After Jezebel “leaked” six digitally altered photographs of Lena Dunham’s February Vogue spread this morning, Lena responded to the backlash this afternoon via Slate and Twitter.

She tells Slate:

“I understand that for people there is a contradiction between what I do and being on the cover of Vogue; but frankly I really don’t know what the photoshopping situation is, I can’t look at myself really objectively in that way. I know that I felt really likeVogue supported me and wanted to put a depiction of me on the cover. I never felt bullied into anything; I felt really happy because they dressed me and styled me in a way that really reflects who I am. And I felt that was very lucky and that all the editors understood my persona, my creativity and who I am. I haven’t been keeping track of all the reactions, but I know some people have been very angry about the cover and that confuses me a little. I don’t understand why, photoshop or no, having a woman who is different than the typical Vogue cover girl, could be a bad thing.

A fashion magazine is like a beautiful fantasy. Vogue isn’t the place that we go to look at realistic women, Vogue is the place that we go to look at beautiful clothes and fancy places and escapism and so I feel like if the story reflects me and I happen to be wearing a beautiful Prada dress and surrounded by beautiful men and dogs, what’s the problem? If they want to see what I really look like go watch the show that I make every single week.”

Lena’s happy with her photos. They’re a bit photoshopped. No one is ever going to change Vogue’s perception of what is beautiful and the distorted “fantasy” they portray. And why should we try to change them now? It’s VOGUE. It’s the state of fashion–it’s years and years worth of putting out a certain message and receiving a clearly successful response. As sad as it may be, it is what it is. Only actresses like Lena Dunham, by simply being out there, will help balance out all of the warped female representations we see in the media every single day. Lena, Lamby, and Adam all looked great, and she seems happy with the photographs, so why the big deal? You will see her on Sunday, just as she is, and she is totally proud of that.

I must admit, I do enjoy viewing the “before” and “after” shots, but any before and after shot is appealing, simply because it’s miraculous what you can do with Photoshop.

She said on Twitter:

“@emilynussbaum 10k? Give it to charity then just order HBO.”

–Lena Dunham, @lenadunham January 16, 2014

Agreed.

(Photo by Vogue/Jezebel)

The post Lena Dunham Responds to ‘Vogue’ Photo Drama appeared first on Jewcy.

Yesterday Jezebel put out a $10,000 cash prize for the pre-Photoshopped images of Lena Dunham on this month’s cover of Vogue. Someone (I wonder who?) got a nice check yesterday when they released the photos, which show significant photoshopping, but nothing shocking nor out of the ordinary for ANY woman who models for the cover of the most judgmental and influential fashion magazine in the world.

Included in the photoshopping: a narrower jawline, shaved down arm/shoulder width, higher waistline, higher neckline, smile lines/under eye circles removed. But honestly, WHO CARES? This whole thing, I think, is freaking ridiculous, and frankly I feel sorry for Lena. Why should someone who has brought such a brave display of healthy body image in the mainstream media be taunted and pinpointed for not being the “exception” to the Vogue Photoshopping rules?

Let’s be serious, everyone wants to be Photoshopped a bit when they make it onto the COVER of Vogue. Of course, Lena fits the standards of “Vogue Beauty” more in her photo-shopped images, which is what we all aim to do when we Instagram a picture of ourselves in a filter that drowns out our wrinkles or creases.

Lena being Photoshopped doesn’t make her any less authentic to who she is and what she stands for–and if anything, it’s Vogue’s aesthetic policies that should be reconsidered.

What is funny is that there was actually no pigeon on Lena’s head (shocker) and the photograph of her and Adam in a “glamorous NYC setting”was really a doctored shot of her and Adam on some random NYC street.

Moral of the story: Photoshop is insane, it’s freaking hard to be a woman today, and Lena Dunham looks beautiful either way.

(Photo by Vogue/Jezebel)

The post Jezebel Releases Lena Dunham’s Doctored ‘Vogue’ Photos appeared first on Jewcy.

Last night, on Jezebel’s open forum ‘Groupthink,’ there was a peculiar little list called “Holidays Worse Than Halloween.” The list had in it six holidays, most of them secular and patriotic: the Fourth of July, Mother’s Day, Veteran’s Day, Arbor Day, and Columbus Day. Like Halloween, these holidays are celebrated by the general public. But unlike Halloween, the first holiday on the list was Hanukkah, a holiday celebrated just by the Jews.

The author, UBERSEXYROBOTPIRATENINJATROUT (probably not a birth name), explained the disdain for the Jewish festival of lights.

Hanukah — aka The Worst Holiday Ever, aka An Infinitely Shittier Version of Christmas. There is nothing good about this holiday. NOTHING. It’s like someone took Christmas and decided to remove every single good thing about it. I will hate Hanukah until the end of my days. I would literally rather shoot myself in the testicles than force my children to have Hanukah but no Christmas (yes, I am still bitter about this, and I always will be).

Really, you’d rather shoot yourself in the testicles? When you were growing up, if you were forced to celebrate Hanukkah over Christmas, I’m sorry that was so hard on you. I get it. Because in the war of Christmas v. Hanukkah, Christmas always wins. Christmas is everywhere. It’s the music on the radio, it’s the decorations in Duane Reade. It’s the moral in the movies and it’s a bully’s punchline to the sole kid in the class who celebrates Hanukkah, not Christmas. Because of timing, Hanukkah will inevitably be compared to Christmas, and though you may hate it, UBERSEXYROBOTPIRATENINJATROUT, a lot of us love it, despite having had to endure Hanukkah bashing our whole lives.

Growing up, Hanukkah was my favorite holiday. Despite its lengthiness, the eight days always lacked the pressure of the High Holidays. It was easier on my mother—no guests, no big meals, just our family of five. We’d light the candles on the artful menorahs that my mother collected. We’d eat latkes; sometimes I’d eat mine with powdered sugar and other times with applesauce. We’d eat sufganiyot, but my brothers and I would pick around the jelly filling, eating just the doughy parts, because we were Florida’s Fussiest Eaters. We’d play dreidel and my father would show off his ever-cool ability to spit it on its top. There were no Hanukkah bushes and there were no blue are white twinkle lights. Just us in our living room, each night, after we lit the candles.

Jezebel’s Groupthink is said to be a place for accessible discourse.

Groupthink is a forum for everyone. That is not to say that ‘everyone’ will get author access or that ‘everyone’ will be a non-gray on the forum. However, it does mean that this is a general purpose space and, accordingly, our aim is to make this a welcoming forum that people feel comfortable interacting with each other in.

But bashing a holiday that any religion celebrates weakens that discourse and turns the discussion into an unsafe place. A place where Hanukkah is bad because Christmas is good. I’m sort of grown up now, so Hanukkah slurs won’t hurt me. But for the people still coming of age, you might want to keep your opinions to yourself. Loving Hanukkah should be easy.

Holidays Worse Than Halloween [Jezebel]

(Photo by blueeyes/Shutterstock)

The post Jezebel’s ‘Groupthink’ Goes Anti-Hanukkah appeared first on Jewcy.

• Fun facts from the New Yorker’s eight pages on Scooter Braun: before he discovered Justin Bieber, the Greenwich-bred Braun’s childhood comic book hero was Superman, who he calls “the Jewish superhero.”

• Toni Braxton discovered her grandmother was Jewish after she made a comment about having to be home by sundown, presumably on a Friday.

• The Winklevoss twins celebrated their birthday at hip downtown kosher joint Jezebel. Guess we should add them to our list of the Five People You’ll See at Jezebel.

• The New York Post reports that Rachel Zoe’s clothing line and Bravo reality show, “The Rachel Zoe Project,” are not doing so well these days.

• Is new reality show Honey Boo Boo a “reflection of the classic immigrant experience?” Rachel Shukert says yes.

• Catch an early glimpse of the impending Downton Abbey diva-off as Shirley Maclaine, who plays Cora’s Long Island-bred mother, comes to Downton for a visit.

Watch Downton Abbey, Season 3: A Scene from Episode 1 on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

The post Daily Jewce: Toni Braxton’s Jewish Roots, Winklevoss Twins Dine at Jezebel appeared first on Jewcy.

The Manhattan restaurant scene is fickle and ever-changing, though there is one constant: it’s the people and the atmosphere that often make the high prices worth it for diners. This is perhaps never more true than at Jezebel, the SoHo chic kosher restaurant I profiled yesterday in Tablet Magazine. The food was good, but not $88 steak good, and what made it exciting—at least in the new restaurant sense—were the people there.

Here are the five types of people you’ll likely run into while dining at Jezebel:

1. Jews! We all knew that was coming, so it’s just as well to put it right there, upfront: this is a place where you will see Jews. “It’s true we don’t want to be associated or compared with anyone else,” Henry Stimler, one of the restaurant’s two founders, told me, “but at the helm of it, we are a kosher restaurant.” It turns out if you build a kosher restaurant in Manhattan, they (the Jews) will, in fact, come. It’s a fun place—new and shiny, and glatt kosher. But part of why I think we, the Jews, come, is to share ambient surroundings with the rest of the people on this list, most of whom you would never catch dead at the majority of New York’s kosher eateries. Like…

2. Supermodels! I’m not saying that they were supermodels per se, but all I’m saying is that when I was at Jezebel, there were tall, shiny women who radiated ethereal beauty across the restaurant. That’s good enough for me, but maybe not for…

3. Celebrities! When I say celebrity, I mean Manhattan celebrity (with the exceptions of Russell Simmons and the New York Knicks’ Baron Davis). And when I say Manhattan celebrity, I don’t mean Jerry Seinfeld (he’s everyone’s celebrity), I mean the type of people who would only be recognized and gawked at by the type of people who would go to a SoHo restaurant and pay $18 for a cocktail while waiting more than an hour to be seated in a loud dining room where the food is just as overpriced but not as restorative. Like Joel Warren (I had to look him up too). Of course, there is a type of diner who would pretend to not care if Oprah herself walked through Jezebel’s mezuzah-clad door, and they are the…

4. Foodies! Perhaps this category is better called ‘Hipster Foodies,’ because there’s nothing quite as ironic as ordering a kosher cornish hen for $48 when just earlier that day, at the city’s latest hiptastic gastropub, you ate more bacon than the Epic Meal Time guys could even dream of. But do you know what is perhaps the greatest irony of all? That everyone on this list, including the hipster foodies, are…

5. People Who Want to be Seen! The art of Manhattan dining is the impressive, difficult feat of being seen while simultaneously doing your best to seem like you don’t want to be seen. Why else would you spend $100 plus on a night at the newest ‘it’ place in town, if not to get there and feign practiced indifference while discretely skimming the crowd to see who might recognize you?

And that’s the beauty of eating in Manhattan: though deep down everyone is just as narcissistic as in any other town, New Yorkers have enough panache to hide it. This means that you can go to a restaurant like Jezebel and make the night about anything you want it to be (except maybe inexpensive dining). I’m glad that Orthodox Jews (see: number one) can finally partake in this hallowed New York tradition. Thanks, Jezebel.

The post The Five People You’ll See at Jezebel, SoHo’s Trendy New Kosher Restaurant appeared first on Jewcy.

• Scott “Scooter” Braun, Justin Bieber’s Greenwich-bred, Emory-graduating manager, has a new gig with Universal Music Group, while little brother Adam is in the news for his non-profit, Pencils of Promise.

• SoHo’s newest tenant? A hip kosher restaurant called Jezebel.

• Real Estate website Curbed named this granny-chic, plastic-covered apartment the worst real estate listing in New York.

• Here are some kids reenacting the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” music video. They rule:

The post Daily Jewce: Babs to Duet with Pop Stars, Scooter Braun’s New Gig, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

I’m having another Carrie Bradshaw moment. I’m staring wistfully into my giant closet, trying to decide if that Dior denim bodysuit goes with my Balenciaga straightjacket. Sigh, I want so badly to say yes.

Can we talk about how in SATC Carrie made a trillion dollars from writing little columns about nothingness and was able to afford $1200 shoes? This is just not realistic. I wonder how SATC would fare with a blogger instead. DID YA HEAR THAT, MTV?

Anyway, let’s get down to business. I can barely hear myself think because Aidan is whacking a hole through the wall. Weeps.

Recently, Jezebel published an article in “Social Minefield” on how to have a great first date. The site tackled all of the major stuff, (with their trademark feminist/overly critical edge), but I think there was one key element that was missing: the idea of expectations going into a first date.

We all have expectations – when it comes to someone else’s personality, looks, or physical characteristics. I’m hoping you’re a ten with the looks of Paul Newman and the comedic delivery of Craig Robinson. Which is a tall order, given that Paul Newman is no longer with us, but lives on in my heart, and Craig Robinson isn’t my type.

If my dating saga has taught me anything, it’s to have as few expectations going into a date as possible. O rly Meredith? You are a judgmental girl who writes a dating blog. Yes, I know. But listen.

I ruined many first encounters by setting the bar too high when it really shouldn’t have been set at all. One of my best first dates was when I had super low expectations, and my date far exceeded them. Just try to go in with a clean slate.

Dating profiles are a two-dimensional, watered-down version of someone.  You wouldn’t want that cute Columbia boy you’re sitting across from to make judgments about you, either.

This is very hard to do when it comes to online dating. In a lot of cases, you’ve chatted with Jared for hours on end about your love of dirty Scrabble, or your pet Maltese James Earl Jones who continually chews only your most expensive sleepwear.

It’s a little strange that you can immediately tell from a JDate/Match profile whether or not someone wants kids or what their past relationships have taught them about dating. These are things that come with getting to know someone, and it’s important to step back and let yourself truly go from square one.

Online dating is great, because it cuts out a lot of the crap. But, sometimes it slops off some of the important, good old-fashioned ignorance about someone else.

(I decided on the Dries Van Noten assless chaps and Karl Lagerfeld for Converse slippers instead.

________

Email your FFJD story to Fiftyfirstjdates@gmail.com!

Follow FFJD on Twitter and be a fan on Facebook!

The post FFJD: Great Expectations appeared first on Jewcy.