Linda Napikoski: The Objectification Of Women

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1.1 Project Background and Motivation

According to Women’s History Expert, Linda Napikoski (Napikoski 2015), “objectify”, being used in a general sense, describes disrespectful ideas about another person (Napikoski 2015). In other words to objectify someone would be to treat them impersonally, as if they don’t matter. Another definition provided by the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary (Webster 2015), describes the word as ideas that start to have emphasis on physical beauty or dismissal of the person's inner qualities, the term is used to describe the way one treats someone as an object rather than a person. This leads to you losing sight of the human connection and disregarding their feelings and self worth. This definition is one that can …show more content…

In other words women are being treated as if they had certain jobs that were prescribed to them, being domestic, sexual etc. Women are in a way being compared to being a tool. Tools were however created for specific purposes, whereas humans have been blindsided about the purpose of women for years (Behnke 2014).

After being brainwashed through media and advertising, women feel pressured to conform to the beauty standards being advertised in our culture. (Paul 2015). Women therefore become familiar with the fact that they are not perfect and end up going to great lengths to make changes to their faces and bodies in order to conform to the beauty standards that people are being lead to believe are “perfect”. The mass media helps women to discover problems within themselves that need to be fixed and adjusted. Women have therefore been taught to internalize an observer’s perspective of their bodies.
The objectification of ones self stems from what we see in advertisements and media. Advertisers use the objectification of women in order to influence society’s expectations for popularity, beauty and fashion (Behnke …show more content…

Women have become too worried about their appearance and extensive research has demonstrated that that there are negative results of female objectification in the media. There is an increasingly growing list of consequences and has been linked to problems with mental health, appearance anxiety, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, depression, body shame, motor functioning, self-worth and cognitive functioning. (Greening 2002) (Heldman, Ms. Blog Magazine 2012).

Women are affected by what they see in the media, whether it is conscious or not. The representation of women in media has created a definition of beauty. It has created a status as to what you should look like, which women compare themselves to. By creating a certain type of message, media can manipulate people’s attitude and opinions. According to Malgorzata Wolska, men are taught to compare the women in their lives to the women they see in the mass media, most conforming to the gender specification roles they were assigned to in the past (Wolska 2011).

In today’s society, being the perfect size, weight as well as having the perfect hair and skin is constantly on the minds of all women. These women see incredible looking models in magazines and become jealous of their perfect looks (Bite

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