Oh, good: vanity and fakery all in one nice package! Hewlett-Packard now has a digital camera with the unintentionally hillarious “slimming function”. Gag me with a spoon.

As an antidote, I offer you some recent quotables from historian and activist Hanne Blank from an interview she just gave on skinny, fat and culture:

What would I tell women who are worried about whether they are fat? I’d tell them to repeat after me: ‘I’m not here to decorate your world.’

Look, we’ve got millions of fat people in this country. Of course fat people are having sex, where do you think all those fat people CAME FROM? I’m here to tell you, we cannot be purchased at Costco.

I can’t think of many more effective ways to paralyze women and make them ineffective than to tell them dozens of times a day that the single most important thing about them is the size and shape of their bodies, and that if they do not have perfect control over the size and shape of their bodies they are worthless. Think of the millions and millions of hours of women’s hard work, of women’s blood and sweat and tears that have been wasted on worrying about whether their thighs are too fat when they could have used that time and that energy changing the world. Our culture teaches women to hate their bodies because our culture hates women AND their bodies, and because our culture is terrified that women who weren’t paralyzed by self-hatred might, God forbid, CHANGE THINGS.