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.