Susan Bordo focuses on the female “body – what they eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body – is a medium of culture.” (Pg. 2240) She stated that “the body is not only a text if culture. It is also a practical, direct locus of social control.” (2240) In the video above, models have to fit this perfect image of the female body. There in the constant need for “improvement” (2241) As Bordo states, “a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion – female bodies become docile bodies- bodies whose focuses and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation.” Basically women from the early ages till this very day try to do everything to attain the body that others have, one that their husband or boyfriend might want. The constant need for improvement destroys the inner women.
The women in the clip show the stereotypical women, i.e. beautiful, thin, tan, and those who dress nice. It is society that creates this high demand for women to have the stereotypical look. Women constantly feel the need to “diet, [wear] makeup, and dress” accordingly to fulfill the image men in particular have created.
The clip views a few teenagers being asked if they like to be a model. Of course not one male was asked in this documentary. NOT ONE. This shows that Bordo was indeed correct in saying that “our contemporary aesthetic ideal of women, an ideal whose obsessive pursuit had become the central torment of many women’s lives. In such an era we desperately need an effective political discourse about the female body, a discourse adequate to an analysis of the insidious, and often paradoxical, pathways of modern social control.” The clip illustrates exactly that. Models constantly say they do not starve themselves and lose weigh by exercising. But when is it enough. When are women going to stand up and say, we have a right to look whatever what we are healthy, weather that be a little overweight or not.
Another big problem we have with the perfect image of the desirable women is that women become anorexic, develop hysteria, and agoraphobia. For those women, that is there transformation and sometimes women can’t get out of the situation they placed themselves in. The female body as Bordo discusses throughout “Unbearable Weight” is a central idealized image. Men and women have created these perfect ideal women and only way out would be to recognize the problem.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan. "Unbearable Weight". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York
"Covergirl Culture" YouTube. 27 Oct. 2009. Web. 10 May, 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hunVgrHLxvc>.
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