I really really enjoyed reading The Beauty Myth. Everything she had to say was so true and so insightful, yet I don't think most people actually realize them. I think when people look at women's rights and compare them to those of women now gone, they think we're doing amazingly well, yet we see in this article that women are just being suppressed in a completely different way.
One thing I had never thought about was how different it was before there were photographs and the wide scale distribution of images of "beauty." she made it sounds if this concept of the ideal woman was not entirely prevalent at one time.
When I worked with The Body Project back in high school, one of the main things we talked about was the 'thin ideal'. This is the image of beauty we felt is currently being portrayed to us. This is the only type of woman we ever see in magazines and on tv. The movie Miss representation is a real eye opener about the media and it's portrayal of women. One quote from this that I can never get out of my mind is when Jim Steyer said, "in a world of a million channels, people try to do more shocking and shocking things to break through the clutter. They resort to violent images, or sexually offensive images, or demeaning images." I couldn't see more truth in this statement.
I think I agree with the statements made on page 73 that the true power comes from the choice to wear your hair in any one of such a wide variety of ways. With that said, I also think it can be very empowering for a black woman to wear her hair as it naturally falls.
My old roommate is from a small Caribbean island and living with her I learned a lot about her hair. One thing I noticed is that when in the states, she almost always has her hair straightened, but at home for whatever reason, she doesn't feel the need to change it. There is certainly nothing unattractive about her natural hair, she has the most beautiful spiral curls that look so cute framing her face when she clips back the front pieces. It should be very clear to her how much people like her hair this way based on the number of compliments she unfailingly receives every time she has it. Yet, the majority of the time we spent at school together, and absolutely most definitely at every special occasion and formal event, her hair was 'tamed' and straight.
Natalie i like you post and found it very insightful when you incorporated you past experience with you old roommate from the small caribbean island. the fact that she changed her hair when she was in the united states and not on her home island goes to show how america and society can inadvertently change a persons appearance through society and media; and the fact that she was not ridiculed for having curly hair in her home helps to show that america has a severe problem with trying to shape men and especially women into a socially acceptable figure. this comes from social media many times but also inadvertently from other students who adhere to these hair norms; that when student of another race or culture see them their view of america become distorted. i wish you got into explaining the body project more and how and what you did for it because it was a very interesting point that i feel would be very relevant in many ways to discussion, otherwise good post
ReplyDeleteI think Natalie brings up something very clever when she says that women think they've achieved so much for the past decades when becoming more powerful and respected, when they actually are now being harassed in a completely new way. Yes, we might be able to work side to side to a man at the office and sit next to a male classmate at college, but before, if we were a little overweight it wouldn't matter so much in our society, but now you see teenage girls starving themselves for wanting to fit into a certain beauty standard. We've achieved so much culturally, but we've been losing it when it comes to extremely irealistic beauty ideals.
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