Blog #4-Pop Culture and Feminism

The repeated, general ideas I found from the reading are how pop culture has affected the women’s movement and also how feminism is depicted in the media. The reading also makes an interesting assessment of the “male gaze” and how images of women in the media are “social constructed” in the way that men would see them. This in turn “affects how women understand images of other women on screen.” One shocking, but true detail in the reading was the statement, “Without pop culture’s limited images of women, many actual women in the real world might not have been inspired to fight for more and better representations of themselves.” Although this statement is borderline offensive, it makes a valid point that sometimes it’s better to be a rebel with a cause.

The ideal of female beauty functions as a form of social control, because women feel like they can’t escape the constant feeling of never being good enough. According to the article, “She is forced to concentrate on the minutiae of her bodily parts, a woman is never free of self-consciousness. She is never quite satisfied, and never secure, for desperate, unending absorption in the drive for perfect appearance is the ultimate restriction on freedom of mind.” This quote illustrates perfectly the feeling of entrapment that women must deal with on a daily basis. This limits women’s choices and lives, because they feel that they must conform to the body image that the media portrays as normal. This image is far from normal, but women will starve, surgically enhance and moisturize their bodies to death, sometimes literally, until this image of perfection is obtained. Women feel that they don’t have the freedom to eat what they want and just be themselves, because it won’t be good enough in the real world.