Beyond the Catwalk lecture because I wasn’t an exhibitor. This was a great disappointment. I think your and their campaigned should be more widely publicised and I’d like to help in anyway I can i.e. stuffing envelopes etc, etc.

Thank you so much for all your effort! We need more public figures like you that are interested in people rather than forwarding their own careers through trendy topics.

Take care and good luck with the campaign. Pippa

Even more importantly it is also concerning just how much gender politics is going on here. Any Lib Dems at all interested in equality should be rejecting sexist phrases such as “violence against women” as they a very much come from a harmful world view of domestic violence as a gender issue – a myth which was debunked long, long ago.

At least 40% of domestic violence vicitms are men, and for younger people under 25 male vicitms now outnumber females. (source is UK Crime Survey) .Despite this there are almost no shelters for men, and the government’s latest reaction is to spend £2 million on a campaign who’s sole message is that boys need to stop abusing their girlfriends!

Further still, such nonsensical phrases cause people to completely ignore the realities of domestic violence. For example half of domestic violence cases are “against” anyone – male or female. They’re reciprocal with two equally violent parties. Yes women might come off worse sometimes, but again most research shows they tend to be the ones landing the first blow.

Perhaps the Lib dems could have a campaign on how male domestic violence vicitms are treated by the media and in advertising? (and the police for that matter) You see countless adverts with men belittled and abused and no one bats an eye lid (and most are for products aimed at women). Here’s a particualrly nasty example by Littlewoods:

http://therightsofman.typepad.co.uk/the_rights_of_man/2008/03/lx-littlewoods.html

Any newspaper covering a story on a male DV victims rarely ever uses the term “domestic”, it’s exclusively reserved for female vicitms of male abuse. In fact, should any man here have a woman mutilate or cut off his genitals, a common reaction would be to laugh at the situation and praise the female perpetrator

You did at least mention men in the first paragraph but you’ve only focused on eating disorders . If your campaigning was more gender neutral and you had some joined up thinking then you’d be able to focus on even more significant issues such as steroid abuse and male models who use steroids. It’s just as unrelaisitc for men to aspire to be like a models who’s on steroids as it is for a woman to obtain and airbrushed type figure. Just think of the consequences too – massive kidney damage, fertility issues and of course extreme bouts of aggression, presumably resulting in domestic violence eventually?

What research have you done on models using steroids please Lynne, and will you be requiring similar health warnings for imaginary resulting from steroid use as you will for airbrushed ones please?

Hope this is useful!