Most women these days would do anything to look pretty and attract the opposite sex. This story gives us the importance of body image to women and they get judged about it. Amber the “finger throated sickness one”. She gets teased because of her anorexic appearance. This is a mental illness common to the young woman.
Exactly, very bizarre practices that woman go by to feel better about there appearance rather then their health. For example, seeing today’s issues for beauty; models and movie stars all over the media show how being thin is the “hot” look as the expression came forth, “thin is in”. Woman all over the world view magazines, articles, television, movies etc, and with more people expressing vanity, many others confidence level has decreased. Everyone wants to look perfect. Everyone wants to be beautiful and wanting people to find them attractive which leads
Peggy says that the girlie girl culture we are living in is increasing issues like eating disorders, body weight issues and unsafe sexual behaviour. The author says “According to the American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture’s emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior." (Orenstein, 6). Society expects females to beautiful and always strive to stay thin, therefore Peggy is going against those stereotypical views and saying that those unreasonable expectations are resulting in self-conscious girls with eating disorders, unsafe sexual practice and depression. Further on in the book, Peggy discusses how the emphasis on girl’s beauty from the culture that we live in is greatly inspired by Disney princesses promoting the idea that girls should be “the fairest of them all”.
Literary Analysis: “Barbie Doll” Today’s women hold themselves to unreachable and unreasonable standards of beauty. With media and social networking on the rise, the standard of beauty is skewed to what others portray it to be. Girls and women of all ages and diversity have self-esteem issues due to the “beauty myth”. Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, defines it as an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society’s impossible definition of ‘the flawless beauty’.” In Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll”, the deadly effects of the beauty myth are revealed. It all begins with a young girl being born into the world of judgment.
“The construction of gender stereotyping of both males and females in the media is based on outdated and unfounded beliefs and therefore has had and continues to have a detrimental impact on society.” (Yes!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUyfD1F7k1I Women are subjected to many stereotypes in today’s society. Movies and television shows suggest that all women are airheads, whose sole purpose in life is to please men and rear children. Magazines and other advertisements push photographs of very slender, over groomed and “sexy women” into our minds. Men’s magazines write articles on how to seduce a girl into sleeping with them.
Orenstein has gotten accustomed to adults assuming her daughter likes pink and princesses. For example, at Longs Drugs, the woman gives Orenstein’s daughter a pink balloon rather than letting her choose the color she wants, and Orenstein lets it slide. At the dentist, Orenstein is so fed up, when the dentist asks her daughter to “sit in the princess throne” so she can “sparkle her teeth,” she finally snaps (326). Her daughter, surprised by Orenstein’s reaction, wonders what is wrong with princesses. Orenstein then sets out to explore the possible answers to her daughter’s question.
Due to society’s creation of unrealistic images of what women are supposed to look like, many women who have lost a breast to cancer with experience a decrease in self-esteem and have other negative emotions. Coming to terms with breast loss and its effect on body image, feminity and self-esteem are major issues confronting women who have lost a breast or both breasts to cancer. Messages from the media, cosmetic surgery and health care profession perpetuate the beauty myth affecting the self-esteem of women diagnosed with breast cancer. The beauty myth says that to be attractive, women need to look a certain way and dress a certain way. Women who have lost their breast to cancer may feel pressured to search for a cure that produces social acceptance.
Or their madly sending nasty text messages or leaving anonymous commentaries on social websites like MySpace or Facebook. Rumors fly, caddy remarks sneak out while they pass each other in the hall, they make smear blogs to hurt others and put them down, they get in fist fights over looks and stealing boys. The competition to be the prettiest, smartest, and most popular makes girls turn vicious animals. Girls even resort to make fake web pages to get you “add” them as a friend and slowly start talking to all your friends trying to turn them against. Girls get so scared and embarrassed that they stop going to school are put in therapy and sometimes lead to drugs and alcohol to make the pain go away.
Who decides what is beautiful and what is not. I feel that the media has a lot to do with how women, in the United States anyway. With all the magazines showing thin, almost anorexic women on magazine covers young women feel that that is what they should look like. So then these young women starve themselves and/or binge and purge themselves. Some even die because of trying to fix a certain mold of what is beautiful.
Consistently, women are diminished by advertisers to pretty body parts used to sell products, a practice that perpetuates the glorification of this unreasonable ideal of beauty. Women’s bodies have not only become a huge money-maker for advertisers, businesses have picked up on women’s insecurities about their bodies and have capilatized on these insecurities. On one hand, advertisers heavily market weight-reduction programs and present young anorexic models as the paradigm of ideal beauty; on the other hand, the media floods the airwaves and magazine pages with ads for junk food. In 1996, the diet industry (as in diet foods, diet programs, diet drugs) took in over $40 billion dollars, and that number is still climbing (Facts and Figures 1). Young women seem to be especially affected by our culture’s obsession with weight and beauty.