Leading Post: Will Women Ever Feel Comfortable in Their Own Skin?

In the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the relationship between women and their bodies is discussed. In this short excerpt the collective discusses the importance of fully knowing one’s body as a women in order to make us better people, stronger, and more self-confident.

Similar to Douglas’ “Lean and Mean” chapter, Joan Brumberg discusses what happens when women over-analyze their own bodies in, “Body Projects.” She explains that today, women view their bodies as the ultimate expression of themselves. She further highlights the idea that with more freedom to expose their bodies throughout the ages, women have become more anxious about certain parts since they are required to mimic the “norm” presented in the media. I thought that Brumberg’s discussion of the shift from creating clothing at home to fitting into standardized sizes at department stores was highly interesting. As was discussed in class today, since standardized sizes can never fit “perfectly,” this form of consumerism has caused many girls to feel abnormal within their own skin. I also liked Brumberg’s discussion of the importance of the bra throughout the ages in that the wearing of this product eventually became a symbol of power/ status for young girls (enlightened sexism, anyone?) since it gave them a point of social comparison to their peers.

Brumberg further discusses how many female bodies are seen as consumer products in the media, which connects to Gloria Steinem’s article, “Sex, Lies, & Advertising," in which she goes on a heartfelt rampage regarding the problems that are associated with advertising within a feminist magazine. Steinem specifically focuses on her experiences working at Ms. Magazine in which many advertising firms attempted to run the content of the publication (only to be denied by lead publisher, Patricia Carbine). Steinem explains that while ads may be necessary to financially support magazines, many companies have a problem with the messages upheld in feminist literature. For example, Steinem describes that when Ms. tried to obtain ads for food giants, these companies complained that not enough recipe pages were held in the magazine. Moreover, when Ms. attempted to recruit Clairol for ad space, this company complained about an article regarding the dangers of hair dye (the irony of this complaint being that Clairol changed their formula for dye due to the facts illuminated in this Ms. article).

These incidents show that in our capitalist market, advertising has taken a firm grasp over magazines so that products are forced into every piece of writing. In Steinem’s words, “praise for advertisers’ products has become so ritualized that fields like ‘beauty writing’ have been invented.” This connection between written pieces and product placement has become a major problem for feminist magazines and for women in general, since it further manipulates them into spending money on things that subordinate them in society. We are instructed how to apply mascara on page 34, and then are conveniently given an ad for Maybelline “Lash Exact” on 35. In order to combat this issue, Steinem suggests that all members of society support products that take women seriously as readers and consumers, and she asks us to put more energy into breaking advertisers hold over the magazine industry so that we can slowly be let out of our consumer-ized cages of inferiority and self-loathing.