i hope carine has a great future. good luck to her, i hope she makes the best of her modelling career, and hopefully it will be over soon so she can get on with the rest of her life.

thanks for putting this story on your blog, it has influenced my decisions-whether to be in debt for a few years, or strive to be on top of payments as well as have some experiences in other industries i would not usually accept.

it would be great to hear more about her carine in the future!!!!!!

I also believe that some of the hostility directed towards Carine is that she is obviously a very pretty girl. When you are perceived as beautiful, it is as if any suggestion on your part that you are having trouble, or that you are struggling in any way, is immediately going to inspire anger in other women. They don’t believe you have a right to complain when you look like you do. Whatever — Carine has a right to pay her bills and pursue that autonomy you always talk about. And real feminists wouldn’t criticize another woman for trying to make it.

I would only add this: in some fields (computer engineering, for example) you have to learn specific skills (and learn them and learn them and learn them…), and universities can offer the best way to do that. On the other hand, you can learn a lot about society and social activism by going out and simply working with people. Particularly with the looming economic problems, a person may well learn more from getting out there and doing the work than from staying in school.

I suggest this only as a possibiliy to consider, given your expressed discomfort with your choices. I have no desire, and certainly no right, to judge you, and I don`t know what you want to do. I only mention this to suggest that you have this option; that if you choose to spend some time, say, teaching literacy to women in trouble with the law, many parts of the feminist and left movements will hold your work and experience in high esteem.

Whatever your choice, I wish you well.

I would also suggest that whether you can meet their standards and look and feel healthy may be the determining factor in this case. If you can be healthy, then you can “model” that to the world as well. If it causes you to be unhealthy, or less strong/intellectually capable (due to under-nourishment), then it’s a pretty damn big compromise. Can you be 15 pounds lighter and still the strong, thinking person you are now? If you wake up one day modeling and you’re hungry and can’t concentrate on your classes, are you going to be able to quit?

Living in this world, we will all make “unfeminist” accomodations to our culture and society. Is this one worth it to you is really the only question.

Engagement may not be contingent on marriage, but marriage is. Without being financially solvent, it’s pretty hard to get married. This is part of why people mostly frown on college students or high schoolers getting married, I’d think. Engagement rings, blah, I’m uninterested in those personally.

Mermade, I think back to the friends I had when I was in high school. Missionary Baptists all, who got married so young. I feel like getting married fast is something they did just to finally have sex. I feel like premarital sex is the lesser evil between that and getting married to someone you don’t know that well when you’re young so you can have sex. Either way, you may not be together in five years.

She can do whatever she wants. She can still be a feminist, even if she hurts herself losing the weight and gets spit back out by the industry. But your vicarious horror of normal work, and your insistence that it is just too hard for any principled woman to maintain her principles in the face of it, is ridiculous.”

Hear, hear!

She can be a feminist model. I’m not going to take awy her card. She can do any kind of work she wants.

But acting like she doesn’t have a real choice is patronizing to her and offensive to the rest of us who aren’t beautiful enough to model.