Femininity

• When one thinks of femininity they usually think of complete beauty and perfection.

•  It is the idea of somatic femininity in that, female bodies are never feminine enough and must be intentionally and sometimes painfully made to be what “nature” wants it to be like (Urla and Swedlund, 1995).

• "Beauty Myth": Naomi wolf explains the "beauty myth" as being fueled by profitable weight loss, cosmetic and fashion industries. It shows the glamorized ideas of the ideal body and how it influences women as, "...a dark vein of self hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control" (Urla and Swedlund, 1995).

• Gender is primarily located in the physical body, rather than gesture, language or other displays of performance (Urla and Swedlund, 1995).

• Barbie is, “…an ideal not just for young women, but for all women who feel that being beautiful means looking like a skinny, buxom, white twenty-year-old (Urla and Swedlund, 1995).

The following video below is a clip from the educational film, Killing Us Softly. It discusses how women learn what ideal beauty is at early age from the models they see in magazines, but what they tend to not realize is that the majority of the model's bodies are edited in some form, which makes it unattainable to imitate. 


Killing Us Softly 4 (0:34-1:54)