The article “Raunch Culture” by Ariel Levy discusses how life in the twenty first century has become very raunchy and erotic. She talks about how easy it is to blame the males of our culture for objectifying women. However, it is the women who are volunteering to have these pornographic or racy photographs and videos taken of themselves. Even women athletes are posing for scantily clad pictures, and they are getting more attention for that than their specialized sporting events. This article discusses that women taking control of their sexuality and objectifying themselves are not, in fact, the same thing.
Pornography treats women like objects, not as human beings. Women deserve respect for being human, a human with feelingsoutside of the sexual world. Objects are objects. Objects have no feeling, no emotions. Objects serve only one purpose.
You cannot expect to send a 16 year old to college and still have full control over their curfew and monitor their social life. Of course, along with drinking comes sexual promiscuity. STD’s, or sexually transmitted diseases, are also at epidemic proportions. American teenagers have more pregnancies, births, and abortions than youngsters in any other Western Industrialized country. One-third of young US girls, about 820,000, become pregnant before they turn 20 (80% are unmarried) and 4 million American teens contract an STD each year.
Men’s magazines write articles on how to seduce a girl into sleeping with them. Haven’t we as a society moved past the sexist ideals of the past? Judging from the way media portrays women, it seems as if things are only getting worse! (Next slide) One of the most common ways television depicts teenage girls as ditzy, body obsessed, ‘pretty’ princesses with a credit card. The girl’s interests are usually limited to make-up, hair, boys and shopping.
In many early Chinese portraits, women were often depicted as weak and fragile individuals. The physical weakness opened them to the hostility of men and slowly became a subject of family violence. In Zhou dynasty, when a husband struck his wife, no charge was pressed upon the man; whereas when a woman struck another man, she was to be punished and humiliated. In addition, because of their physical attractiveness and sexuality, women were thought as a form of evil that could potentially lure man into ruins. Many books draws on a historical context in which Daji, the concubine of the last king of Shang, lured the king into being obsessed with her and therefore, dilapidated country’s affairs.
For example, the word “butterface”, which means overall the woman is attractive “but her face”. Today’s media is barraging women with images of what they are supposed to look like. Examples like these lead women to feel incomplete and inferior because she can never be perfect and completely secure in her
However, Angela’s inner beauty is anything but beautiful. She treats others as if they are beneath her just because they are not as beautiful as she is. This ultimately leads me to loath her character because to me, outward appearance is nothing but looks, like an empty shell –which is only there for display. This was the first impression I got about Angela –vain and empty. Her personality deteroritates from her looks and it is easy to judge her on her actions without knowledge of her motives.
For example, by the 1950s, many adolescent girls considered Marilyn Monroe the ideal of beauty. Many wanted to look like her. She was a size twelve. In today’s society, if a young girl is a size 12, she considers it a death sentence. This is because the models that are shown in magazines today are size double zero.
There is always a low self-image body against women by media. The media is too much interested in about how the women would look in thin body. There are so many advertisements where the women’s body is very thin. Women begin to believe that they can never add up to the shown models in advertisements. This can lead to many eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, over eating and bulimia.
In line with the idea that sex sells, almost all ads nowadays features women and even young girls in a sexual context. “The feminine form is being used to market everything from gourmet meals to a new set of wheels” (Hirsen 59). This sexualization of girls and women needs to stop because the propagation of these sexual images leads to a lack of self esteem, depression, and eating disorders because these images presented to young girls and women as the ideal is practically impossible to achieve. The APA task force describes sexualization as “a person whose value only comes from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness with being sexy; a person is sexually objectified- that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making” (2). Examples of this notion of sexualization can be seen in everyday life like shirts for little girls with prints like juicy, flirt, boyfriend material, bad girls rule, hot chick, eye