Role of Women
Civil Disobedience Class Activity
By: Kendall Earnshaw, Jeremiah Mallari, Kayla Fernandez, Katie Pappas, Elizabeth Ekman, JP Silva, Christian Vu, Spencer King, Haley Zadel, Chandler Atchinson, Julia Chizankos, Rachel Fong, Rachel Wong, Allison Kramer
1950's and Today: How do you see this generation?
It has long been known that the perception of women's inferiority is not only unjust, but overlooked as well. Even with elevated heights of awareness, preventative actions, and relentlessness efforts to stop these injustices, women are subliminally harassed and manipulated even at a young age. Efforts to stop these manipulations do exist, however just like all major cases of injustices, the problem roots deeper than what the eyes see. Pictures, articles, books, and movies constantly shape, alter, and mold a vision of what a perfect body should look like. These standards are often unrealistic and both dehumanizing and demoralizing to all viewers who aren't up to par with these "beauty" standards. Picture like the ones shown above attest to the acclamations that state: today's modern society calls for women to look a certain way to be accepted. These standards attack a person's dignity as it conjures feelings of self worthlessness, self pity, and the lack of appreciation for what the person truly is. Which consequently creates a streamline to efficient business: to attack ones insecurity, to create a compulsion to overcompensate what they don't have; which is, and is created by media, a "perfect body".
This ad portrays women as needing to be skinny to be beautiful. This "need to be skinny" impacts women by telling them that if they are not skinny, then they can not be beautiful. Because of this, they will always see themselves as ugly and will never be proud of how they truly look. Posters such as this poster destroy the self esteem of all women today. By lacking self esteem, women try all they can do to become skinny so that they themselves can feel pretty or attractive. These false assumptions on themselves can lead to severe depression which can result in a women committing suicided, all because they saw a poster that made them feel inadequate and inferior.
Big Name Clothing Companies Start To Get It
In 2009, Ralph Lauren fired Filippa Hamilton, a size 4 Swedish-French model for no longer fitting in their sample size clothes. While Filippa was frustrated with Ralph Lauren's decision, she was not going to originally take it to the public, but after releasing an unrealistic photoshopped representation of Filippa in Japan, many people quickly noticed the image and soon after, Ralph Lauren apologized for the incident. Three years later in 2012, Ralph Lauren hired Robyn Lawley, a size twelve Australian model. Perhaps the choice of hiring Robyn Lawley shows they have learned how to be realistic when it comes to the portrayal of a women's body without having it perpetuate the negative images of women in media.
Eating Disorder Statistics
Women are much more likely than men to develop an eating disorder
The body types portrayed by media are possessed by only 5% of women
47% of girls in 5th-12th grade want to lose weight because of magazine pictures
69% of girls in 5th-12th grade state their image of the "perfect" body is from magazines
42% of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner
81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat
3.7% of women suffer from anorexia in their lifetime
43% of students report onset of anorexia between 16-21
By middle school, 40-70 percent of girls are dissatisfied with two or more parts of their body, and body satisfaction hits rock bottom between the ages of 12 and 15.
Notably, girls’ self-esteem plummets at age 12 and doesn’t improve until 20, an-unhappiness attributed to changes in body shape, as “females first experience a decline in self-esteem between the ages of 12 and 13, a time when most females have entered puberty.”
81 percent of girls would rather see “real” or “natural” photos of models than touched-up, airbrushed versions, yet 47 percent say fashion magazines give them a body image to strive for.
63 percent of girls think the body image represented by the fashion industry is unrealistic and 47 percent think it is unhealthy, yet 60 percent say that they compare their bodies to fashion models, 48 percent wish they were as skinny as the models in fashion magazines, and 31 percent of girls admit to starving themselves or refusing to eat as a strategy to lose weight.
An estimated 24 million people suffer from anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder, all of which can be triggered by “garden-variety” dieting.
Up to 4.2 percent of women have suffered from anorexia; up to 4 percent will have bulimia; 2.8 percent of American adults will struggle with binge eating disorder.
Teenage girls often start to smoke to avoid weight gain.
Obese children were 63 percent more likely to be bullied regardless of gender, race, family income, social skills, academic achievement, or school composition.