Jamaica Kincaid Woman

783 Words4 Pages

Women are programmed to believe that they have to look a certain way to be accepted in today’s society. Even from birth, they do things in certain cultures to change a baby’s physical form. Such as squeezing the nose to make it smaller or stretching the neck or legs to make it longer. We as women are taught to look a certain way or do thongs to look beautiful. Images in the media, history, our upbringing, and culture has a lot to do with it. Starting from a young age, things, such as Disney princess and even the unrealistic shape of Barbie was showing us that, that is what we are supposed to aim to look like. In the end we lose our self-respect, dignity and even jeopardize our health to maintain today’s society beauty standards. We as women stop at no cost to be accepted and branded as beautiful.

Throughout history, women has been objectified by the media and put down in order to buy into whatever the companies were …show more content…

As daughters our mothers, grandmothers and aunts has pass down advice and beauty secrets that dates back for generations. Women are taught to only be on this earth to bear children and serve men. Therefore we are only seen as sexual objects and slave to men because they are the powerful gender. In the short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, it shows a mothers giving advice to her daughter on how to be a woman. She talks about ways of cooking and how to dress properly and to not succumb to whoreish ways. She fears for her daughter becoming promiscuous, so she tells her to stay away from certain men and also teaches her a remedy for abortion. Therefore implying that women are easily peer pressured into looking like a slut and becoming one for these men. She wanted her daughter to have self-respect and dignity for herself and be ladylike. She didn’t want her to succumb to society’s pressure on what they wanted women to be like versus what she

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