“Becoming the new feminine ideal requires just the right combination of insecurity, exercise, bulimia and surgery.” -G. B. Trudeau
Borrowed from Feministing.com
What would you do if a random stranger on the street told you:
“You are utterly worthless unless you fit into a specific, narrowly defined idea of what a woman is. You should think, feel, act, and especially look the way we say you should. If you do not meet these impossible standards, you should spend every waking hour and every dollar in your bank account trying to achieve them. If you can’t achieve them, you should feel horrible about yourself for being a failure at womanhood. Expect to die alone. No one could ever be with you romantically unless you weigh as much as an eight-year-old, have no pubic hair, are in a constant state of sexual arousal, have no bodily functions, always smell like a tropical island, and bleach your anus.”
Would you punch that person in the face?
I would.
If we wouldn’t accept it from a real-life person, why do we accept it from faceless executives, inanimate television sets and disposable magazines? We’re smarter than that.
The complexities of sexism are difficult to navigate. However, our reaction can be simple: do you agree with everything the faceless “they” say? Or do you not?
Are you going to let yourself be pushed around by the media? Are you going to let someone define womanhood for you, or are you simply going to disagree?
A couple of years ago, I realized that I’d been tricked. It REALLY pissed me off. I thought, “I’m an intelligent woman who has taken entire courses on the media and women’s studies and I consider myself to be a feminist. Yet the media has still managed to get inside my head and fuck with my thoughts.” If I (a very discerning and skeptical 24 year-old university educated woman) am susceptible to this, imagine how susceptible a twelve-year-old girl is. How horrifying is that?
So then I thought, “fuck ‘em” and I realized a few things:
1. Frida Kahlo is my absolute definition of beauty. Not the tanned, thin, blonde, surgically enhanced images of women that I am confronted with every hour of the day. (Although, I have no judgement if those images are truly what you find beautiful or if that is what you look like.)
2. I will NEVER shut up. I have too many brain cells and too many opinions to spend my life acting like a dumbed down version of myself. I refuse to silently accept things that I don’t agree with. In addition, I am SO happy to be with a man who appreciates my mind as much as (if not more than) my body.
3. Getting rid of all the non-friendly clutter in my life was essential. Recently, I cut ties with people who were poisonous to my self-esteem or had a negative outlook. I also stopped reading magazines and got rid of cable. Not being hounded by sexist messages has had a huge impact on my sense of self-worth. I’m now in the process of cutting out celeb gossip sites and reality television. It’s a waste of my precious time.
It very easy: decide for yourself what you find beautiful and how you define womanhood and watch as the world open up before you.
As far as other people’s thoughts on feminism and the media, I think Tina Fey says it best:
“It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves — whether or not they choose to put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and judge each other back and forth on it. It’s a complicated issue, and we [at 30 Rock] didn’t go much further on saying anything other than to say, ‘Yeah, it’s a complicated issue and we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go.’
“ … I don’t have the answer. But I find it interesting that Olivia [Munn, a correspondent on The Daily Show] gets people who go after her on some of these sites because she’s beautiful, and that’s part of it. I think if she were kind of an aggressive, heavier girl with a Le Tigre mustache posing in her underpants, people would be like, ‘That’s amazing. Good for you.’ But because she’s very beautiful, people are like, ‘You’re using that.’ It’s a mess. We can’t figure it out.”
A great article from “Medicinal Mazipan” titled The Unrealistic Nature of Media Images and Fighting Back
A “Time” article on the current state of sexism.
