Post 4: Women's Bodies

Women’s bodies are policed constantly, be it through laws, social views, controlling family members, or even their own insecurities.They are told how they should look, how they should act, and how they can express their sexuality. They are the other, the foil to men in a patriarchal society. The policing only increases for women who are ‘others’ in other ways, i.e. queer women, women of color, disabled women et cetera. Through gender roles, the male gaze, advertising, politics, and contributions to poor body image, women are treated as less than, and learn to treat themselves as such. 

I think this speaks for itself.

Gender as a concept, at least in its contemporary application, is where the policing begins, as the binary has typically been enforced as the only option. According to Julia Serrano in Performance Piece, the reality is that, “gender isn't simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient." In practice however, gender, specifically the female gender, is quite regulated. And while people shouldn’t be lumped all together based on gender identity, women have typically shared the struggle of demeaning gender roles. 

In growing up as a woman in this society, I haven’t escaped my role. I was taught to change diapers and do dishes by 8 years old. I helped with the cleaning, would serve guests, make dinner, and was taught the importance of keeping a home. In a vacuum, none of these skills are negative, but the problem is that it is typically the women who do all the vacuuming. My brother has rarely been asked to clean or cook, and my dad is typically free of chores because he works. My mom also works, but as a nanny, and childcare is typically not seen as real work. My experience is not unique in any sense, as the housewife role has existed for a millenia. 

Housewife, but happy to do it. 

This servitude does not just concern meeting men’s needs, but on keeping them engaged visually, as a woman’s worth boils down to her appearance. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote “Men survey women before treating them. Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated” (46). In media and in life, this means women are more akin to objects than to equals. This gaze, typically the gaze of the old rich white men that run the country and thus contribute to most of the policing, project fantasies onto women, and expects them to conform accordingly. 

Sexuality also falls under this gaze. It is my firm belief that conservative men are against the women in the LGBTQ community because they can’t have sex with some of them. It is the parallel of when you reject a guy who’s hitting on you, and he immediately starts calling you an ‘ugly bitch.’ These misogynists have no use for something that doesn’t serve them. While same-sex marriage is legalized in the U.S., trans women’s legal protections are precarious at best. The homicide rate for trans women, and trans women of color in particular, just continues to increase, and this is paired with Trump’s desire to prevent sex changes on legal documents. In gazing at queer women, misogynists are ignorant, and thus hateful.

This ignorance relates to all women in the realm of reproduction and sex. While there are no longer laws in the U.S. that mandate women as their husbands’ property, tendencies and beliefs are still downright archaic. Birth control is as hotly debated as abortion, as pro-lifers want fetuses to live, but once alive, want to regulate their sex lives. Some people take birth control to ease periods or regulate hormones, while some take them because they want to have sex without conceiving. It is this pleasure that so many have a problem with, as a woman’s pleasure is not necessary for reproduction. 

According to Tanya Steele, “in the overall American marketplace, female desire and pleasure is neither supported or promoted. As a result, there is no counter-attack to the religious conservative onslaught to restricting our desires. There is no group, no lobbyists, no ideology that advocates for female pleasure. Therefore, conversations about our bodies and birth control stay within the confines of conservative ideology” (2014). This framework teaches women that they do not have a right to enjoy sex, and if they do, it is shameful. 

This shame is used to stop women from having abortions, and I believe it has nothing to do with preserving life, but with regulating life. A woman with a choice is dangerous, because she can choose to not have sex with you, to not follow your rules, and to set her own path, so the men in charge want to take away that choice. Yet in doing so, they forget that, “Women were forced underground for contraception and pregnancy termination before and we will go underground again if we have to” (Gay, 2012).

Going underground is dangerous, but it is a reality within the patriarchy. This system is as pernicious as it is pervasive, and a larger problem is that it is simply accepted. In Understanding Patriarchy, bell hooks wrote that, “patriarchy is the single most life threatening social disease assaulting the male body” (17). It hurts men too in that they are not allowed to feel emotion and are put into specific gender roles. It is their silent pain that leads to the policing of women, as it gives them control. They are able to take out the frustration of their bottled up emotions on the lower class: women. 

There is room for sympathy for these fragile men, but none for inaction. According to hooks, the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (18) is strengthened when women accept male dominance as a given. In this way, women contribute to their own policing by way of complacency. They also do so by giving money to companies that reinforce the control. In a capitalist society, your money is worth more than your word, and thus women need to not give financial support to those who strengthen the power imbalance. This involves being a conscious consumer of advertisements, which are key distributors of societal tropes. 

Ads show women with perfect skin, perfect teeth, and itty bitty waists. They are often hyper sexual and show women the ideal they need to achieve. They tout their products, such as weight loss pills, cosmetics, or cleaning products, as the way to be the best wife, lover, or mother, and these roles are the only ones that matter. In Sex, Lies, and Advertising, Gloria Steinem discussed the fact that women’s magazines are almost all ads, and how hard it is to get ads for ‘traditionally male’ products. This polices women’s minds and bodies in that it shows them that they matter little more than the products they buy, and tells them the products in particular that they need to purchase.

Ads and women’s magazines also contribute to regulations on body image. By providing photoshop images as the ideal, women are taught that they need to achieve these unachievable images and when they can’t, they feel shame. While there are pictures of impossibly thin women, at the same time, food is presented as a comfort, such as ice cream to heal a broken heart. In discussing this relationship at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Jean Kilbourne said “the bulimic is the ideal consumer.” In this way, ads, and social pressures in general, police women’s health. 

Ads play on women's insecurities, such as not having the perfect bikini body.

Food is presented as a reasonable way to deal with emotion,
but women are still expected to be skinny. 

Again, I must say that women need to take action against these social trends. This is not to put all the blame on women, as it is men who designed the framework that oppresses them, but it is to say that all is not lost. The women’s march and the Me Too movement are examples of what can be done, but the work isn’t over. The effort needs to be intersectional, but even more than that it needs to united against the same enemy: misogyny. Women on women attacks only reinforce the attacks of the patriarchy. 

Wise words of Tina Fey.

References
Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing." London: BBC Enterprises, 1972: 45 -64

Gay, Roxane. "The Alienable Rights of Women." The Rumpus, 2012: https://therumpus.net/2012/03/the-alienable-rights-of-women/

hooks, bell. "Ch.2 Understanding Patriarchy" in Will to Change. New York: ATRIA Books, 2004.

Steele, Tanya. "Hobby Lobby and a Woman's Right to Sexual Exploration." Rewire, 2014: https://rewire.news/article/2014/07/10/hobby-lobby-womans-right-sexual-exploration/

Steinem, Gloria. "Sex, Lies, and Advertising" in Ms. magazine. Arlington: Liberty Media for Women LLC, 1990: 18-28

Leave My Body Alone

     I can still vividly remember sitting on the 5th avenue bus, my legs dangling against the plastic seat, daydreaming about becoming a witch one day, when my mother leaned over and whispered, “People are looking at you.” Seeing my confusion at her statement, my mother said, “They think you are beautiful.” Most adults might think my mother was trying to complement my appearance, and teenagers might think I should have rolled my eyes at her effort. However, I felt horrified, confused and embarrassed that anyone at all would notice me, let alone judge my body. If I was ‘beautiful’ in that moment, would I be ‘beautiful’ in the next? Was I ‘beautiful’ in the last moment? How could I have anything to do with my appearance when really I had nothing to do with the creation of body? In fact my mother, if anyone, could take credit for that. All of a sudden I, like the strangers on the bus, was outside my self looking at my body and wondering what rules, what laws I had to follow to maintain this favorable judgement. Or what rules I needed to break so the invasive eyes of strangers would not bother judging me. Lindsay King-Miller says we focus, “…Too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity…” King-Miller also quotes writer and performer Denise Jolly, “The semantics of beauty are so entrenched in our culture that we would have to interrupt it from birth to escape it.” (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/pretty-unnecessary-beauty-body-positivity)

     My mother of course was not leading the effort to police my body. She was merely a pawn and a victim of the patriarchal system of our culture. The beauty industry is a capitalist marketplace where useless, sometimes harmful products are sold to women by advertisers that instill insecurity in women and girls by using models that are airbrushed to perfection. Television and social media also showcase the perfect and perfected female body. The ‘ideal’ figure has changed over the decades but a beauty standard still exists in popular culture today and women measure themselves against it. A brief history of the ‘ideal’ woman (https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty-explainer-intl/index.html) reminds us that we can trace back to the Victorian era, the effort of men to create an ideal body shape, a way in which to capitalize on products to achieve that ideal and cruelly a way to literally break women’s bodies. Note in the below picture for this corset the ad copy states, “Combining features of daintiness and the best ideas of a shapely and hygienic form.” The message being, you will not be dainty, shapely or clean if you don’t buy and wear this garment. Horrifyingly today, women are having ribs removed by surgeons and going to other extremes to achieve an ideal shape. 

Bruising her softly, one rib at a time.

     Advertisements are particularly harmful because they are everywhere and nowhere. Like an invasive species, having flourished in newspapers, magazines, radio, and commercial television targeted advertisements now seed our online life. When we want to look at photos of our family on facebook or instagram we must also look at (even if we don’t take the information in consciously) targeted ads. Maggie Wykes and Barrie Gunter explain that, “At best, media images of the feminine body are politically oppressive and commercially exploitative. At worst they may justify a young woman’s efforts at self annihilation.” (Conclusion: Body Messages and Body Meanings, p.219) In this way the advertising industry, corporate industry, and the entertainment industry police women’s bodies and set down the influential ‘laws’ that are used to police the way we look. 

    Leading the effort to influence and create actual laws and policy concerning women and their bodies are men in government. What our politicians say influences the way a majority of people think. In a Vox article from 2017, Ann T. Donahue described Donald Trump’s comments on women by saying, “…Throughout the years [Trump] paints women’s bodies as disgusting, confusing bags of flesh and blood whenever they function outside the role of eye candy.” (https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/7/1/15905632/trump-tweet-mika-brzezinski-morning-joe). Besides the policing of beauty there is the policy around what women can and can’t do with their own bodies. For white middle class women the concerns usually only extend to health coverage, contraception and access to abortions. In the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s women of color were not initially not given a voice regarding serious abuses of their bodies. From Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, Jennifer Nelson writes about the history of poor, women of color losing their ability to have children through involuntary sterilization. This inhumane treatment of women’s bodies was legislated throughout the country. In fact, Federally funded sterilization took place until 1979. This was explicitly to control for populations deemed 'dangerous' because they were not white. 

The Horrifying Map of US Sterilization in 1935

     In The Alienable Rights of Women (https://therumpus.net/2012/03/the-alienable-rights-of-women/), Roxane Gay says, “There is no freedom in any circumstance when the body is legislated.” To insure that all women, whatever their financial situation, have control over their reproductive rights, access to health care, access to birth control and a social safety net for their family, we must vote for representatives that will create policy and uphold the rights women currently have. Two groups that keep track of what our politicians are doing for women’s rights are https://americanbridgepac.org/ and https://weareultraviolet.org/. 

Policing of Women's Bodies

Very often do I go on my social media pages, and see a viral post about a girl being sent home from school, prom or work because her outfit was deemed as “inappropriate.” Women’s bodies have been policed since the story of Adam and Eve. The patriarchy has always made women feel ashamed for showing and loving their bodies, just the way they are. Women’s bodies are policed not for their own sake, but because if a woman shows too much, it’s distracting to males. If a woman is raped, often people blame her for wearing something too provocative. And we’re policed for not wearing enough, for not pleasuring men. The continual policing of women’s bodies devalues us. We are told that we are to blame for all of the male species wrong doings, and we have to change in order to stop men. Policing of women’s bodies is a dehumanizing act; we are used by the patriarchy as a scapegoat.

Lizzy Martinez was pulled out of class for wearing this long sleeved t-shirt and told to put band-aids over her nipples because they were distracting to male students. 

            Policing of women's bodies is a deep-rooted issue in our society. Dress code isn’t just an issue in schools and work places, but sometimes even in a woman’s own home. Beth Cone Kramer explores this policing in religions. The Tznuit laws of Orthodox Jews have modesty lawst hat prohibit women from having bare elbows, knees and even toes. And once she’s married, she has to cover her hair with a wig as to not attract any other man to her. In her essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack, Peggy McIntosh writes about male privilege “They may say they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s” (1.) The patriarchy’s goal of policing women’s bodies is to use women for their benefits, and as a blame for all there past, present and even future wrong doings.

            Tanya Steele explores in her article about sexual exploration, that women are viewed as objects to bring men pleasure, rather than humans that are also recipients of pleasure. She analyzes the policing of women’s access to birth control, and writes “these men see a woman’s need for protection, for control over her body, for a desire to experience her sexuality without the risk of pregnancy or disease, as not of interest to them. What interests them is the climax, the end result. For men and boys, in the private spaces of negotiation, their orgasm is the goal” (‘Hobby Lobby’ and a Women’s Right to Sexual Exploration.) The messages being sent to women are that we are worthless. We are here to serve men, and that’s what we should do. But this shouldn’t be the case. As Audre Lorde writes in her book Transformation of Silence, “... if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still die.” Because women are made to believe we have no control, we just quietly accept what the patriarchy imposes on us, because it’s safe. But we need to speak up, and we have been. That’s why the Me Too movement has been so big.

This ad promotes "loving one's body", but only uses stick thin models.

            It is the patriarchy that restricts women’s agency over their bodies. As explored in the article Patriarchal Society According to Feminism, a patriarchal society (which we for the most part live in) consists of a male dominated power structure. This power gives men more privileges than women. One of these privileges is the right to control women's bodies. Men use women to their advantage, and as women we’re supposed to serve. They blame how we dress as a distraction and ignore our own needs, and they continually over sexualize us in media for their own pleasure. Either we wear too little clothes... or not enough. Media has a huge impact on how we view policing of women’s bodies, because media continually tells women we have to look a certain way to be wanted by the patriarchy, and we continue to give over to these ideas. In Jean Kilbourne’s essay Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, she writes in regards to women being shown almost exclusively as sex objects or housewives in ads, “ Women are constantly exhorted to emulate this ideal (beauty), to feel ashamed and guilty if they fail, and to feel that their desirability and lovability are contingent upon physical perfection” (122.) The media is run by the patriarchy, and they force women’s bodies to be viewed as a sexual objects. And this continual portrayal over sexualized women’s bodies keeps enforcing this idea to women that we are here only for men. Our bodies are here to be used as a blame or for men’s pleasure. They use us to reach their climax. They police us to get what they want from us.

·       Kilbourne, Jean. Beauty and the Beast of Advertising. 121-25. Print.

·       Lorde, Audre. "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." Transformation of Silence. 40-44. Print.

·       McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack." Print.

·       Steele, Tanya. "'Hobby Lobby,' and a Woman's Right to Sexual Exploration." Rewire.News. Rewire.News, 10 July 2014. Web. 04 Nov. 2018.

Blog Post 4

Women’s bodies have been policed from the very beginning in basically every aspect of life, I feel women now subconsciously police their own bodies because that is all they know and have been cultured to know. From a young age going to school some dress codes for girls, which most schools only have dress codes for girls, were: your shorts had to reach the length of your fingertips when your arms are by your side or no shoulders showing so no tank tops. The no tank tops one always confused me, even when I was younger and did not know all of these concepts about sexualization, I would always question why a boy can show his shoulders and a girl couldn’t; when I was about the age of 10 to 14 I would question what was so sexy or provocative about a shoulder? how can a shoulder of a little girl be sexualized? that question should make people cringe and realize how wrong the policing of women’s bodies is, and the focus should be on policing the ideas that boys and men have to those female bodies. In the article “The policing of women’s bodies needs to stop” by Lerato Moloi, she also discusses how the policing of women’s bodies is engrained in us from a young age. Moloi says “Policing women is normalized by both men and women and legitimized through state law and policy, educational institutions and in the workplace. Policing women is a form of repression that restrains freedom of expression.” this policing has become normalized, but can become much worse with other rights of women becoming debates. 

There has been a constant battle for women to have full rights over their own bodies. Whereas men do not get policed on what they should look like, how they should dress, or what is right, wrong or “socially acceptable” to do with their body, yet the topic of a women’s reproductive freedom is a debate in politics and being debated by men. In the reading “The Alienable Rights of Women” by Roxane Gay she discusses the reproductive freedom rights of a women such as brith control and abortion. During her discussion about abortion she says “Things have gotten complicated, in too many states, for women who want to exercise their right to choose. Legislatures across the United States have worked very hard to shape and control the abortion experience in bizarre, insensitive ways that intervene on a personal, should-be-private experience in very public, painful ways.” when she says this she is talking about how even though women had the right to choose to terminate their pregnancy since 1973 and since some of the men in charge do not like this right for women to be able to chose what to do with their body, some states have created loop holes to try and change the women decision by forcing them to do many things including but not limited to, undergo invasive medical procedures. When I read things such as this I can not help but to compare this to a man, there is nothing a man is not in control of doing with or to his body, there is no debate in politics by women on whether or not a man should be able to choose what to do to his body, and there never will be because there will (hopefully not) always be this double standard. 

Another double standard between men and women is the body image portrayed in the media, both men and women are portrayed as these ‘perfect’ people in ads and media but the pressure for women to actually look like that unrealistic women in ads is extreme. In the reading “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising” by Jean Kilbourne says “But the ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy. They tell us who we are and who we should be.” (Kilbourne, 121) not only is the government trying to tell women what they should or should not be doing with their bodies but ads and media also try to tell them who they are and who they should be. There is a constant pressure on girls and women, in all aspects of their lives to be a certain way, whether it is what they look like or even what they wear. 

In the article “Stop Policing Women’s Bodies“ by Beth Cone Kramer, she opens the article by saying “We can teach our children there’s a time and place for cocktail or beach attire without shaming girls for their bodies. And we need to teach and show boys that a girl’s attire or presence at a party doesn’t mean she’s fair game.”, which I agree there is a time and a place for certain dress codes and attires but currently the policing of what women wear instead of teaching men self control is absurd. Kramer also says “The idea that women are the protectors of “virtue” and “chastity” is the basis of the rape culture. If a girl is sexually assaulted, we ask why she was at a party, walking home from class unescorted or wearing “that dress.” which is something we discussed in class; we talked about the things boys and girls are taught when they are younger to protect themselves from this rape culture, boys could come up with two or maybe three things whereas a girl could make a list easily, such as, never walk alone, keep your key in between your fingers, never walk with both headphones in etc.

Dove Ad

Dove Ad

There is a new wave of trying to fix these problems in media, there is definitely a long way to go but it is relieving to know that people are becoming aware of these issues and making it a topic of discussion, which it never would have been years ago. A lot of these efforts are seen in Dove ads such as the “Real Beauty Campaign” where they used models who aren't ‘perfect’ and they use models who are ‘normal’ and ‘average’. In the reading “Here’s What Bothers me About the New Dove AD” by Lindsay King-Miller discusses the Dove ad where women walking into a building can either walk into a door labels ‘Beautiful’ or another door labeled ‘Average’. In the other reading “Taking Beauty out of Body Positivity” also by Lindsay King-Miller, she discusses another Dove ad, this one sits down women with a police sketch artists, who never sees them, and asks them to describe their facial features to him, he then asks strangers who have just met the women briefly also for a description of the women; the outcome is that the women describe themselves more harshly and include every ‘flaw’ whereas the strangers create this beautiful description of the women. Some things Miller says in the articles is “These ads each depend on the assumption that in order to be happy, empowered, or confident, women need to feel beautiful.” and “While I’m in favor of encouraging women to feel confident and happy, I worry that today’s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity.” I think Dove had the right idea with these ads and it is a step in the right direction to create these new understandings of women and not everyone being perfect there is still plenty of room for growth and change in the media.

Blogpost #4

Women’s bodies are policed consciously and unconsciously by society as early as the womb, resulting in consequences that confine women to positions of inferiority and devaluation.

Society itself is based on the premises of the male gaze instituted and led by wealthy cyst white heterosexual men. These are the same men that remain at the very top of the social hierarchy and part of the problem in enforcing these barriers for women. However, the majority of white men are unaware that they even have this privilege that seems so obvious to many minority groups. As Peggy McIntosh in White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack states, “Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended” (McIntosh 1). In other words, people cannot have a conversation about improving the status of women without discussing the status of men first. The two subjects go hand in hand with one another to create the imbalance of powers that exist within society. When men deny their superiority they also reject that there is a problem in need of fixing.

Often the male gaze picks and chooses what it pays attention to and what it does not. One thing that the male gaze does see are women as nothing more than sexual objects that provide pleasure for the benefit of others or in this case them. This perception is then distributed to society through various forms of media. In Body Messages and Body Meanings by Wykes Gunther he says, “‘A false standard of what is and what is not desirable is being imposed’ (Berger, 1972:154), mass media representations of femininity and especially the female body not only sets limits and controls on women’s self-worth and the value assigned to them but nurture falsities by allying sexual and social success to size” (Gunther 220). The size that Gunther is referring to is being physically petite which is the complete opposite standard for the “well-built” man. It’s almost as though women are supposed to feel, look and be inferior in all aspects of their lives.

In order for women to stay small in physique, it also means policing women when it comes to the topic of food. As Bordo in Hunger as Ideology states, “Men are supposed to have hearty, even voracious appetites” whereas “...women who habitually seek such experiences (emotional heights, intensity, love and thrills) from food, are most likely to be overwhelmed by their relationship to it, finding food dangerous and frightening” (Bordo 108). Society holds a double standard when it comes to men versus women, but women are the ones getting the short end of the stick. The necessary and simple act of eating that all people need in order to survive and most importantly stay alive is given praise by society when accomplished by men whereas women are castigated because their increasing the likelihood of gaining.

Men vs. women when it comes to food. (L) happy man w/ pizza (R) sad woman w/ apple, 2018.

The impact of these methods of policing forced upon women result in women under the false pretense that their looks dictate their window of opportunities. When women engage with media, they are often given images of their bodies being as Jean Kilbourne in Beauty and the Beast of Advertising states, “dismembered and separated into parts in need of change or improvement.” This psychologically affects women because it causes them to believe that they will never be good enough, especially if they remain true to their authentic self. Society places a great deal of pressure on women to achieve goals that are unrealistic and/or are outright lies. Another thing that Kilbourne notes is that, “All ‘beautiful’ women in advertisements (including minority women), regardless of product or audience, conform to this norm. Women are constantly exhorted to emulate this ideal, to feel ashamed and guilty if they fail, and to feel that their desirability and lovability are contingent upon physical perfection” (Kilbourne 122). All women, no matter if it’s a women of color or a white women is affected by the barriers society has placed on them. Women as a whole have been policed into relying on the approval of men and artificiality to make them happy and accepted. Even looking bare-faced/ “natural” takes effort and investment because people still want to look like the ideal but it might be at a lesser extent.

The "natural" look featured by BareMinerals makeup brand, 2018.

In the article Girls and social media: ‘You are expected to live up to an impossible standard’ many young people such as Julia Peters, 22, feel as though “there is an unwritten rule about how you should look in your pictures- how you should do your makeup and what filter you should use.” This unwritten rule is not just in the case of pictures as quoted here but in real life. Many of the young girls within the article shared stories having to deal with their biggest worry online, comparing themselves to others. To put differently, the male gaze causes women to self-objectify themselves. Women are then forced into viewing each other as competitors, distracting them from uniting as one to fight the real root of their problems, the wealthy heterosexual cyst male that dominates the social hierarchy. For every high there is a low, for every up there is a down, and for every boy there is a girl.

According to Natasha Devon in You are your looks: that’s what society tells girls. No wonder they’re depressed she states, “gendered terms such as ‘girls,’ ‘boys’ or ‘ladies’ not only fail to acknowledge the potential presence of transgender people, but are unhelpful since they constantly remind humans of their gender (and all the social expectations attached).” As a result of these sets of expectations assigned along with the sex at birth, women are the ones more likely to suffer mentally and physically by falling into depression and eating disorders.

From personal experience as a woman myself, I have experienced the pressure to keep my figure tight because society makes it seem as though it is a responsibility of mine to stay on top of my body appearance. There was a point in time where the pressure I was feeling became too much for me to handle that I remember going on extreme diets, overloading on the amount of exercise and consistently shaming myself in front of the mirror. Bottom line is I was way more unhealthy when I gave into the policing of women then when I acted or spoke out against it.

Another thing that I relate to from experience is giving into the artificiality such as makeup. I remember always setting my alarm to wake up earlier, that way I could ensure that I had enough time to put on my daily makeup. It wasn’t until my lack of sleep hit me that I began to question whether or not the makeup I put on was for myself or for the comfort of others. When I finally stopped denying the answer I knew was true, I took a break from putting on makeup altogether because I didn’t want to feel reliant on it to make me feel good about myself. Makeup is only one of many discourses that  are “part of the technology of power-capitalist and patriarchal but also heterosexual, white and Western and also part of subjective consciousness” (Gunther 208). I had finally realized that makeup wasn’t something that I needed but something I thought I needed. My own insecurities were being used to make an industry richer than it already was.

Overall, society and the media aren’t completely terrible because the awareness on these issues are growing and the internet is starting to promote projects advocating for the growth of women’s self-esteem by displaying women of all colors, body types and sizes. No longer is a single story about women and women’s bodies being told thereby improving society by a little but still improving.