How One Word On A Woman’s Weight Can Destroy Her
Since prehistoric humanity, women’s bodies have been deified, but they have also been judged. Even today, women are held to astronomically high standards of beauty and body shape. Because women have been viewed as property, as nothing but cattle, men and society have oppressed us in every way - from ostracizing overweight women from society, to microaggressions against our body that affect us everyday.
When men criticize a woman’s weight, they aren’t just being mean or insulting her - this is their way of asserting their dominance and authority over us. By telling us how we should look, men are declaring their ownership over us and our bodies. This is a history of female enslavement that has
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It’s 2018. Hasn’t humanity evolved past these archaic, patriarchal, bullshit standards?
This is a process called being body positive. It means that we have a forgiving, accepting attitude of what everyone’s bodies look like. It is the unlearning of the harmful, oppressive idea that only certain bodies are worth accepting and praising - and idea particularly harmful to women.
Body positivity begins with the personal understanding that there is no ideal body image, but that all bodies are acceptable and precious. It doesn’t matter what you look like, but what feels best and healthiest for yourself. You let yourself decide what you look like and how you feel about what you look like, and you allow everyone else to do the same.
Acceptance begins with the individual. It spreads from person to person, until everyone has a new understanding of body positivity.
We know nothing about a body except its physical appearance when we look upon it - the most we can see are the scars from a past surgery or an accident. There might be moles, freckles, tattoos - however, what we’ll never see is the reason why a body is the way it is, or how it became what it is. You have no idea what happens to that person in their body when they’re alone. She might be fat because she goes on eating binges in order to cope with trauma and disaster. What you say about her body could be that much more
When we look into the mirror, we are constantly picking at our insecurities; our stomach, thighs, face, and our body figure. Society has hammered into our brains that there is only one right way of looking. Society disregards that there are many different shapes, sizes, and colors. Then society makes us believe that corporations can shove detrimental products to fix our imperfection. As a consequence, we blame media for putting all the negative ideas into women’s brain. It is not wrong to say that they are in part responsible, but we can’t make this issue go away until we talk about patriarchy. In the article Am I Thin Enough Yet? Hesse-Biber argues that women are constantly concerned about their looks and if they are categorized as “beautiful” by society. These ideas are encouraged by corporations that sell things for us to achieve “beautiful” but the idea is a result of patriarchy. Hesse-Biber suggests that if we want to get rid of these ideas we need to tackle patriarchy before placing all the blame on capitalism.
My mother was taught, as her mother before and so on, that these conversations are to be kept private and talked about quietly. In response to this, the power of men has an increasingly strong hold on the ideal physical beauty and how the changes of the body, such as menstruation, are in private and never spoken of. The Body Project gives a disturbing look at how women in the past few centuries and the present should act, look like, and keep hidden in response to what men think is most desirable. No matter how free women think they are, we are still under the control of men, even if it is not directly. This book opens the conversation on the problems that are still plaguing women and how society needs to change to have a healthier environment for women to be comfortable in their skin.
Body image is the perception, both thoughts, and feelings concerning an individual’s physical appearance. Research has suggested that exposure to an ideal standard of what it may mean to be beautiful is the norm for the media to expose a woman to. The results of an idea of feminine beauty can be disastrous for women, leading to depression, and an unrealistic body image. According to Posavac & Posavac in the article titled Reducing the Impact of Media Images on Women at Risk for Body Image Disturbance: Three Targeted Interventions...
Calliope is not the only human who has been a victim of self inflicted body shaming, studies have revealed that women go on severe diets to obtain what the media defines as a perfect body. In Rose Weitz and Samantha Kwan’s novel: The Politics of Women’s Bodies, “27.3 percent of women are “terrified” or getting fat… A total of 5.9 percent of women met psychiatric criteria for Anorexia or Bulimia (USA Today 1985)” (68-69). Not only do women struggle with the appearance of their bodies, some punish their bodies by self induced vomiting or starvation in attempt to achieve an idealistic body. While Calliope feels ashamed for lacking a womanly figure, woman elsewhere envy Calliope’s body and are bullying themselves as a
The various and changing body images presented by media perplexes women. As the changes happen, women should keep up or risk missing out. This obsession gives a negative effect to both ends of the spectrum. Women who could not cope get depressed while those who could cope fear of not being able to cope enough. The race to social norms’ acceptance follows a feedback loop that reinforces its inputs and thus gives an even worse output. This is the dilemma faced by women since the beginning of time. As long as people submit to media’s demands and trust social norms’ stipulations, this cycle of cultural dominion will never end.
Beauty is a cruel mistress. Every day, Americans are bombarded by images of flawless women with perfect hair and smooth skin, tiny waists and generous busts. They are presented to us draped in designer clothing, looking sultry or perky or anywhere in between. And although the picture itself is alluring, the reality behind the visage is much more sinister. They are representations of beauty ideals, sirens that silently screech “this is what a woman is supposed to look like!” Through means of media distribution and physical alteration, technology has created unrealistic beauty ideals, resulting in distorted female body images.
The female body is socially constructed in different ways over categories concerning race, sexuality and gender. Society has a huge control over women’s body and sometimes influences them to make “choices” that are harmful to themselves. This paper focuses on Fausto-Sterling’s The Bare Bones of Sex and how medical research has failed to consider the impacts of social factors and not just biological ones on bone health; Thompson’s A Way Outa No Way… in which eating disorders are solely claimed to be due to society’s norm of physical appearance and the restriction of eating problems to just white upper- and middle-class heterosexual women; and lastly Davis’s Loose Lips Sink Ship which addresses the increasing popularity of labiaplasty in the United states and the outrage shown towards African women who indulge in female genital mutilation. The following paragraphs will discuss the ways in which the female body has been neglected in society and “choices” made to conform to society’s norms.
The way a person see’s oneself and imagines what they look like is one’s body image. One can either have a positive or negative connotation regarding their own body appearance. A positive body image means that most of the time one is comfortable and satisfied about the way they appear. In a sense, that means they feel good about the way they see themselves in mirrors or pictures. Having a negative body image is a common struggle for individuals. This means they are unhappy with their physical appearance and constantly want to change something about him or herself. Negative body image leads to serious mental problems such as anorexia or bulimia. Not only do we have a personal view on our body image, but society also has an input. Society
Throughout history when we think about women in society we think of small and thin. Today's current portrayal of women stereotypes the feminine sex as being everything that most women are not. Because of this depiction, the mentality of women today is to be thin and to look a certain way. There are many challenges with women wanting to be a certain size. They go through physical and mental problems to try and overcome what they are not happy with. In the world, there are people who tell us what size we should be and if we are not that size we are not even worth anything. Because of the way women have been stereotyped in the media, there has been some controversial issues raised regarding the way the world views women. These issues are important because they affect the way we see ourselvescontributing in a negative way to how positive or negative our self image is.
People feel increasingly pressured by the media about their bodies. Each day we are bombarded by the media with all sorts of image related messages about the “perfect
As a woman of color who has always been a big girl, I started struggling with my body image when I reached my adolescence years. Growing up, I did not realize that my body was abnormal and unacceptable. I saw myself just like other peers and age group. My experience of body dissatisfaction first started within my own family. I got teased about my size by family members. My parents, especially my mother, reminded me constantly about how obese I was. Reaching a certain age, she started controlling my food intake and she made sure I ate no more than three times a day. With all those disciplinary actions from my mother and the pressure I felt from family, I started noticing of external standards of beauty and body image. In this lens, one can see that body image is influenced by many factors and my mother became a structure that carried out directives. This example demonstrates that feminine body is socially constructed and taught to us. When this ideal body image or feminine body gets inculcated in us at a young age, it becomes internalized discipline that enables one to distinguish herself from other
Women are bombarded by images of a thin-ideal body form that is extremely hard, if not impossible, to emulate. Comparing themselves to these women can lead to feelings of inadequacy, depression, and an overall low self-esteem. (Expand on, need a good opening paragraph to grab the reader’s attention) Objectification Theory Objectification theory has been proposed as a standard for understanding the effects of living in a culture that sexually objectifies women (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Objectification occurs when a person’s body is treated like a separate entity and is evaluated on its own merit, without consideration for the rest of the person.
Exact Beauty: Exploring Women's Body Projects and Problems in the 21st Century. Mandell, Nancy (5th ed.). Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality (131-160). Toronto: Pearson Canada, Inc. Schulenberg, Jennifer, L. (2006).
The mass media over the years has had such a profound role in creating an image on how women should be viewed. From their appearance to what their duties are in everyday life, the media has made sure to depict unrealistic images of women. These images have caused not only the male public but women themselves to believe that they must attain a certain kind of body or occupation to fit into society. Women often feel obligated and pressured to comply to this praised image of perfection.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the Body. London: University of California Press, 1959. Print.