timeimmortal

Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred link to an article from Quadrant that discusses the pressures that modern young women often find themselves facing. It’s a pretty terrifying read, and I also think it’s a rather damning indictment of feminism and the various social changes that have emerged out of, or parallel to, that movement. Oh, don’t get me wrong — early feminism achieved some good ends. But suffrage and wage equity were one thing; abortion and the “liberation” of sexuality were quite a different thing, and then not nearly so beneficial.

Trends in popular culture, the insidious creep of the cult of bodily perfection, the dominance of fad diets, billboards and magazines depicting flawless female forms, all play a part. Then there’s the commercial interests of companies marketing the promise of success in life through the bowling-ball breasts preferred by readers of Zoo.

Another significant factor is that the movement for women’s equality was overtaken by the movement for sexual licence — the sexual revolution. To be free has come to mean the freedom to wrap your legs around a pole, flash your breasts in public, girls-gone-wild style, or perform acts of the oral variety on school-boys at weekend parties in lieu of the (as traditionally understood) goodnight kiss.

IN AN AGE OF “Girl Power”, many girls are feeling powerless. They are facing unprecedented social pressure, their emotional and psychological well-being at risk in ways never before imagined.

I understand that the 1950s weren’t exactly all that and a bag of chips for women, and that’s unfortunate. But it has to be said: back then, things were a lot more…well…wholesome. “Sex sells” was hardly the norm in marketing, and the televisions and billboards were not plastered with nudity and just-shy-of-soft-core-pornographic imagery. One might have been able to thumb through a Life magazine and note the presence of a lingere add or two, but even these were reasonably tasteful when compared against even what one can sometimes find in the Sears catalogue.

Heck, even the pinup girls were normally proportioned, and had figures that any reasonably healthy women wouldn’t have to starve herself to emulate. For whatever scandals might have surrounded Betty Page or Marilyn Monroe, their figures were normal and healthily proportioned; they weren’t Photoshopped, nor were they expected to be. Nowadays, one can hardly see a woman (or a man) in a magazine or newspaper who hasn’t had their picture retouched in some fashion.

The body has become a project that a girl has to work on full-time. If she stops to even take a breath, she might gain weight. Too many girls are trying to imitate half-starved celebrities, and are obsessed with trying to conform to impossible-to-attain highly sexualised images. Some sobering statistics:

A Mission Australia national survey (2007) of 29,000 young people aged eleven to twenty-four found that body image was the most important problem for them — ahead of family conflict, stress, bullying, alcohol, drugs and suicide.

The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health found that between 40 per cent and 82 per cent of young women were dissatisfied with their weight and/or shape.

Close to 20 per cent of adolescent girls use fasting for two or more days to lose weight. Another 13 per cent use vomiting. Others rely on slimming pills, chewing but not swallowing food, smoking and laxative abuse, as found in the 2006 National Youth Cultures of Eating Study.

One in 100 adolescent girls suffers anorexia.

An estimated one in five is bulimic.

One in four teenage girls wants to have plastic surgery, according to reports in August last year.

To say nothing of the hyper-sexualized images one sees constantly thrown at young women from every angle. Dove is maybe the one exception to this trend, what with their “Campaign for Real Beauty” and their use of normally-proportioned women in their marketing campaigns. Still, one notes that Dove does make and market products that ostensibly are to be used to “firm up” the skin and keep it “looking young”, thus stoking the fires of the dissatisfaction with body image that plagues many women today.

And much of this can be traced back, I think, to when feminism and other movements sought to “liberate” sexuality, especially female sexuality. The outcome of such a goal should have been predictable — once sex was no longer something “special”, titilation was fair game for marketers. And like the old maxim about Labour Day and white clothes, once sex was liberated it was only a matter of time before women who didn’t look and dress a certain way, and who didn’t “put out” when it was demanded of them, would be thought of as having committed some kind of faux pas.

Feminism, at its outset, did some great things for women. But in the wake of the sexual revolution and its disastrous results, it would seem that the drive to “liberate” women has only left them in heavier, more tightly fastened shackles.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

~ by Kenneth on July 16, 2008.