Rhetorical Techniques Used In Whose Body Is This By Katherine Haines

The poem “The Limited Edition Platinum Barbie” critiques our culture’s narrow standard of beauty. Our society is consumed by the fantasy and perfection of the idealized body. This constant fixation on physical perfection has created unreasonable beauty standards for women, ones we cannot possibly achieve on our own. Such standards permeate all forms of popular media, particularly fashion magazines and advertisements. Women are bombarded with the notion that we must be thin in order to be desirable. These images project an

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.

Is this what media finally comes to? To profit and acquire fame, while throwing into the back the importance of wellness and confidence of women young and old alike? In this age many women around the world are heavily influenced by the prevarication of the modern culture's "perfect female body". Evidence of this ubiquitous illusion is prevalent in the texts "My Body Is My Own Business" an essay by Sultana Yusufali and the short comic "My Body" by Vicky Rabinowitz. The example of the crushing influence of beauty by the media are explicated by both texts. In the essay by Yusufali, she boldly writes: "[By] reading popular teenage magazines, you can find out what kind of body image is "in" or "out"' (page 52). By this, Yusufali explains how women

This advertisement was most likely published around the 1950’s. Women was supposed to fulfill certain roles during the 1950’s. The perfect wife was supposed to stay home and have dinner ready and on the table for when her husband arrives home from work. The advertisement says a lot about how some men may view their wives and many women who always had need for a man. Women would more than likely be shown doing the “nonworking roles of the home” then a man would. If the portrayal could be different such as the man being the cook or the parent who stays home and takes care of the kid’s things would be very different. Women would be seen as the more dominant role in the relationship. Men would have to have dinner on the table before their wife

Your decisions to comply with society’s view of “beauty” are no longer subconscious, but rather are more conscious-driven decisions. Barbie’s slender figure remains idolized; however, it has evolved from a plastic doll to a self-starving model that is photo-shopped on the pages of glossy magazines. You spend hours in front of a mirror adjusting and perfecting your robotic look while demanding your parents to spend an endless amount of money on cosmetics and harmful skin products to acquire a temporary version of beauty. Consider companies such as Maybelline, which have throughout the ages created problematic and infantilizing campaigns and products for women. More specifically consider the “Baby Lips” product as well as the company slogan, “maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline,” that reiterates the male notions of beauty to which women are subjected. Society’s perception of male beauty isn’t tied as inherently to age as it is for women, in that cosmetic companies continually market products to consumers through the male gaze. Women are constantly defined by their appearance, which is problematic in and of itself, but this problem is exacerbated by society’s rampant ageism which tells women they must maintain youthful, feminine looks as they

Men and women nowadays are starting to lose self-confidence in themselves and their body shape, which is negatively impacting the definition of how beauty and body shape are portrayed. “...97% of all women who had participated in a recent poll by Glamour magazine were self-deprecating about their body image at least once during their lives”(Lin 102). Studies have shown that women who occupy most of their time worrying about body image tend to have an eating disorder and distress which impairs the quality of life. Body image issues have recently started to become a problem in today’s society because of social media, magazines, and television.

For decades women have been put under the pressure of looking a certain way. This pressure, primarily begins in the adolescence- teenage years of a girl’s life. Teenage girls are expected to have perfect bodies.Thin- but curvy, tan- but

Through The Body Project, Brumberg explains how American girls have shifted from judging a girl through her personality and internal character to judging through her appearance. But as we become more comfortable with our bodies, American girls are going through yet another shift: we are judging girls based on not just their appearance, but also through their material possessions. It is a rare sight to see someone judging others based on their internal character, but Brumberg clearly illustrates how we have gone to a world of material

African American rapper “Lil’Kim” publicly admitted to getting surgery and bleaching her skin, saying “really beautiful women that left me thinking, how I can I compete with that? Being a regular black girl wasn 't good enough.” This trend of women being unhappy with their bodies is not uncommon. 53% of 13-year-old American girls are unhappy with their bodies, this grows to 78% by the time they are 17 (Maine, 2011). Due to this, more women result to practices making themselves more “attractive”. One of these practices is the art of wearing cosmetics. Self-conscious women are more likely to wear cosmetics than less self-conscious women and report that they believe their social interactions are more pleasurable when they wear makeup (Miller &

So when people look and see that they don’t look like they’re favorite super-model it can put a downer on their self-confidence. This causes many girls feeling that they aren’t good enough in society, society won’t accept them because they aren’t perfect and they start to not like their body. When for many females they can’t lose as much weight as their friend can just because of their genes and how they were born. “The lack of connection between the real and ideal perception of their own body and firm willingness to modify their own body and shape so as to standardize them to social concept of thinness…” (Dixit 1), being focused on unrealistic expectations can cause women to lose themselves and change their attitude on how they view their body, and not for the better. “Body dissatisfaction, negative body image, concern with body size, and shape represent attitudes of body image.”(Dixit 1), women are so obsessed with looking good that they are missing out on enjoying

It is a crisis in today’s world where teenagers feel the need to censor certain parts of their personality and physical features. Some feel that they should be the same as someone else so that they are not judged as much. Some want to look and be different and still expect to be not judged. During the month of July 2015, teens started a trend, a ‘Don’t Judge Challenge’. Teens have been declaring war against body shaming. Body

For example, girls will style their hair to “become more attractive” (Berger 2014), or they will purchase ‘minimizer,’ ‘maximizer,’ ‘training,’ or ‘shaping’ bras, hoping that their breasts will conform to their idealized body image” (Berger 2014). This all appears to be harmless activities, yet when body image is only addressed outwardly and not psychologically, there can be an increase in poor and destructive behaviors. For instance, body image dissatisfaction can lead to poor self-esteem, which can create a cycle of increased body dissatisfaction, followed by decreasing self-esteem (Stapleton et al., 2017). Ultimately, a teenage girl can find herself in a cycle of “depression, eating disorders and obesity” (Stapleton et al., 2017). On study in 2012 revealed, “Two-thirds of U.S. high school girls are trying to lose weight, even though only one-fourth are actually overweight or obese” (Berger 2014). This self-view can lead teenage girls to begin extreme dieting, exorcising or develop a full-blown eating disorder, such as anorexia (Berger 2014). Therefore, it is important for society to encourage young girls to know that they are beautiful just the way they

Meaghan Ramsey's TED Talk "Why thinking you're ugly is bad for you" is a powerful speech about low body confidence. Ramsey talks about how society's pressure to be perfect is one of the main reason for young girls' (and boys') low body confidence and how these feelings of low esteem can impact their lives and futures. I chose to analyze this speech because I have experienced low body confidence and I have felt those feelings of low self-esteem. In Meaghan Ramsey's speech "Why thinking you're ugly is bad for you", she discusses how low body confidence is undermining academic achievement, damaging health, and limiting the economic potential of today's youth who are growing up in a world of social media.

There has been an increasing number of women that are dissatisfied with themselves due to constant external pressure to look perfect. YWCA’s “Beauty at Any Cost” discusses this in their article saying that, “The pressure to achieve unrealistic physical beauty is an undercurrent in the lives of virtually all women in the United States, and its steady drumbeat is wreaking havoc on women in ways that far exceed the bounds of their physical selves” (YWCA). Being surrounded by society’s definitions of beauty has definitely taken a toll on American women’s confidence. This toll becomes evident from statistics such as, “7 in 10 girls believe that they are not good enough or don’t measure up

In the year 1998 women would strive to be perceived as the “perfect” woman with flawless skin and a skinny body. In the 1990’s technology changed how we would perceive women forever. With this new technology we now have access to digital editing and other online editing tools that women can use to eliminate all of their imperfections. With these tools our society put a huge pressure on girls to look like the people in the magazines. The problem with this, the girls in the magazines were not real. In 1998, people did not realize what they were doing to girl’s confidence and ability to feel beautiful in their own skin. They were showing the world what women could now look like through photo shop. For many years this trend continued, fortunately, in the year 2015 everything changed for the