Barbie-Q The story, which was chosen to explain theme, was written by Sandra Cisneros. The main purpose of Barbie-Q is trying to expose the evils that young girls experience by playing with an immensely popular toy, the Barbie doll. The doll, which was once viewed as being an iconic positive figure, proves to be the contrary in this story. It shows the obsessive nature of two girls hunt to have and act like an image created by these fictitious plastic dolls. The theme of the story is to show how Barbie dolls are negatively influencing young girls and the drastic change they had on young girl’s observations of relationships, self-image, and childhood innocence.
Life as Plastic Both today and yesterday's society have created a mold that young women are expected to fit in to. Tall, tan and slender girls are often looked at as the beautiful members of society. The positive and wonderful qualities of both women and men are often overlooked because of physical appearance and image. Marge Piercy accurately portrays the unreachable standards placed on women to be beautiful from adolescence into adulthood by her use of fluctuating tone and effective symbolism in her poem “Barbie Doll”. The poem follows a young girl from her childhood to her adulthood in a third person omniscent point of view.
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.
All over the world, girls often go through a "princess phase", made up with anything pink and pretty. When it happened to Peggy Orenstein's daughter, the writer decided to examine the phenomenon. She found that the “girlie-girl” culture was less innocent than it might seem, and can have negative consequences for girls' psychological, social and physical development. From a very young age, girls learn to define themselves from the outside in, and a lot of researches suggest that our culture’s emphasis on physical beauty is the root of problems such as negative body image, depression, eating disorders and high-risk sexual behavior. I strongly agree with the Peggy Orenstein’s article.
Barbie Doll Women have a wrong perspective about beauty. With media and social networking on the rise, the standard of beauty is skewed to what others portray it to be. Women who don’t have supportive people around them to reinforce the true concept of beauty often grow up to be self-destructive and seek validation from all the wrong places. There is too much importance and too much anxiety placed on women to surrender to the image of being or becoming a Barbie doll. In the poem “Barbie Doll,” written by Marge Piercy tells a story of a young girl’s short life.
They were the stereotypical toys of the girl, and help to create the image of the stereotypical “girlchild” in the mind. This then continued into when it described how the classmate described her “great big nose and fat legs.” This helps to create the picture that she is no longer the little girlchild that was perfect in every way in the view of society. Instead, she has become different, because she has features that go against the stereotypical definition of beauty that is defined by today’s modern culture. The fact
In the third stanza I could tell by the descriptions that she is a young adult, and is being pressured by the real world to be “perfect” in every way. The last stanza is the stage in life that everyone goes through, but maybe not as soon as this young girl, which is death. At the beginning we see her youngest, purest years of life. She did the things that most young girls do. She had “dolls that did pee-pee and miniature GE stoves and irons and wee lipsticks the color of cherry red,” (1-3).
Non-fiction essay on how the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter responds to societal issues. The new generation has been taken over by the poor representation of women and girls in the media, from television screens to magazines; women are portrayed as the weak and sensitive gender doing housework chores such as cooking or laundry. The topic of societal issues occurs in the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein. In the book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein, the author responds to societal issues like eating disorders and Disney’s impact on girls with research from psychological associations and real-life situations. Peggy says that the girlie girl culture we are living in is increasing issues like eating disorders, body weight issues and unsafe sexual behaviour.
Not only is it to inform adult women but it is also young girls too. She states, “If even the heroine in a Disney ‘girls’ movie’ does not enjoy being a girl, how must the girls watching her feel about it?” (Ross 553). She also reiterates that she is aiming to analyze and inform girls later in the text. “… I am concerned about what girls may learn about this potentially explosive aspect of their characters that could so easily burst the bounds of traditional feminity” (Ross 555). These two quotes present that the audience is in fact female.
For some people, beauty is only physical. For others, beauty is just a woman’s charm, intelligence, or personality. However pageant participants are taught that “beautiful” is a woman who is thin, wears a lot of make-up, has fake hair, bleached teeth and spray on tans. Basically, a fake woman. * Beauty pageants sexualise participating children.