Flexible Personal Image - How flexible and compromising can you get? (Responding post)

Our Bodies, Ourselves talked about the influence of birth control and how that shifted the amount of control women had over their own bodies. Women could now choose when and whether or not to take on the mother-role society expects of them. This short excerpt shows how women now have a say in the way their bodies are used, which is very empowering.

However, the other two articles focuses more on the lack of power women have over their own bodies. It seems like societal pressures to look a certain way are so unwavering that these women dream, breathe, and feed off of these images society spits out. In the case of Yvonne, she is willing to give up comfort, happiness, relationships to achieve X amount of pounds. These images devour the very essence of these young women. Instead of using her literary passion, Yvonne is distracted with self-denigration. I also don’t think that Yvonne’s case is extraordinary. Descriptions of her case can probably be matched in many other cases as well.

What I find to be even more sick and dreadful is the fact that society wants to see this happen because our economy profits from the low self-esteem and depression of our citizens. The battle tactic is this: we feed young women ideas of unattainable beauty standards and obliterate self-esteem in order to develop and sustain the new market of miracle pills, self-help magazines, cosmetics, enhancing undergarments and the like. This market depends on our young girls’ lack of self-esteem in order to succeed. There is seriously something wrong if we continue to allow our society to hurt us and call that success. What way does it go? Do we work for society and the images it creates? Why do we insist on trying to fit into these systems of oppression instead of insisting that these systems fit us? This question applies to a plethora of things. We try to fit into the S-M-L, 0-2-4, 32D-36D, sizes instead of having those articles of clothing fit us. This even goes back to the discussion of intersex infants. We force a label on these infants instead of creating a label that fits the infant. In all of these examples, there seems to be a directional issue as to who wins and who loses. It shouldn’t be the citizens who feel depressed, ugly, fat, incompetent at the end of the day for the sake of society’s image winning a couple points, but this is the way it is and Steinmen and Brumberg’s articles reveal the extent to which women suffer as a result of these pressures.

(Who can forget Ralph Lauren's Photoshop mistake? Instead of throwing this image out, Ralph Lauren decided to only circulate this in Japan and Korea, hoping that they wouldn't notice a thing.)

These images need to be more prevalent because it questions the reality of our beauty standards. With the help of image retouching, we “accidently” create a fantasy world. Women, and men alike, are now born ugly in comparison to these pictures we take as a matter of fact.