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Boston Women’s Health Book Collective – Our Bodies, Ourselves

The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective essentially kicked off a new approach to feminism that involved exploring and understanding one’s body as a female. Their idea was that a better understanding of female bodies and how our society and its institutions interact with those bodies would help make progress toward freeing women from unwanted pregnancies, unplanned motherhood, and the more intangible feelings of shame and insecurity that often accompany one’s self image. While I think males experience some of these confusing times and pressures from society that make natural things shameful, the article opened my eyes to a couple more of my privileges as a male:

-I never (or at least not as much as women do) have to look critically at my society’s medical institutions or legal institutions to decide whether or not I am being mistreated or mislead about my body

-I never have to worry about an unplanned pregnancy changing my life (in the way that it changes the child bearer’s life)

Our Bodies, Ourselves makes a strong argument for women to seek better knowledge of their bodies and to share their experiences within those bodies as a method of relieving the shame and consequences that society enforces.

Sex Lies and Advertising – Gloria Steinem

I have always challenged the “chicken or the egg” comment people make about the media: “Do people’s wants create media content, or does media content create the people’s wants.” Granted, the media perpetuates certain standards and stereotypes but ultimately the media is a business and it will fulfill any market where there is profit to be made. So, at the risk of oversimplifying, I guess I say chicken: people’s wants create media content. I think this article supports that statement toward the end in its petition for readers to “act in a concerted way to change traditional practices of all women’s magazines and the marketing of all women’s products.” Gloria Steinem complicates this argument by bringing in something I’ve never considered in depth: a chicken/egg relationship between editorial content and advertisements (again, with both of them always eyeing the consumer’s dollar). Steinem explains how women’s magazines in particular are encouraged to include recipes and recommendations in their editorials in order to gain higher paying advertisements. Likewise, the publications have to be selective of which ads they run in order not to offend readers and to uphold certain aesthetic and professional standards. She goes on to explain a number of personal experiences in navigating these difficult objectives of satisfying readers, advertising needs, and editorial integrity. I did not find any of her examples really surprising. In fact, I could probably think of similar examples that I have encountered to match each of hers. What is more interesting for us to think about is how advertising has changed with the spread of the internet and social networking. Now, companies can target your facebook and email accounts based on lists of your interests and hobbies as well as your sex and sexual orientation. Does this make ads more appropriate or does it only further categorize people and solidify the constructed expectations for whatever demographic they fall under? I think it is important to continue exploring the world of advertising as it changes as Steinem has begun to do here.

Body Project – Brumberg

“Body Projects” discusses how women’s bodies have become the ultimate manifestation of their identity and how society has shaped the way women want to present that outward identity. Brumberg touches on the fluctuation of weight/figure trends, bras and breast’s influence on identity, shopping, and the recent piercing trend. All of these discussions add up to a good depiction of how women’s bodies have progressed rapidly from something private to something being projected out to (and for) the public. Women are left with very little feeling of bodily privacy because our society has increasingly put the female body under a metaphoric microscope. Brumberg begins her discussion in the early twentieth century, but I believe we were moving toward where we are long before that. She mentions the flapper generation as a “liberating” movement that began praise of slim figures and served as a primary example of bodies and clothing as a way of “making a statement.”

I found Brumberg’s discussion of bras to be the most compelling part of her discussion about the body. The rise in popularity and shift from “practical” to socially “necessary” and expositional is, I think, very indicative of the way our society operates. The fact that bras so quickly spread in demand and eventually became adolescent necessities shows how susceptible humans (particularly females) are to socialization and pressure to look and act “normally.” The “medical benefits” that our society so quickly placed on bras also strikes me as strange; clearly the human race survived perfectly well before breasts were “supported.”

The emphasis on shopping and commercialization of the body in this article made me consider how this process was different for men and women. Although men are encouraged to be body conscious, I don’t think the shifts in those trends and pressures are nearly as numerous or as strong. The simplest example I can think of is the movie When Harry Met Sally. The movie covers about twenty years through the late 70’s to the 90’s. It’s pretty noticeable that Sally is the marker for these eras by what she wears. Harry makes almost no changes except in facial hair while Sally’s clothes become more form fitting and revealing. The two of them side-by-side throughout this relatively short time period is a testament to how much more pressure there is on women to project their identities from their body.

http://www.thecitrusreport.com/2011/features/happy-new-years-the-fashion-of-when-harry-met-sally/

Response Post 3.2: "U" by Kotex

While I was reading the article in the Essential Feminist Reader, a particular section struck me. The article “Our Bodies, Our Selves” touches on many important points, but I liked what the authors had to say about menstruation. They discuss that many pre-teen girls learn about the menstrual cycle, and they are taught (in textbooks) that “the onset of menstruation is a normal and universal occurrence”. However, many women find that when they actually have their first period, they are incredibly scared and/or embarrassed. Although this article was written in 1973, I believe this is still very true today. Periods are not supposed to be discussed in public. Many girls become comfortable telling their girlfriends about their periods when they are older, but these things should never be discussed in an “open” setting.

Tampax Pearl tampons are an extremely popular brand, and that is in part because the wrappers are specially designed to ensure “quiet unwrapping”, so no one has to know you’re on your period. I am guilty for buying Pearls for this reason (among others), and until our class discussion on Tuesday, I never questioned my secretive attitude about my period. Why should women feel the need to buy “quiet” tampons? Why does it matter if people know that we have our period? Every woman experiences it, and that is 50% of the human population….so why isn’t it more talked about?

Kotex brand has created a relatively new line of tampons that I have spotted in stores, called “U” by Kotex. These tampons are packaged in a black box and come wrapped in an array of bright colors, such as red, blue, green, and yellow. The idea behind Kotex “U” tampons is to “stop all the weirdness about periods” (Kotex website). These tampons stray from the norm, because most are packaged in light pink or blue boxes with flowery designs. The “U” by Kotex brand is attempting to bring conversations about vaginal health out into the open. The website is very well done, and they have a video (see link) about a guy struggling to buy tampons for his girlfriend. Many of the people in the video are visibly uncomfortable talking about periods/tampons, and Kotex is trying to put an end to this discomfort. “U” by Kotex is the anti-Tampax Pearl. Kotex makes no effort to have “quiet” or “secretive” tampons, and this makes me hopeful that change is happening. Perhaps girls will start buying “U” tampons, which come in bold colors and are not advertised as opening silently. Maybe, in the near future, women will be able to openly and publicly discuss the phenomenon that is menstruation.

“U” BY KOTEX WEBSITE:

http://www.ubykotex.com/the_mission

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.

Response Post March 1

Both Fausto-Sterling and Susan Douglas confirm what I think is one of the most dangerous tendencies of Western society. The advent of the scientific method formulated western thought to divide everything into factual or nonsensical, empirical or irrational. This spilled into our opinions of things more generally; we are quick to label people and beautiful or ugly, or we categorize them by race, sex, orientation, etc. It’s as though we are constantly collecting data and making conclusions about groups every second of every day. It is the way our brains have been wired and, even though it has done great things for our society, it is dangerous to always think with such certainty. The most dangerous thing about the studies that Fausto-Sterling investigates, for example, is not that these sexist ideas were published, it is that these ideas were published as fact as shown by science. It is very difficult for western society, which is only beginning to realize its ethnocentrism, to understand that even we have a bias. Even science has bias. Even the most advanced data collecting techniques and experimental processes are not perfect and should be questioned.

As Douglas shows, this mentality even permeates our ideas of beauty. Exemplified most by the website HotOrNot.com, we struggle constantly to reach an ideal of beauty that no one seems to realize is completely constructed. And it is websites like “hot or not” that perpetuate these standards of attraction and give us the idea that there is some empirical definition of beauty. Much like there is danger in some studies being construed as “fact,” there is serious danger in these ideas of beauty being described as feminist. That is the major point of Embedded Feminism that Douglas tries to prove from a lot of different angles and I think she is successful in this chapter.

Response Post to Douglas: 2.28

Douglas’ chapter entitled “Lean and Mean” seemed to be pretty repetitive, and it echoed many of her points that we have already discussed in class. The one part of her chapter that I liked was when she discussed how some feel the need to “eat a tic tac and drink a diet coke”, and call it a meal. I think that this phenomenon is very prevalent on the Colgate campus. I don’t think I could ever go a day without hearing a girl talk about how she “feels fat” after having a normal-size meal, or wants to lose 5 pounds. The media is completely to blame for this phenomenon, as Douglas states in her chapter. We look towards Vogue and other magazines and see women who are miraculously wafer-thin but still manage to have huge breasts. This is the image that permeates our media, and it is just unacceptable.

In response to Sam’s post…I agree with everything you are saying. You are right that beauty has become very class based. Older women are only considered “beautiful” by society if they spend the money to have plastic surgeons completely erase any sign of aging, and the women who can pay are upper class. Additionally, television shows, like “The Swan”, promote the idea that to be beautiful, we have to pay large amounts of money. The “lucky” women on The Swan get to have the show to pay for all of their plastic surgery, and they end up with an entirely new face that is just…perfection? I am a huge advocate for natural beauty and would never dream of getting plastic surgery, but shows like The Swan really promote the idea that we need to pay to look pretty. That being said, I am not opposed to some plastic surgery. If a woman looks in the mirror and truly hates her nose, breasts, etc…then why go through life hating the way you look? The Swan simply takes plastic surgery to a new level and I honestly cannot believe that show was allowed on television. It’s one thing to get a nose job because you don’t like your nose, but getting an entirely new face? That’s just unnecessary.