Category Archives: Inspiring Images, Books & Quotes

Girls are the best because we are pretty! That’s it?

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provok661

This is one of the drawings coming from one of the youngest participants in my research (Kirsty, 8 years old; all names have been changed to protect girls’ identity).

During a bonding group session with 6 girls (8-9 years old) I asked the girls to make a drawing about what they thought it was the best thing about being a girl. Let’s consider that out of so many qualities, characteristics, situations, attributes…the girl has decided to focus on just ONE: perhaps the one aspect of being a girl that first came in her mind or the one that she considers more poignant, we don’t know about this.

What we know is that a 8 years old girl has made this drawing in response to the prompt: “why girls are the best?”.

In other girls’ drawings (with the exception of one girl who emphasised instead being imaginative, creative and fun) “prettiness” was a constant component, with girls referring to make-up, fashion and boys’ gaze.

I suggest that this kind of drawings are powerful, emblematic representations of the way young girls internalise media and society messages about being a girl/woman and as such their meaning should be taken very seriously.

 

Killing Us Softly – Jean Kilbourne documentary

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tony

I just thought I should add a link to this state-of-the-art documentary by Jean Kilbourne.

This is one of the first documentary I watched with regards to women’s sexualisation and objectification in advertising (and it remains to these days one of the best I ever watched on the topic): it has now been released in 4 different editions
Jean Kilbourne on her documentary “Killing Us Softly”.

Browsing around the web I found the comment of an American college student who had the chance to watch it as a part of the school curriculum:

“For the first time in my college career I did not fall asleep watching an in-class video. Killing Us Softly 4 by Jean Kilbourne was engaging, relatable, and just interesting all around. The film depicted the way women and men mostly women, are portrayed in the media. Kilbourne gave many examples of ads and commercials where ideals of femininity are distorted and destructive.

This generation understands that everything in the media is not necessarily realistic but this film definitely opened my eyes up to how blatant and incorrect the media is when it comes to its negative portrayal of women. Advertising depicts images and messages that are unhealthy and unrealistic perceptions of body image and sexuality. I do believe that these ads are the main reason that there is such a high rate of females with low self-esteem and suicides in females today. With the constant portrayal of women being tanned, skinny, having large assets, and long hair, females have begun to think that this is what they need to strive to become otherwise they are far from perfect. Well in reality no one is perfect and there is no one perfect body type for a woman. Women come in all shapes and sizes, which is what makes us such unique and beautiful creatures. In reality the type of women that are depicted in the media are unattainable. This is the reason why plastic surgeons are rich because women are constantly going to them to enhance something on their body. Unfortunately by making all these physical changes, women are not becoming the “perfect woman”, they are just covering up their insecurities. So in the long run plastic surgery can only do but so much; it is a short-term cure for a long-term psychological problem.

I am grateful that I was always taught to love myself for everything that I am. Truthfully when I was a teenager I did try to look like the women I saw on television or in magazines but as time went on I realized that those women are not me, and can never be me; that is why I am special and unique!” (JPalm88 – blog post, April 18th 2011)

The comment shows how, for many young women, resource like this represent a real eye-opener. I would be interested to hear comments from my readers on whether they would consider such a resource useful or appropriate in primary schools (perhaps at age 10-11): how early is too early to introduce young girls (and boys) to this analysis?

An Excerpt from “A Woman’s Worth” by Marianne Williamson

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In this book, Marianne Williamson challenges women to see themselves in spiritual terms. Here is an excerpt on beauty.

“Feminine beauty is not a function of clothes or hair or makeup, although billions of dollars are spent in this country each year by women who have been convinced by the advertising industry that it is. Beauty is an internal light, a spiritual radiance that all women have but most women hide, unconsciously denying its existence. What we do not claim remains invisible. That is why the process of personal transformation — the true work of spiritual growth, whether couched in religious terms or not — is the only antidote to the pernicious effects of society’s backlash against genuine female empowerment. Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we’re not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty. The reason we’re such fertile ground for the dark forces of such lies and social manipulation is that we’re dissociated from the genuine light of self-awareness.

The woman who is truly self-aware knows that her self is a light from beyond this world, a spiritual essence that has nothing to do with the physical world. Those of us who strongly believe in the reality of spirit are quickly invalidated by a worldly power system that senses within spiritual truth the seeds of its own destruction. For if we truly believed in an internal light, we would not believe in the power of external forces, and we would not be so easy to dominate and control. We would not be tempted to see hair and clothes and makeup as sources of so much of our self-esteem and the ideal beauty of a fashion model as a sign that we are not beautiful at all.

In the words of Naomi Wolf, ‘We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women.’