this might be too niche of me but i'm putting this out there bc i need to know if anyone else who grew up evangelical remembers "project inspired" by nicole weider (maiden name sione)?? like once every few months i remember her and her website and her seething hatred for cosmopolitan magazine (and specifically targeted kate white who i think was the editor of the magazine circa 2011?).
her whole thing was being a model in hollywood before finding jesus, and got scarred from the trauma of being taken advantage of as a young woman in a predatory industry... totally understandable, especially considering that she was underage through some of those years. but instead of identifying that trauma as the result of the patriarchal structures of society that allow industries, like the modeling industry, to capitalize on the objectification of women's bodies, she blames it all on "the enemy" aka satan and made it her mission to evangelize and take down the modeling industry altogether.
idk i just think about her sometimes bc i was so down with the cause as a 14 year old self proclaimed "jesus freak". i think even as a young teenage girl, even when you don't have the language for it, you can feel how degrading the male gaze is and you become resentful for how self conscious it makes you, and i felt like her project gave me something i could do with the feeling of being sexualized as a child emerging into womanhood, while simultaneously being made to feel inherently ugly and unworthy.
but now i think back on some of the arguments she would make and i think they're kind of amusing bc she totally misidentifies the issue of sexualizing young girls as being the byproduct of satan and a godless society, rather than a symptom of the patriarchal degradation of women, and puts it into such an unhinged evangelical perspective.
