Blog #4 Social Construction

In Revolutionary Road and Mona Lisa Smiles, women were portrayed as the good housewife. In Mona Lisa Smiles, Julia Roberts plays a woman who isn't married and wants to spend her life as a career woman teaching and she wants to show her students that there's more to a woman than just being a housewife. One of the girls decides not to go to Yale Law School because she wants to be the housewife. In Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet plays a housewife who becomes sick of doing her role of the perfect mother and wife. She wants more than what the average housewife even dares to dream of having. At one point, she tells her husband that they can move to Paris and she will work while he relaxes and takes the time to do whatever he wants to do. In the readings, I feel like there was a huge pressure on women to be the perfect housewife and that was the perfect body image at that time. I also gathered that women have all kinds of different issues with their bodies. Some have issues with their skin color and others have issues of weight. The general idea is that there has always been an issue with body image. Advertisements today are almost sexual in a way because sex does sell. Obviously women who look like models and have beautiful bodies are going to climb father up the social ladder and I hate even admitting that I believe that is very true. Sex truly does sell and it's ridiculous that they companies use sexual attraction as the number one way to sell. 

The whole housewife thing is kind of weird to me because I was raised in a generation where women have successful careers and some women choose to be a housewife. I grew up in a generation where women are allowed to make their own decisions about their lives and destinies. I really like the concept of being a body outlaw and I truly hope that I can one day become a body outlaw. When we took our little quiz over different statistics about body image, none of the answers shocked me because there's such a high pressure to look good and I honestly say that I haven't met someone who doesn't think something is wrong with themselves. It's kind of shocking that body image has been an issue for an extremely long time because I've never thought about how far back body image has been an issue. Female beauty serves as a very big function of social control. Like I mentioned above, women who fit the "perfect" body image does tend to climb higher on the social ladder and it's something that I have seen happen. In rap videos, you don't see women who are overweight and the women are hardly wearing anything and dancing provocatively. Now, I must admit that I've always put the blame on the rappers for giving women a bad name and a negative body image. It wasn't till recently that I finally saw that these women make the choice to be in those music videos which led me to think about the models in advertisements, they all have the choice. Women can gain social status and money by using their beauty as an advantage, but they must deal with the consequences of what the media is going to say about their bodies and how sometimes that one music video or that one advertisement is going to make women in general look bad because of what the media portrays what we want to look like. In the workplace, you always hear the stereotypical woman who is beautiful will get the promotions, but then you can't help but wonder if they only got hired because of their beauty. Beauty definitely puts a limit on women's choices and lives and always will.