The Myth Of Femininity

542 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Roles of women in societies

Yes, femininity is a myth in our society. From the dawn of modern society we have been constructing the myth of femininity. A woman is always taken for granted to be the beast of burden, essentially altruistic and she will accept every harm you inflict upon her and also ready to forgive you. Very clever huh!
Let’s try to chalk out some points.
Women are selfless
Just as some women are loving and selfless it is very much wrong to assume that altruism is a part and parcel of femininity. Not all women are soft and not everyone will accept your faults silently. To assume all women as selfless enterprises is to assure a man, absolute rights in her devotion.
Woman Flesh
Wondering at a woman is not bad but to refer her voluptuous body as ‘flesh’ is degrading. Now this ‘flesh’ brings in connotations of evil powers, backed by age old mythical stories. Consider all lustful female villains of old stories. A woman is not merely a carnal object. In West, women were considered as ominous during their periods.
Beast …show more content…

Let’s elaborate it. Women are considered to be created for the purpose of helping man, to be his companion, so that he can reduce some load off his shoulder. But with the passage of time the load happened to be totally transferred to the woman’s shoulder. The patriarchal priest goes on preaching- she is intended by nature for this purpose. A queer myth that torments the lives of

Show More
Related

  • The Wonders Of The Invisible World Summary

    1775 Words  | 4 Pages

    Through her words and actions, the true nature of women was exposed; her story and “weakness” showcases what women’s innate nature corresponds to. Eve represents everything about a woman a man should guard against; she is the original sinner, and cannot be trusted in both form and symbol. The idea that her actions are not without warrant, and therefore she is a representation of us is, in fact, what has been propagated throughout hundreds of years. Eve is woman, and because of her, all women are by nature disobedient, prone to temptation, weak-willed. The connotations associated with womanhood, in turned have become, untrustworthy, deceitful,

    Read More

  • Comparing The Wife of Bath and The Canterbury Tales

    1115 Words  | 3 Pages

    Looking back through many historical time periods, people are able to observe the fact that women were generally discriminated against and oppressed in almost any society. However, these periods also came with women that defied the stereotype of their sex. They spoke out against this discrimination with a great amount of intelligence and strength with almost no fear of the harsh consequences that could be laid out by the men of their time. During the Medieval era, religion played a major role in the shaping of this pessimistic viewpoint about women. The common belief of the patriarchal-based society was that women were direct descendants of Eve from The Bible; therefore, they were responsible for the fall of mankind. All of Eve’s characteristics from the biblical story were believed to be the same traits of medieval women. Of course, this did not come without argument. Two medieval women worked to defy the female stereotype, the first being the fictional character called The Wife of Bath from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The second woman, named Margery Kempe, was a real human being with the first English autobiography written about her called The Book of Margery Kempe. In these two texts, The Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe choose to act uniquely compared to other Christians in the medieval time period because of the way religion is interpreted by them. As a result, the women view themselves as having power and qualities that normal women of their society did not.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Kaleidoscope Of Gender

    995 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities written by Joan Z. Spade and Catherine G. Valentine is a book about the sociology of gender and the construct thereof. The writers use a metaphor of a kaleidoscope to illustrate their interpretations of the topic. A kaleidoscope is a toy consisting of a tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated. Utilizing the similitude of the kaleidoscope, this collection presents gender as a result of always transforming patterns get under way by prisms that underlie change, both straightforward and complex, bringing about an extensive variety of possibilities. The book

    Read More

  • Elizabeth Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters"

    1269 Words  | 3 Pages

    The society of women complied with replicated this God-like figure, which is impossible to achieve since no living human can reach this supreme stature. The novel manages to offer insight into the different characters while still addressing critical and social roles in a male oriented society.

    Read More

  • Women and Religion in the Film Alien and Frankenstein

    942 Words  | 2 Pages

    The issue of religion in women's horror is much like the issue of class. In most major organized religions there is a definite patriarchal structure of male dominance. The Father, the Son, the Pope, bishops and priests are all part of this structure that mostly lack woman influences. The religious structure reflects the male dominated society as a whole. As one would expect, women are frightful and perhaps horrified at this exclusionary system and in women's horror the idea of a woman Christ figure has been brought forth. Perhaps women are in touch with the idea of the Christ-like figure, one that is nurturing and motherly and by using a woman with Christ-like attributes, the structure of religion is commented on and destructured. Men's horror, however, works in the opposite direction by struggling to maintain the structure as it stands. While women battle to overthrow the ideas of a patriarchal religion, men battle to keep this disturbance in check and find comfort in the reassurance from male horror in the reassertion of male dominance.

    Read More

  • The Cult Of True Womanhood

    549 Words  | 2 Pages

    states that men are to work and make money for the family. A woman's goal was to

    Read More

  • An Inquiry Into Femininity: Women in Medieval Epics

    1182 Words  | 3 Pages

    In history, the role and status of women have fluctuated incredibly. At first, matriarchy was dominant in Greece and other realms. Women who are like mother earth and nature were the idols of fertility. They symbolized both beautiful and fertile side of nature. But after monotheist patriarchal religions began to dominate, the women lost their high times and treated as second creatures of nature on which Engels commented that it was the historical defeat of women-kind. This mistreatment was so violent that women are equally treated with satan in religious stories. Afterall, the word `Eve' comes from `Heva' in Hebrew. After Eve's seduction, all sins belonged to her and her kind . Because they were the redlection of men's lusts and vices on the mirror. Whenever men looked at them, they saw their feeble and lustful sides. Thus to be purified of these, in history, they ceaselessly made women their own scapegoats. A women can give birth to a male but the male cannot give any right to her in exchange of his life. Actually the women kind is so sensitive and vulnerable that they do not even attemt to extort what should be given. Still men are indebted something to all women. That is `respect' for all over the world. Ýf ever this is to be attained, the women will serve a better world to all men kind.

    Read More

  • The Five Sexes Revisited Summary

    698 Words  | 2 Pages

    As we discuss the articles of Anne Fausto- Streling, “The Five Sexes, Revisited” and Marjorie Garber, “The Return to Biology” in class we came to see how these two articles could bring up such controversy. As they question our perspective on human nature as we have always known it to be, from “The Five Sexes, Revisited” stating “absolute dimorphism disintegrates even at the level of basic biology” (176), to “The Return of Biology” saying “Society mandates the control of intersexual bodies because they blur and bridge the great divide” (184). We see many different aspects on how human biology or culture is more than what meets the eye. All I can begin to say is everything we, as the human species, do revolves around dimorphism no matter the questions or contradictions that may arise. The idea that only two sexes exist is still firmly maintained in our society as how things are suppose to be aka the “norm”.

    Read More

  • Pamela Cooper White Cry Of Tamar Summary

    656 Words  | 2 Pages

    Pamela Cooper-White, in the second edition of The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church’s Response, revisits violence against women in the United States and the increase of strategies implemented to end the physical and sexual abuse of women around the world. In her pursuit of exposing the detestation, prejudice and violence women encounter on a daily basis, Cooper-White first confronts the depiction of women in society. She proposes six patriarchal myths: (1) woman as nature, (2) woman as eternal mother, (3) woman as crazy, (4) woman as subhuman, (5) woman as bearer of sin, and (6) woman as gateway to death that serve as catalysts to woman abuse and the excuse for man to “control forces that are perceived as mysterious and threatening” to them. I will examine the first three myths concerning stereotypes of women to provide my perspective on or personal experience with each.

    Read More

  • The Role of Woman in Judaism

    1896 Words  | 4 Pages

    The depreciation of women and their overall inferior position in society can be attributed to the androcentric interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, especially the story of Adam and Eve. Throughout history, the story of Adam and Eve has been used by men to point out the inherent evil in women by pinning the eventual expulsion of Adam and Eve from Heaven on the neck of Eve. Eve has long been blamed for the expulsion from Heaven and in effect, women, even up until today, are portrayed as the “gateway to sin.”

    Read More

  • A Man's View of Women

    1351 Words  | 3 Pages

    When Tinie Tempah, an English rapper, said, “At the end of the day, I'm a human being and I just think that's what it is. Challenging stereotypes by just being that I am,” he known that at the end of the day society cannot define who he is as a person. Tempah lived with challenges of being an English African rapper that faced the discrimination of society. Society shot down his dreams of being a rapper by stereotyping because of his English accent. Tempah can relate to the women stereotyping because he knows the emotional Rolla coaster one goes through when being labeled. In today’s American society, femininity has been expressed through media in various ways—in Lil Wayne’s “Love Me” music video— and lately the ideal woman is being portrayed as sexually submissive, weak, and dependent on men, causing women to believe this is what strong, wealthy, and powerful men really want, which makes women have less confidence and not strive for anything better.

    Read More

  • Social Construction of Gender

    1142 Words  | 3 Pages

    Social Construction of Gender Today’s society plays a very important role in the construction of gender. Gender is a type of issue that has raised many questions over the years in defining and debating if both male and female are equal. Today, gender is constructed in four different ways. The The first way gender is defined is by the family in which a child is raised.

    Read More

  • The Social Construction Of Gender

    3360 Words  | 7 Pages

    Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.

    Read More

  • How To Cite The Little Mermaid

    3109 Words  | 7 Pages

    These stories mandate that women cannot exist in Christian Society without man and was created for the sole purpose of serving

    Read More

  • Masculinity and Femininity

    673 Words  | 2 Pages

    Masculinity and femininity are two terms, which have been interpreted differently throughout history. Both the males and the females have responsibilities and duties but these duties differ based on one’s gender. Gender has played a prodigious role in the economy, politics, and the society. Everyone starts making interpretations of the strengths and weaknesses based on one’s gender. These interpretations are not always based on his or her ability but is usually based on his or her gender. Males tend to be judged as extremely strong and unfashionable in terms of appearance. Whereas, females are judged as expensive and very fashionable. Males and females both differ in their abilities and their enjoyments. Fashion, entertainment, and strength are three topics, which are used to define masculinity and femininity in the 21st century.

    Read More

More about The Myth Of Femininity

Open Document