Readings for 10/18

One of the readings for this week was “Lean and Mean” in Enlightened Sexism. In this chapter the author discusses the pressures women and girls face to meet society’s standards of ideal beauty. She notes the explosion in cosmetic surgeries- most notably breast augmentation. Moreover, she describes how the standards of beauty are almost impossible considering women are expected to have tiny waists and yet watermelon size breasts. Only supermodels have these types of bodies but the overwhelming role of the media influences women and girls into extreme forms of dieting, practicing strange exercises, purchasing endless “miracle” beauty products, and even undergoing cosmetic surgery. One point I also found interesting was how women were also expected to binge eat. After a bad break up what do you do? Curl up with a pint of your favorite men- Ben and Jerry. This creates a double standard that wedges women between binging and starving. This reminds me of a previous clip I posted in my blog in which men acted like women. In one part of the scene the men discuss what they’ve eaten that day. One replies, “I shared a bagel…with a trashcan…” another says, “I had a big gust of wind” finally the last one admits, “I had three chocolate cheesecakes!” Clearly men’s interpretation of women is that they have out of control extreme eating habits, and unfortunately they may not be far off. Douglass writes how even girls in the third grade are unhappy with their bodies! She writes that it seems everyone has the mentality “to lose five more pounds.” The Mean section of this chapter comes from the theory that women participate in “hotness Olympics.” Girls are expected to put extreme effort into their appearances and suffer the consequences; those that forgo this hardship are to be ostracized and ridiculed. As demonstrated in movies like Mean Girls, girls compete against each other for the attention of boys- mainly by becoming “hotter” and ruining others’ reputations. Therefore, it becomes a self-enforcing process through which girls influence other girls’ appearances. The first process in destroying unattainable beauty standards may be to break this “girl on girl crime” as Tina Fay puts it in Mean Girls.
The other reading was an article about menstrual cycles, PMS, and menopause. This article was interesting because it explored a phenomenon not frequently seriously discussed. Many women will joke about PMS and quickly write off all of their problems onto just a case of PMS. In fact, Fausto-Sterling explains how woman have even come to expect such problems, and that expectation alone may be responsible for the appearance of some symptoms. I have never really considered PMS a serious illness myself, nor have I wondered as to how it seems to have a dramatically different effect on women. This article forced me to consider if PMS was actually a singular condition, given that it has such widespread and varied affects on the body. Few other diseases have such seemingly random effects on the body. Furthermore, PMS may only be considered a “disease” because it deviates from the social norm dictated by men. Women are considered to be slaves to their rollercoaster hormones, whereas men are assumed to be emotionally stable all the time and therefore objective judges about women’s changing behaviors. Why is that the case? Maybe women are the normally emotional ones and men are just emotionless robots. Maybe not. But either way, Fausto-Sterling raises an interesting point that men and women both typically experience an emotional cycle throughout the week. Furthermore, girls and boys have expectations about female behavior during the menstrual cycle and these expectations may then actually induce the anticipated behavior. There is a lack of well-crafted studies that examines the causes PMS. Studies either lack the double blind format, do not contain a placebo group, or the cohort is aware of the study’s purpose. All of these flawed methodologies lead to unreliable results. Menopause inhabits a similar mysterious place in society. Post-menopausal women are considered to be “castrated” and only slightly women because of their lack in estrogen. Stereotypically, post-menopausal women are helpless, wrinkled, depressed and susceptible to disease. However, a study of American and Japanese women revealed that 75% of menopausal women reported no sign of symptoms. Contradictory to common beliefs, postmenopausal women feel just fine. All in all, these readings exposed the standards to which women are expected to hold, positive or negative, and the problems they create.