At the beginning of the poem the girl is portrayed as a typical little girl without a care in the world. Her parents and family members presented her with gifts and toys like any other child would be. She receives gifts like Barbie dolls, play ovens and pretend make up. Piercy uses an anaphora in the first stanza as she repeats the word “and” three times (2,3,4). This is an effective strategy because it stresses the amount of gifts the girl is given to play with.
Particularly, Hair and My Angry Vagina discussed how society thinks the vagina should be hairless and smell like flowers and should not be left in its natural state. The "Wear and Say" List was a great transition after the Hair monologue. The girls exposed what their vagina would wear if it could be dressed and say if it could talk. The Vagina Workshop was about a woman who had a self-discovery experience with her vagina. It portrayed the relationships that females have with their vagina.
Shirley Temple in the Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison represents the American ideal girl and a representation of the stigma related to not being white in a society. In one way or another all of the characters in the Bluest Eyes are obsessed with beauty and defining what beauty is to them. The blue eyes closely tie to Shirley temple and baby dolls and their representation of a hierarchy of race. “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.
Amy Tan tells of a mother's expectation for her daughter to be a child prodigy. Jamaica Kincaid tells of an unknown person describing to a girl how to be a "good" girl. Both essays illustrate an authority figure that has expectations for a young female and why and how those expectations will come about. As young children growing up without a care in the world, we cannot comprehend why authority figures dictate how we should behave. In "Two Kinds", the daughter is expected to be a child prodigy because her mother believes "you can be anything you want in America".
The media conform teens to believe in a false lifestyle. The media tries to conform the way we, as teens, live by showing us unrealistic lifestyles. They specifically target teen girls. Magazines and advertisements project to girls that all girls should wear a certain size or have a specific shape or figure. All the time the media makes girls think that in order to feel beautiful, popular, or desirable they have to look like these women seen on TV or in magazines.
Sexism in The Hunger Games Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once said, “The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, "It's a girl. "” Collins demands that we take notice of the fact that society has made it acceptable to degrade women. The Hunger Games urges society to recognize the way it diminishes women by sexual objectification. From a young age women are told they should act a certain way, usually to please others. In the article, “Controlling your reality” Paige Pfleger states “Reality television can also preserve old fashioned notions about sexual stereotyping.
Mini Barbie Dolls Child beauty pageants should be banned. The expanding trend of child beauty pageants is growing rapidly in the United States and should be stopped immediately. Mothers enroll their daughters into these beauty pageants and the little girls, sometimes as young as four years old, compete against one another almost entirely based off of their outer beauty. The pageants throw in the “talent” section for the girls to compete in where they show off a gymnastics routine or something physical that supposedly directs the judges eyes off of mainly beauty, but all in all that is exactly what they are judging these little girls on. These children are way too young to be worrying about what they look like when they look in the mirror.
Little girls learn that they are supposed to like dolls and pink, while little boys learn that they are supposed to like trucks and the color blue. Through various forms of guidance and direction from external influences, children experience gender role socialization they quickly learn what behaviors are encouraged by their parents and peers, and which ones are not. These ideas are further reinforced by the media's portrayal of traditional gender roles. As a result, children internalize these beliefs pertaining to gender roles and their behavior is modified accordingly. The child's first influence in regards to gender roles is the family.
It is easy for women to conform to an idea when it is supposed to be a dream come true—everything they could ever want. An instance of discourse like this near the beginning of the text is “[women] learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights…All they had to do was devote their lives from girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (Friedman 270) This exemplifies the way that femininity is instilled into young women, and the one-track minds that result from it. When experts, teachers, parents and peers alike define the expectations of a woman, it is be difficult for females to imagine their femininity as anything aside from the
Beauty pageant participant, Kelsey Killeen said, “When I started going into pageants, it gave me so much self-confidence.” Pageant moms believe pageants are a good way to teach their daughters skills needed in life. Eight main skills mothers thought or hoped their children would learn from pageants were acquiring confidence, learning to be comfortable onstage and around strangers, gaining poise, determining the best way to present oneself, realizing the need for practice, learning good sportsmanship, becoming more outgoing and learning to listen (“Child Beauty”). Some parents have even said that they have placed their children in pageants because of a birth defect their child had (“Child Beauty”). These parents wanted to support the fact that their children are normal and beautiful no matter if they have birth defects (“Child Beauty”). In numerous pageants it is required that the contestant raise money for a local