For Me or for You?

Body image has been an issue that females have struggled with for many years.

It seems as though women are never comfortable with their bodies until they gain the acceptance of a male.

My best friend from home has always had horrible self esteem issues. She has a very distorted view of her body. She has always thought of herself as extremely overweight, which, in fact, she is not overweight at all. She has always been an athlete, eats very healthy and is a good weight for her heigh, but she obsesses over her body image in a very unhealthy way. This is issue consumes her life and literally sends her into depression. It effects her daily activities because sometimes she is "too fat to wear any of her clothes." I have never gone one day without hearing a complaint about her body. In addition, until recently, she never had a serious boyfriend and assumed that this was due to her being "fat" or "ugly".

Now, she has had a boyfriend for about three months. In these last three months I have noticed that I have started to hear less and less about her body issues. Then, today she told me that she does not care as much about her weight because her boyfriend loves her body and thinks that she looks "sexy". Therefore, she is happier. Although I am very thrilled that she is happy and has been able to stop obsessing over her body image, I also question it.

How come in order to be comfortable with herself she needed a male's approval? Our culture has placed so much pressure on women to look good for our men that we allow them to decide whether or not we are happy or comfortable with ourselves. This gives men so much power and then we wonder why men THINK they have power over us. They think this because it is true! Most women allow these men to have power and what is more powerful than determining someone else's moods and views of themselves?

In thinking about this, I found that this strongly relates to Bordo's article, The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity. She explains, "Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress - central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women- we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification. Through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conyiction of lack of insufficiency, of never being good enough." I think this quote relates to my friend very well because before meeting her boyfriend, self-modification took over her life because, once again, this is what women on our society are "supposed" to care and worry about. Until her boyfriend said so, she never felt good enough. Can't women just be good enough for themseleves?

"I Do"

Male dominance in advertising is clearly an ongoing problem. My roomate is a model and over break was doing a photo shoot for a wedding dress company. She had to dress up in a wedding dress and model with her "groom."

Throughout the photo shoot she said she felt very confused because the photographer kept telling her to "tone down her poses" and told her that she was being "too aggressive in the picture." Also, at one point the photographer had her close her eyes and fall into the male's arms so that he could catch her. This made me think of a helpless women who needs a man to lean on. My roommate is an aggressive, strong girl that would not let a man be the dominant one in a relationship, so she was especially affected by this situation.

When I was talking to her about this we found that this was weird first, because the advertisement was for the wedding dress, not for the man's tuxedo and second, because the photographer telling her to be more passive was a female doing a predominantly male profession.

Thinking about this situation lead me back to Yep's ideas about heteronormativity or what society's idea of normative sexuality. Not only is it the norm to be heterosexual, but more to be in a heterosexual relationship in which the man is dominant. To relate this to my roomate's modeling experience, this photographer was illustrating this point specifically because the advertisement was a picture of marriage. Therefore, she was inferring that marriage should be heterosexual and the male should be the dominant one and the woman should be the non-aggressive, passive one. If women can't even move past this idea, then how are men ever going to?

Hi, my name is Maya Tobe. First, I took this class because I had to have a junior composition class, but I chose the topic women and writing because I thought that it would be interesting. Sexism in the media is something that we deal with every day whether we realize it or not, so I knew that this class would not be a waste of my time. I am a psychology major and am most interested in abnormal psychology.

When we were assigned this blog, I was not sure what I was going to write about. Fortunately, when I came home from class last week, I had the new subscription of the Victoria's Secret catalog sitting on my desk. Of course, like all of their magazines, there was a half naked, 6 foot model on the front cover. The more I looked at the cover I knew something looked unnatural. Of course she was skinny, tall and made-up, but her body looked alien-like. Her body was so photoshopped and contorted that if she were to put her arms straight down, her fingertips wouldn't even fall past her belly button. In other words, they photoshopped her body so that she would look taller and thinner when in reality, that body type is not even humanly possible.

What's the problem with that? Victoria's Secret is the most popular underwear and bathing suit chain among girls of all ages. When they see models wearing the underwear or bathing suits that they want, they also want to look like what the models look like in them. Therefore, these girls will go to desperate, deadly, measures to be skinny because of these false advertisements.

In Bordo's article, "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity," she talks about anorexia and the powerless image this body type gives off because it makes the female look almost literally invisible. She explains," The rules for this construction of femininity (and I speak here in a language both symbolic and literal) require that women learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self nurturance and self feeding as greedy and excessive." So, not only does the girl on the cover of the Victoria's Secret magazine make readers want to be so skinny that it is deadly, it portrays an inaccurate sense of reality that degrades women on a much deeper level than just physical. Consequently, this can cause mental and physical harm to girls in general and especially to the girls who idealize the Victoria's Secret models.

Lastly, this harmful photoshop job gives men the wrong idea of what "sexy" is. As a result of this, men want their women to look like these models,and when they do not, the men are unsatisfied. This puts unnecessary pressure on women making them want to achieve a body that is unattainable in order the please males.