If the “I love food and Ryan Gosling” Somee card that went viral last week is any indication, women really enjoy eating.

For many of us, our social lives are built around lunch breaks at work, mimosa-optional brunches and potluck dinner parties. We cook to de-stress, eat out to get a little bit pampered and order in when we just want to watch Netflix streaming in our beds (or perhaps that’s just me). Food is undeniably cause for celebration and joy. Yet as women, many of us have complex and often negative relationships with food.

Our Women’s editor, Margaret Wheeler Johnson, remembers a former colleague returning from a lunch date with an ex-boyfriend eating lunch at her desk right after. Her explanation? She had to look lady-like during the meet-up, which in her mind involved picking at her food. Unfortunately, that story isn’t an unfamiliar one. How many of us have heard some woman in our lives recite, “You should always leave half the food on your plate.” And some of us aren’t as self-conscious about how much we eat as we are about how we eat. On several first dates I’ve tried to take as few bites as possible to avoid revealing that I have the hand-eye coordination of a 5-year-old.

It’s not all that surprising that we feel the need to be dainty with our meals when you look at the images of women eating we’re bombarded with each day … or rather, the lack thereof. How often have you watched a television show or a movie where the female characters always seem to be eating, but really they’re just sitting near food, sometimes holding a fork, perhaps putting one grape in their mouths? (Serena Van Der Woodsen, I’m looking at you.) In the stock photos we see in magazines and online, we see lots of women smiling near a mound of iceberg lettuce, and while eating is often implied in these photos, you rarely see the subject actually putting the food in her mouth. (For a visual representation of this, check out The Hairpin’s brilliant round-up of “Women Laughing Alone With Salad.”)

Here at HuffPost Women, we’ve observed that women eat, and we think eating should be celebrated and documented. Let’s face it — women look pretty awesome enjoying food. We started by gathering photos of some of HuffPost’s editorial staff doing just that, but we want to see yours! Email us a photo of yourself eating — no implied eating, only full-on food-in-mouth action.

Last June, my morning routine was interrupted by a series of texts from a friend, showing a pair of screen shots that were at first incomprehensible. In one, under the headline “Better Singles, Better Dates,” my boyfriend Patrick’s smiling face hovered in the bottom row of a Brady Bunch-style grid of other men, as if it had been ripped from a personal account.
“WTF IS THIS?” my friend wrote, “Since when are you guys online dating?” Good question.

“Patrick,” I yelped, “look at this.” As we huddled over the phone, another image popped up — another grid of faces, but this time all women. All the way on the left, in the second row, was mine. A small logo gave the name of the matchmaking service being advertised: HowAboutWe.

Neither the images nor the site were immediately familiar to us. The pictures hadn’t been taken from our social network profiles, nor had Patrick and I ever online-dated. Of course, that’s where my mind went first: Was my live-in boyfriend of five-plus years maintaining a double life filled with Internet honeys? But how would that work — he doesn’t even know how to send an instant message. Or does he?

At first, being an inadvertent star of an online dating ad campaign seemed hilarious, and I reveled in the joke, posting screenshots on Facebook and dominating the proverbial water cooler at my workplace, the Bay Citizen. But the ads continued to run through the fall and winter, and gradually they came to haunt me. The online dating service they promoted, once obscure, now seemed to have sprouted the world’s most intractable Internet campaign. Looking at the New York Times website over the shoulder of my boss, I’d spy Patrick, seemingly the happiest, most single guy amid other happy, supposedly single guys. Acquaintances and friends sent concerned emails and Facebook messages. I was just looking at something on NY Mag and saw this ad — isn’t that your boyfriend in here? Maybe just a look-alike? In any case, wanted to share ….

Even more troubling was the notion that pictures of Patrick and me were floating around the ether, out of our grasp and susceptible to any insult or manipulation. For example, Jenny hadn’t taken many solo shots of us. In order to slot our faces into separate grids of smiling men and women, the dating service may have had to snip a happy-together image in half. Is that even allowed? What else could a stock agency client do to my picture?

To begin answering these questions, I needed to know who, exactly, was selling my image. (At this point, Patrick didn’t care much about the ads, except to point out that he looked really, really good as a single guy.) When the photo was taken, it was not intended to be a stock photo — Jenny just wanted some fresh images of couples to add to her online portfolio, as she often works as a wedding photographer. But a few weeks after we spent a pleasant half hour or so making goofy poses in our living room and backyard, Jenny sent an email asking if we would sign model releases because the stock agency she works with had notified her that it was in the market for some “trendy couples.” That’s how it works: Every month or so, she’ll get an email saying there’s demand for “kid athletes and their moms” or “grandparents with grandkids.” If she has any shots to match, she sends them in.

To help with my investigation, Jenny pointed me to the website of Corbis, the huge stock company that owned Veer, her particular agency. I spent the next hour or so wading through thousands of photos, trying to find the picture of me that had turned up online and worried my friends. I found pictures of a “couple practicing yoga together,” then “three generation family smiling together,” and, finally, a whole set of “woman eating salad.” Each one would cost a user $20 for posting online, and as much as $1,095 to reprint it on a billboard. What sort of label or caption would my picture get, and how much would I cost?

But this wasn’t the image that HowAboutWe had used for its campaign. No, that was “Couple laughing,” another of the eight Reyhan-and-Patrick photos available on the site. The mix of fascination and embarrassment that had defined the experience for me thus far deepened as I scrolled through them: “Happy couple;” “Couple sitting on hillside;” “Couple sitting at home on couch;” et cetera. In addition to a title, every image had keywords. For “Couple laughing” these read like found poetry: facial expression / human relationships / smiling / headgear.

OK, I’d found the pictures online. But Jenny couldn’t tell me who else might have bought our pictures. She gets a statement when her images sell, but these take the form of an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. (Even for a photographer, stock images can be a kind of black hole.)

Having tapped Jenny for the meager information she could provide, my next step was to contact the stock agency itself. It was an unproductive and apparently unusual event. Thad Westhusing, vice president of Veer, had no information to share with me, though he did inform me that he rarely hears from models. “It’s really the photographer who has the relationship to the stock agency,” he said.

According to Simon Frankel, a copyright lawyer in San Francisco, the legal language in my model release form did not bode well for future litigation. He could not recall any court cases deciding in favor of a model who had signed away her rights as unambiguously as I had. “It’s hard to see what your claim would be,” he said. “Consent is critical as a defense to a claim.”
At this point, any pleasurable frisson from the inadvertent modeling gig was gone. I tried another lawyer, Carolyn E. Wright, who maintains a website devoted to photo-law issues. She told me the same thing as Frankel, with an added dose of condescension. Now I was feeling queasy and confused. Jenny had done her best to make us look happy and shiny, but I am ridiculously unphotogenic as a rule (eyes closed, chin-forward; Tyra has taught me nothing). How could this be happening to me, of all people?

Just as I was feeling good about my industry-approved attractive approachability, Schechter set me straight. Click-throughs and conversion rates for my ads and Patrick’s were low — low enough for the company to start phasing them out. It turned out we weren’t that approachable, and it wasn’t just us — the whole campaign was getting pulled. “The grid is what we’re moving away from,” Schechter said, mentioning that they’d been doing some new photo shoots with professional models.

We probably won’t even know the next time our images get bought. This is both disturbing and common: In talks with professional photographers, I learned that even famous photos are hard to protect with copyright claims. We live in a time when stock photos function like the visual equivalent of Muzak — ubiquitous and invisible, easy to find and impossible to remember. As they spread, and as we acquire more and more devices on which to view them, it’s tempting for an unwilling model to just throw up her hands. For now, I’m glad to know that if my boyfriend has to appear on another online dating ad, I might get to be right there with him, frozen in Internet amber as a “trendy couple holding hands.” At least that’s how I feel right now. It might not be so amusing if Patrick and I ever were to break up.

Well, you can’t say they weren’t warned.

Thirty-three students at a Jewish girl’s school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn ponied up a $100 each after they were stone-cold busted using Facebook. This, after signing a contract with Beis Rivkah High School this year in which they agreed to not use the social network, the New York Daily News reports.

“It’s not a modest thing for a Jewish girl — or man or woman or student or father to be on,” head administrator Rabbi Benzion Stock told the New York Daily News. “There is a lack of privacy and dignity.”

The decree is in keeping with Tzniut, a group of laws emphasizing modesty and humility, and observed within the Orthodox Jewish community. Beis Rivkah is a Hasidic school, but this isn’t the first time Facebook, modesty and private schools have clashed.

St. Theresa’s College High School in Cebu City in the Philippines barred a senior from participating in her class’s graduation ceremony on Friday because she posted a bikini-clad photo of herself on Facebook.

According to Cebu Daily News, the girl was “cited for violating five provisions in the [St. Theresa’s College High School] Student Handbook” which include a rule against “posing and uploading pictures on the Internet that entail ample body exposure,” and “engaging in immoral, indecent, obscene or lewd acts.”

The crackdown at Beis Rivkah High School came last week after administrators discovered some of their 495 students still active on Facebook, according to the New York Daily News. Head administrator Stock said parents were “shocked” to learn their daughters were still using the social network.

One sophomore who said she’s Facebook friends with her mom, isn’t happy with the crackdown. “If I post a picture, I don’t just send it to everybody,” Sarah Freid, 15, told the New York Daily News. “I don’t do bad things online,” she added. “I’m friends with my mom.”

All 33 girls were asked to delete their accounts by the end of the week, but they’ll get their $100 back at the end of the year.

We all have a few of those Facebook “friends” — ones which we barely know and never interact with — but we’d feel guilty about unfriending them, even though their constant posts are irritating. Thankfully Facebook’s devised a way to ignore those “acquaintances” more easily than ever.

Facebook’s list feature has been around for quite some time. It helps control not only whom you’re sharing posts with, but also whose posts you want to see. In plainer terms: It helps remove all those kinda-sorta-but-not-really “friends” from your News Feed without actually unfriending them. And now Facebook will even suggest which folks you should stick onto one of those lists.

All you have to do is go to your “Friends” page, select the “Acquaintances” list and click “See All Suggestions.” Ta da! Facebook will make your life simpler by pointing out with which individuals you haven’t interacted much lately and allowing you to add them to the appropriate list with a click. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see fewer of those individuals’ posts in your News Feed.

Given how much information Facebook has about its users, it’s no surprise that members of the social network’s data team can infer all sorts of details about human behavior. They even know when people are generally most likely to begin — or end — a relationship.

In a recent blog post, Jackson Gorham and Andrew T. Fiore — two of Facebook’s data scientists — shared the data they’ve compiled about the “seasonality of relationship formation.” They analyzed Facebook users’ relationship statuses in 2010 and 2011 in order to tabulate changes from “non-coupled” statuses (such as “single” or “divorced”) to “coupled” statuses (such as “in a relationship” or “engaged”) and vice versa. They compared the two figures and calculated net percentage changes.

So what did they learn about our romantic (and not-so-romantic) tendencies?

For starters, they noticed that love tends to win around Valentine’s Day and Christmas. On Feb. 14, Feb. 15, Dec. 24, and Dec. 25 there tend to be significantly more new relationships than break-ups. They also observed a high increase in new relationships on April 1, but — considering that there’s also a significant number of break-ups on April 2 — it is fairly reasonable to assume that many of those relationship status changes were just “in good fun” or part of some sort of April Fool’s Day joke.

As far as break-ups go, the team noticed that the summer months are particularly bad news for relationship across all age groups.

Facebook’s data scientists didn’t stop with those broad time frames though. They also made it a point to figure out how the days of the week factor into relationship status changes. They discovered that there was a “net gain in relationships after the weekend — Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were the biggest days for new romance.”

They also noted that break-ups had a tendency to occur on the days leading up to the weekend. They speculated that one explanation for this phenomenon could be that “people looking for a change tend to end their old relationships in time to spend the weekend with friends or get back in the game with someone new.” Alternatively, some folks might just be putting the drama of a break-up off until the work week’s nearly over.

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You’ll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

I cringed as soon as I noticed Circl.es — a new dating site — requires access to its users’ Facebook accounts. “Time to write yet another headline that somehow incorporates the word ‘creepy,’” I muttered, to no one in particular.

It turns out the website is quite cleverly designed and that the ways in which it relies on users’ Facebook data are quite reasonable (at least based on my brief experience with the site).

There’s no way to manually create an account on Circl.es — the site only allows you to login using a Facebook account. This is a good thing because it limits how many fake profiles you’ll encounter. (Yes, someone could first create a fake Facebook account and then link that with Circl.es, but let’s be realistic: That requires way more effort than most individuals with sleazy intentions would care to put in.)

Once you’ve logged in with your Facebook account, Circl.es asks you a handful of questions about your personal preferences — such as the age, gender, and location of the people you’d like to date — and a few clicks later you’re good to go. You’ll be presented with potential matches and a couple of buttons which allow you to check the person’s public Facebook profile, express interest, express disinterest, or simply pass on making a decision for now.

If you express interest in a person, he or she won’t be instantly notified. Instead Circl.es only notify both of you if you both express interest in the other. This means there’s no risk of rejection — no one will know you’ve expressed interest in him or her unless he or she finds you appealing as well.

Like I said, the site’s clever. There’s not much to it, but its simplicity is a strong point.

Circl.es doesn’t post anything to your Facebook profile and if you decide to delete your dating profile, it only takes a click to accomplish the task. From what I saw while trying out the site, everything’s on the up and up — which is quite baffling to this writer, who is used to covering sites which abuse Facebook connections rather than using them to quietly avoid matching you up with friends because it’s ”time to date outside your social circle.”

Alrighty! Jennifer Lawrence Got “Totally Naked” in Front of Zoe Kravitz.

“I couldn’t have the Two and a Half thing be my television legacy … I couldn’t have it end on that note. So if this is going to be the swan song, then it’s got to be a beautiful experience. And so far, eight days (on Anger) was more fun than eight years (at Men).”

Despite his jokes and bravura, — and a few jabs at his former employer — Sheen seems hopeful for the future. When Lauer asked what their story would be a year from now, Sheen replied with a smirk, “It’ll be the same, only better.”

He seems eager to please, and clearly longs to make people laugh again — no doubt he has the skills to do it (as Men’s extremely successful run proved). We just can’t help but notice that there’s a sadness about Sheen, who still looks like someone who’s abused his body with drugs and alcohol. Let’s hope he can outrun his demons long enough to deliver laughs to his fans once again.

Kim Kardashian is used to a lot of attention whenever she hits a red carpet, but Thursday night she received an unexpected surprise from one of her “fans” — a flour bomb.

While the reality show star and her mother Kris Jenner were standing on the red carpet for the launch party of Kim’s new fragrance True Reflection in West Hollywood, Calif., a young female onlooker approached Kardashian and then threw an entire bag of cooking flour on her.

But ever the professional, Kardashian, 31, wasn’t overly upset at the incident. She returned to the red carpet after security escorted her away for a brief moment.

“That probably is the craziest, unexpected, weird thing that ever happened to me,” Kim told E! News. “Like I said to my makeup artist, I wanted more powder and that’s a whole lot of translucent powder right there.”

Kardashian laughed off the situation, but mama bear Kris wasn’t too amused.

“If anybody comes at me with something, call security,” she said.

And as for little sister Khloe Kardashian Odom, who’s known for being the protector of the family, took to Twitter to comment on the situation.

“I wish I was with my sister tonight. I bet you that woman wouldn’t have dared tried a thing…” she wrote.

There is no clear motive for why the young woman threw the flour, although media sources told E! that it sounded like she had mentioned fur.

The demonstrator was apprehended thanks to Kardashian’s security team. According to a press release from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Kim did not want to press charges but they did file a non-criminal battery report. The woman was later released.

“At least she didn’t get that much on me,” Kardashian is heard saying.

CelebVillage Elizabeth Banks: I Thank Birth Control Pills for My Son.

The star of The Hunger Games writes in her exclusive blog for iVillage about having her 1-year-old son Felix via a surrogate — and why she credits birth control pills for helping bring him into the world.

In her exclusive blog for the iVillage blog series CelebVillage, The Hunger Games star Elizabeth Banks writes about having her son Felix (who turns 1 on March 30) via a surrogate — and why she credits birth control pills for helping bring him into the world.

Just over a year ago, my son Felix was born via gestational surrogacy. He came out of me nine months early and because of my broken belly, his babycake was baked in a wonderful angel’s oven and now — I can’t believe it — he’s a year old and walking. He has expanded my capacity for joy a thousand-fold.

His life would have been much harder to come by if not for the birth control pill. How’s that, you ask? Well, it’s a simple fact: The pill is used for many situations that have nothing to do with the prevention of pregnancy. The pill was prescribed to me when hormonally induced migraines kept me locked up in dark rooms for days at a time. It was prescribed to me to regulate insanely painful cramps every month — cramps so painful that I often vomited. And here’s a little secret I am happy to blow the lid off of: The pill is often prescribed during the IVF (in vitro fertilization) process to help MAKE BABIES! That’s right, women dealing with infertility are often put on the pill to help regulate a cycle so that they might have a more successful IVF. The pill is used to manage ovarian cysts, endometriosis and other conditions too. Not to mention, it helps couples plan for wanted children.

Obviously, I’m not a doctor. I’m just a woman grateful for my necessary and very helpful medication. And I’m sure glad I don’t have to discuss any of these conditions, including infertility, with my employer.

A girlfriend and I recently wondered what would be more mortifying: having to tell her male employer she needed birth control to mitigate a heavy flow or just bleeding all over herself in the office?

So with that image in mind, I encourage all women — and the men in their lives — to protect access to birth control, and encourage our politicians to take women’s health issues out of the political process.

Wedding is a ritual
which exists in all countries. In Russia, a wedding has always
been famous for it’s rich traditions and
customs, details of which have been preserved in the Novgorod Chronicle. lang="en-US"> It is interesting to trace in a few strokes to
describe the history of wedding dresses, as it developed and improved,
because a wedding dress has come a long and rather unusual way.

Even in ancient Greece, was born the
tradition during women marriage,
brides used to wear something special, different from the
everyday. The dress of the Greeks at that time was a rectangular piece
of cloth, which are held together by special pin on their shoulders. It
was called a dress “Peplos”, and it was worn by both men and women.
The task of the bride was to select the most delicate fabric. lang="en-US">Aristocratic circles during style="text-decoration: underline;">women marriage lang="en-US"> could afford an expensive white cloth.
Popular wedding dress used
to be with ornamental geometric pattern.

Russian bride in wedding day
ceremoniously donned a long shirt with wide sleeves, at her – dress,
over a sundress – dushegreyu. Sarafan was decorated with a vertical
stripe with gold braid. Bride of the princely estates will certainly put
on a cloak-gown of heavy brocade with gold embroidery. Such a heavy
literally had to wear a wedding dress brides in Russia. lang="en-US">So Russians during women marriage
had to wear such heavy outfit.

After sunset Renaissance wedding fashion
many times has evolved. Dresses lang="en-US">were becoming more open,
on the contrary, as much as possible obscured bride many layers of
tissue. But new silhouettes far departed from the traditional dresses,
which lawmakers came up with the Venetian fashion.

Every year in Italy, officially entering a 2.000 “Hot Russian women” from Eastern Europe,
about half of them – girls from Russia and Ukraine. Unfortunately, the
Italian immigration service did not have accurate data, reflecting the
divorce rate of such couples, but we all have read horror stories,
telling about the brothels, which are covered matrimonial agencies, and
the mossy suitors who are looking for girls from Eastern Europe, because
in their home, no self-respecting woman does not even look in their
direction. All this – the terrible truth, which translates into
indignant article in the newspapers, as we read, horrified and desperate
spare our fellow citizens, in search of a better life married to
first-encountered monster with a foreign passport. Stop! That’s right,
girl you marry a passport, for the opportunity to become a citizen of
any prosperous country, and for the sacrifice these dreams and the cover
of the passport with someone else’s coat of arms often do the very life
of a foreign bride, no one desired and not taken into account … Long
queues of Russia’s Consulate in Milan. Most of standing in the queue –
future Hot
Russian women, who need different certificates for the wedding. Waiting
to have friendships, girls perk up, share stories and advice for all
occasions … Light – bright, beautiful blonde. A couple of years ago, she
divorced her husband, a drunkard in his native Saratov and decided that
life in the province was not for her. Sending out messages to different
agencies, so pretty soon received a huge amount of feedback from
suitors from around the world. In America decided not to go, not to risk
too far, but the girl looked to Europe “… And they all pay the same to
me; everywhere I drove, trying to please. I looked at all the European
capitals, is it bad?” Then he says that we do not approaching each
other, and left. And no claims cannot be! «As a result of all potential
applicants Light chose Italian.» What? Country – beautiful, but the
house had what you would have seen – villa on the beach!” After some
time came and future husband – a little man in glasses, glowing with
happiness and pride in the beauty Hot Russian women, and with a wild accent
told us “Good Dien!»… Light cynically smiled: “Well, look at him,
already undertook to teach the Russian language! Nothing, as soon as I
get citizenship, divorce and find myself a normal guy, saw some handsome
men on the streets go?” Almost all the girls in the queue nodded their
heads in agreement … When you live abroad for a long time, before your
eyes everyday life are the little tragedies in which a Russian wife
acting as a victim, and the husband-foreigner – as bastards and bullies.
How did this moldy morel cut off as his wife a beautiful and something
else required, instead be grateful to her for life for such happiness!

sites as men (they are every year becoming less) who would like to find a
girl for 20 -25 years younger, whom some of them want to have a baby,
which their previous American wife never gave birth to, someone to feel
himself young again, showing and opening the world for his wife.Many men
also come to sites with Russian girls, after their environment comes
across a family where the wife is Russian. They see the love and care
for the couple to each other, and it inspires them to find their love in
Russia, too. Russian Brides remains a beautiful dream
for many foreign men. So if you’ll decide to have a wife, Russian one
will be the best!!!

Not every Ukrainian bride and not immediately aware of and voluntarily
assume this part of the role of wife – responsibility for the peace of
her husband and his own integrity. A lot of them, in principle, not
ready for such care, so it didn’t make sense to get married. So what is
the difference between Ukrainian woman from the others? First of all,
the character and attitude to the family at all.