Women's Body Image

(response to The More You Subtract, The More You Add)


     What are the factors that contribute to women's body image in today's society?  Especially, how does the media perpetuate images of women’s bodies and simultaneously send the message to conform to that impossible standard?  What effect does this have on women's self esteem?

     “our children are… brought up by the mass media.” (Kirk p. 231)

     The mass media takes away our self esteem through unrealistic, over-perfect images (of white and mulatto women, not black) and then sells us products to enhance our self esteem (which is only possible by enhancing how we look), with advertising phrases like “He says the first thing he noticed about you is your great personality…  He lies.” (Kirk p. 232).  Other popular social gendering is that women shouldn’t speak, with advertisements like, “Make a statement without saying a word,” (Kirk p. 235).  Also, women should be small, an add for a collapsible excersize device claims, “Soon, you’ll both be taking up less space,” (Kirk p. 235).  What we find across the board is that women’s confidence is first systematically degraded and then women are offered empowerment through products like hairspray: “Never lose control,” (Kirk p.238) face powder: “An enlightening experience.” (Kirk p.238) girdles: “only victoria’s secret could make control so sensual,” (Kirk p. 238), and hairspray again: “The possibilities are endless.” (Kirk p. 238)

     Overall, we have a whole selection of beauty enhancing products that advertise themselves to those hungry for empowerment, who are women who have taken to heart the over-perfect image of women’s bodies that the media offers and lost their self esteem, and they could really care less about looking perfect.  But because in American society beauty is the thing in the media we equate the most with self-esteem for women, that’s what women tend to seek is physical beauty as the path to "feeling and being free."  It's a typical confuse and distract strategy by the patriarchal system.

     Before television reached Fiji, it was normal to compliment someone by saying “you gained weight” and it was considered a bad thing to be “going thin.”  Within three years after television reached the island, the risk of eating disorders for teens had doubled.  Those girls who were heavy viewers of television were 50% more likely to describe themselves as fat and 30% more likely to diet than those girls who watched television less frequently.” (Kirk p. 234).
     Basically the media distorts women’s body image for profit.  This reading relates to Beauty Within and Without.  The article’s main point was that feminism had created some real gains in women’s rights and also that it is important to prevent the patriarchy from informing the beauty industry about women’s body image.  It also relates to the article Women’s Bodies Women’s Health because the media perpetuates the idea that fat women are necessarily unhealthy, which is not always true.  Female and disabled bodies are portrayed in the media as inferior, women are often frail and half starved and looking away from the camera, while men stand tall and proud.  What we need is healthy body image.  In Big Beauty a fat girl buys a tank-top and at first is too shy to wear it.. When she finally wears it, she finds she feels good about herself and that feeling sexy is ok.  Fat women are taught that they are not sexy by the media, and they are told to have surgeries to nip and tuck, and the rest of the time, women’s value is reduced to the status of their physical body, and used like a seal of approval on products that we should buy. 

     “Dominant U.S. culture often reduces women to bodies, valuing us only as sex objects or as bearers of children.  The advertising industry uses women’s bodies to sell shampoo, soft drinks, beer, tires, cars, fax machines, chain saws, and gun holdsters, as well as concepts of womanliness, manliness, and heteronormativity.” (Kirk p. 208)

     So women are sex objects in modern society.  It makes me wonder, where does it begin?  I mean, I can see that perhaps there are some CEOs of advertising in that wake up in the morning and say to themselves, “How can I degrade women and make them feel less beautiful while using their bodies to sell products” etc.  So there are these evil people in powerful positions I think controlling the status quo of large corporations.  But it must also come down to what happens in the home.  I feel like the problem must be individual men, and a lot of the degradation must occur right there in the home.  So I think there must be a “front line” to feminism, where those women and men in powerful or just oppressive conditions have to fight for all of us who might be getting it comparatively easy – because if the few can have their human rights broken, so can the many.  Think of how much it would rock the boat if a first-lady decided to be pro-feminist!

     Since we’re not all in that position it’s important to make changes in small ways.  We all have to be an activist when the time comes for us to stand up for our rights.  If I met someone who I judged to be sexist, who I thought had an attitude about women, that would probably make me prickly and I would probably hash out my women’s studies knowledge against his women’s stereotypes.  Viva la revolution!

     In Letting Justice Flow, a disabled woman pees the bible garden of a university because the president refused to build her a bathroom.  When she threatened to involve the media (they’re not all bad), she finally got satisfaction.  We don’t always choose to be on the frontlines – but activism, in small and large ways, is always important.  What I’ve learned is that the micro, meso, macro, and global levels are all different manifestations of individual human behavior.  So if small changes can take place at a personal level, sometimes those can cascade to greater levels of change.  Change sometimes starts in the home or just with the dissuasion of sexist humour in the right situation.

     In Yay for Hairy Women we learned about a girl who generally felt good about having hairy legs – and when she shaved concentric circles in them, everybody at school sort of realized that they being prejudice against her was stupid.  I think she made a good point.  But what I realized is that the media is one factor contributing to women’s body image – but there are social factors too, where interpersonal behaviors can encourage someone to feel good about themselves.  The girl in this story mentioned that her mother didn’t shave her legs and that she had a babysitter that set the stage for her rebelliousness by saying “Yay for hairy women!” and encouraging her not to shave.  So the media is a factor, but there are also interpersonal factors at work that can overcome the media’s over-perfect images.

     As part of this weeks blog entry, I sat at a coffee shop and observed for signs of societal symbolic body-image conditioning.  I noticed that some women were wearing sweaters that only came halfway down their backs, because the popular fashion perpetuated by the media is for sweaters to be “cute and short,” not “effective and warm.”  I also noticed that several women were wearing perfumes and the men weren’t, and it’s not like women smell bad.  The media however gives them self-esteem messages about using those products.  In the orient small feet were the popular self-esteem solution and they would bind their feet with cloth to prevent growth.  I also noticed the chairs were not fit for a sizeable person.  There weren’t even multiple sizes of chairs available for different sized people.  Indeed, we live in a “one size fits all” society.  Some women also wore high heels – evidence of an attempt to conform to the acceptable height norm.  I also noticed that all the women had pierced ears and very few men did, or if they did, they were not wearing earrings.  I think this is an attempt to conform to the idea that women should decorate themselves at all times with shiny things as they are portrayed this way in the media, with excessively expensive jewelry and accessories.  Most women wore makeup, some women wore so much makeup and had even partially shaved and redrawn their eyebrows, while men engaged in no such activity.  Make-up is a socially gendered activity, and it’s mostly perpetuated by the advertising and makeup industry.  It’s a great example of how the media uses over-perfect images of bodies to sap self esteem in women, and then products are offered that “cure the problem.”
     Before I finish, I wanted to add that the article If Men Could Menstruate was a general article highlighting how the patriarchy hides it's mechinations behind "logic".  Indeed, the advertising industry appears logical.  If women want to look better, show them a pretty model and tell them what make up the model used.  It's just a system of logic meant to help women.  Wrong - logic is a face for the degredation of women in this case.  The patriarchy uses the idea of logic to conceal the horrors of an industry that systematically demeans women and disguises it as something else, even innocent captalism.  Is any captalism ever innocent?

     In conclusion, overthrow capitalism.  But since I don't know what to replace it with, let's just tackle the smaller issue.  In the short run we need some kind of national advertising health agency that can help us transform television into a healthier media.  As it is, television is pretty sick, it transforms women’s body image and self esteem, and it needs to stop.  And television isn’t the only problem – it’s all forms of media. Internet, radio, newspaper, anywhere that symbols occur in human communication.  Human’s are learning creatures, we learn from everything we experience, and when we’re exposed to lots of misinformation, inevitably more or less of it will get through.  So we need to address sexism, classism, racism, and all the problems that are fed by media misrepresentation.

Eroticism and Sexuality

             What does it meant to be an erotic creature?  Are males and females equal on the sexual front?  Where does social conditioning come from?  These and other questions are relevant when we think of human sexuality, which is really just one factor affecting the human erotic sense-ability.  The following quote illustrates the true meaning of the word “erotic” as it has been lost in American culture:

“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all aspects – born of chaos and personifying creative power and harmony.” (Kirk p. 162)

Humans are erotic, spiritual creatures, separate from sexuality.  According to this definition, spirituality and eroticism go hand in hand!  Indeed, perfect spirituality is perfect love.  Eroticism is a personal sense we all have – a sense of what is right for ourselves, of how to love ourselves.  It is our personal eroticism that gives us a sense of the truth in life.  What feels right to people is according to the individual.

In standpoint theory, knowledge is culturally and invidually situated, according to the individual ‘erotic’ or ‘spiritual’ life of personal edification and validation that a person has.  The following quote illustrates the dowsing effect of our own erotic inner sense, and the connection to standpoint theory:

“ ‘It feels right to me’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light towards any understanding.” (Kirk p. 162)

What struck me about the eroticism reading is that we all have a fundamental lively energy that guides our sense of the truth – and that lively energy gets repressed and confined by cultural ideologies.  For instance, in Guadalupe the Sex Goddess, one woman’s path of personal sexual guilt and misunderstanding is apparent.  Finally, she reclaims the symbolic image of Guadalupe that presented unrealistic expectations of women, and forms a symbol for herself of positive sexuality and motherhood, while also becoming sexually educated.  She reclaims this symbol as part of her personal erotic and/or spiritual process as illustrated by the following two quotes:

“She is Guadalupe the sex goddess, a goddess who makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy” (Kirk p.166)

“My virgin de Guadalupe is not the mother of God.  She is God.  She is a face for a god, without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.” (Kirk p. 167)

After finishing today’s readings, I find myself asking, “how can we change things”?  I see that there are a lot of problems in our society.  For instance, sex is commonly about male pleasure, when it should be about both sexes pleasure.  Perhaps two individuals could come to an understanding of that, and be feminist, and lead a more respectful sexual relationship, but there are factors at work.  Where does the malformed social conditioning (social gendering) start?  For Guadalupe, she cited that her mother told her strange facts, like a woman is allowed to use a tampon once she is married (although they still use pads even then) among other misinformation (her mother taught her to respect the virgin of Guadalupe, an effeminate image probably created by men).

            So we can see that a lot of the problem is social conditioning and stereotypes in the article Women's Sexuality, bad facts from parents, and even distorted images perpetuated by society.  So the solution would be to do two things:  Get some positive female images out there into society, and also, spread correct information about human sexuality, and spread an equal-opportunity perspective for sexual satisfaction.  Part of the author of the article’s problem was that the sexual education information available to her was terrible, and she new next to nothing about her own vagina.  So education is part of the problem also.

            Part of eroticism is proper sexuality – being true to ourselves, our own needs, what our own inner spark of life has to say about our sex life.  Life is erotic – it fulfills our deepest longings at times – and sexuality is erotic, because we find some deep meaning in sexuality.  What’s important is not just being assertive about our sexual needs in uneven situations, but counteracting the cultural ideologies that prevent us from being safe sexually (ideas like “men don’t like condoms” and “STDs are inevitable”) and/or prevent us from being fully sexually, and erotically, satisfied.

The main point of the article If It's Not On, It's Not On was that it’s not lack of assertiveness that tends to create health and sexual displeasure risks, it’s the systematic ideas that are perpetuated about healthy sexuality – mainly that women are perfunctory and that male pleasure is central, cause women to marginalize their own feelings about personal health and sexual pleasure.  What society needs is better, clearer education, and also classes like I am taking now: women’s awareness.  Imagine a world where everyone had taken women’s studies 101, it would be a different world, a sexually and erotically educated world.

            Finally, can sex be non-erotic?  If it’s not deeply fulfilling and validating to the spark of inner being of those involved, if it’s not a life-affirming experience, it’s not erotic, it’s just sex.  Pornography is recorded sexuality without eroticism – no one is having their feelings validated, no one (except the men perhaps) feel good about what they are doing.  I feel this quote adds dimension to our established definition of the erotic, and as I finish with it, think to yourself, “in what ways do I suppress my true feelings in favor of popular ideologies or acceptance?  In what ways do I have sensation without feeling?”  Probably, you can think of times in your inner life when there has been a separation of church and state, per se.  The quote is as follows:

“… Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling.  Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

Eroticism at its best is sensation and feeling together under the roof of self-love.  For women in a patriarchal society that is especially important.  However, it’s something we can all aspire to.

The Social Construction of Gender

     The image is from the popular movie South Pacific, which is known for dealing with the issue of racism, and is strewn heavily with gender-role examples: a naieve woman and many confident, some gun-weilding men.  Where do these strong, sexist images of male and female roles come from?  They are easy to pick out in this film from 1949 - they are almost painfully obvious - what about in present day?  Are they biologically based or socially developed and conditioned into us?

"Gendered people emerge not from physiology or sexual orientation but from the exigencies of the social order..." (Kirk p. 67)

"...  gender differences are not natural or biological but learned from infancy" (Kirk p. 55)

     What a significant statement!  Evolutionary biologists would have us believing that men and women are fundamentally physically different because we had different gender roles thousands of years ago while we were evolving genetically - which is circular reasoning.  Gender roles didn't evolve from gender roles.  What is a more reasonable explanation for human behavior is social conditioning - the ways we learn through our interactions with those around us to behave in certain ways.  What if thousands of years ago, cave men and cave woman both each hunted and gathered herbs.  How would we ever know?  Maybe women were hunters too.
     This leads to another major idea in the Patriarchy reading in Women's Lives: paths of least resistance can explain why players of a game and also members of a social system rely on behaviors that are easiest under the social circumstances.  In this case, social conditioning is a matter of learning and being taught what paths to take in life and personal thought by taking those that offer the least challenge.  When your best friend tells you all women are stupid, there is a tendency to agree. Social Gendering is the main topic of the text and,

"As a process, gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and "man."  In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order." (Kirk p. 65)

     So we learn gender stratification, we live gender stratification, we engender gender stratification.  Males and females are both participants in skewed system which generally advantages one over the other.  To give a concrete example of that, there is the double standard of sexuality in society as illustrated by this anti-sexism excerpt:

"Fuck up the double standard. Don't let people call girls sluts! Engage folks in conversations about
why they think it's cool for guys to hook up, but not girls." (Full Frontal Feminism, p. 238)

     This double standard is ridiculous, but it's the current state of affairs in popular thinking.  Although, if it's cool for a guy to hook up but not for a girl to hook up, does that mean guys should only date guys, if women technically shouldn't participate?  I'm only pointing out the humor in this double standard.  But this is an extremely pervasive double standard that is the product of social gendering.  Males are taught at a young age to think they are better than women, and that women should feel crappy about themselves for doing exactly the same things the men do- even for partaking in the "hooking up" in this case, is "wrong" morally for the female to do.
      After reading the texts I find myself doing some self-assessment.  I think every man on the planet can probably say he has laughed at a sexist joke.  But what I think I'm learning is that the degradation adds up.  And from what I'm learning in social psychology class so far - that "schemas" that represent aggressive behaviors can be "primed" by being exposed to aggressive images, and we see sexually degrading images in the media, and I ask myself, what sort of behaviors does this create in the general populace, and how is this used to reinforce social gendering (in say, the media)?  Ethics is extremely unrepresented by modern society.
     Look at internet porn for example.  Pornography that is terrifying for what it represents - the degradation of women at the hands of men.  There should be healthy sexual intercourse "recreational" video / image materials available for all humans - but not where a specific "group", in this case women, is systematically and thoroughly degraded in ways not fit to describe here, which is basically an example of malicious social gendering on the part of the men involved.
    Sexuality is a beautiful thing that should be celebrated, and I think historically when humans were mostly pagans before christianity appeared, we found it fascinating to get together and watch other people have sex at moon lit festivals - I wonder what kind of sexual roles there were when the Goddess was worshipped?  How was sexuality and masculinity and femininity back then?  What constituted womanhood, manhood?  Was a "Virgin" still an independent woman - or did that image start to skew when Christianity arose?  I quote:

"The bitch was Artemis-Diana, goddess of the hunt, most often associated with the dogs who accompanied her.  And the virgin was merely a woman who was unattached, unclaimed, and un-owned by any man and therefore independant and autonomous." (Kirk p. 74)

     It's strange how these words have become twisted in our modern times.  For ancient people, then, am I to understand that the dog was a positive feminine symbol?  Perhaps, of loyalty, strength, intelligence, and master of the hunt even?  Social gendering is possibly an inescapable process - in which case, we need back those ideas of strong women, of huntresses and wise women, of independant women, to give to our children as something a better way of being and a more respectful place in society.
     So yes, there is something strange going on.  It's called the patriarchal system.  As a man, I can see it's perpetuated by men, so let's address what needs to be different for men in a better system.  Male attitudes and indifference is one of the biggest causes of skewed social gendering.  A new idea of masculinity is needed:

"What is and was needed is a vision of masculinity where self esteem and self-love of one's unique being forms the basis of identity.  Cultures of domination attack self-esteem, replacing it with a notion that we derive our sense of being from dominion over another." (Feminism is for Everybody p. 70)

     This is pretty much a universal factor in the troubles and trials of any human spirit.  We all need self-esteem and self-love, and somehow, we get that at times by making other people miserable (through sexism, discrimination, at home, in the workplace, in politics etc).  If I'm the A group, why make the not-A group miserable?  Men orchestrate and women participate in this strange system of social conditioning.

     In Jessica Brown's letter about her activism, in which her pro-lesbian group wore cupid costumes and were bear breasted and entered the Family Research Council (a christian organization for legislation against gay rights, among other things), Both groups were basically degrading each other.  However, christianity is one of many common places where social institutions are basically against women's rights, and among christans, often social gendering occures at a young age.  Women are seen as the "source of original sin." and are taught to view themselves as such. In a case like this, the FRC proved themselves to be extremists, who being extremely socially gendered, tried to make the bear-breasted women miserable by physically pushing them out the door and then purposefully breaking the gift they had brought.  It appears people pick on each other in part because of social gendering.
     Notice how all the FRC women left the room and the men all came forward and became aggressive towards the demonstrators, as though they thought that kind of behavior was appropriate.  Notice that there were women working for this christian organization that was basically against women's (human) right to love other healthy human beings without harming others - which is what gay and lesbian marriage really amounts to.  The social gendering starts young to teach people to lobby against their own rights - and the scary thing is, popular christianity does this effectively by alienating one group from another through stereotypes and dogmas.

     Finally, it goes back to Kathy and her problem with their not being a woman's bathroom at her workplace.  Her supervisor was male, and ignored her problem.  When she locked the bathroom door, basically when she made them understand there was a real problem, they delivered her a bathroom.  Men are a great cog powering the problem of patriarchy, we are perhaps the most and worst gender conditioned of any group, and as was said, with bad self esteem to boot.  To make a long story short, if you're a male, you could probably become a better feminist, and if you're a female, stand up to those men and show them you're not afraid to make a point.

     What did Rachel really accomplish that day, for her and her schoolmates?  The boys were systematically ruining the girls self esteem at school, by loudly rating their body parts on a 1-10 scale - a very degrading thing. Rachel got the girls together and made a plan to humiliate the boys - but not to torture them forever.  She didn't just turn the tables and use their system against them from then on - she made her point systematically and also by writing a letter that was probably a very clear statement.  She made an impression. And that's part of what feminism is about too, because we can't become conscious about social gendering and sexism unless we make demonstrations that get the point across clearly and concisely to oppressors.