Female body image and pornification
Good afternoon! i was watching a programme on channel 4 last night and it got me to thinking, about the way in which women and young girls are having their body image affected by the media. I have an 8 and a half year old sister and she is rapidly developing as she nears puberty, I admit that i am deeply worried for her.
The programme has a website and you can catch it at www.sexperianceuk.channel4.com
it’s title is sex education versus porn. Pornography is an adult thing, unfortunately it has been seeping into evryday life little by little and duee to poor controls many under 18’s are able to acess it, maybe accidently maybe not. But how is it affecting them?
On the programme, what really shocked me into researching today was the moment that the school children when confronted with photographs of say 10 real breasts and 1 pair of falsies they all gravitated to the falsies, they seemed repulsed by the natural boobs of all differing shape and size and their reaction to normal and varing vulva was of abborance.
The boys were quite blase, with their put downs and i could tell thses girls were suffering with really abnoramlly low self esteem because they did not mesure up to porn stars or the modified bodies of glamour models.
when i was growing up i was soooo far removed from the ideal phenotype of desirability that i did not even attempt to measure myself against any scale, the ideal was at the time Jordan aka Katie price, who is a size 8 ( maybe even a six) and her breast were massive absolutely huge we must have been talking about at least 32g. so while i was also size 8 i was 32b , i was also black with natural hair and i was short and i had arse that you could lay your lunch on, that back in the day was deeply unsexy, while the narrow barely there cauasian backside was deriguer.
But now we have various black/ multi ethnic visions of female desirability in the media which my sister will have to contend, the video models with their barely brown skin, their waist length weaves, their super large breasts and tiny waist, with our parents genes she will have little trouble with the full backside, but the whole thing is tyranny.
I do not want my sister stepping of the shower feeling shame, or inferiority when the scale that she uses is a false one, at least we have parental control on our family computer, but what about the outside world? we cannot sheild her from that. I’m glad there are representations of black and nonwhite women out there that are beautiful and desirable, but at what cost? To our collective self esteem? when i grew up the only black women on tv were depicted in characture really, fat , loud, agressive, really 19th century mammy types apart from the women on desmond’s (rip). That was just as damaging but still i feel the more we as women conform to this porno- coded acceptability the more difficult we will find it.
katie price is an admirable woman, she rolled up her sleeves and plenty more items of clothing and she made a fortune, now she is expanding her resume now she is a wife and mother, what about her copy cats will they be that lucky? are they as brave as she was to start with? did they alter themselves because they wanted to or because they thought it would be more sexually desirable to men?
Now i am not casting aspertions on any of the three ladies above who in order say they are silcone enhanced (katie price aka jordan tope left), natural god given (esther baxter), or natural but no one believes it (angela lola luv). Good for you if you are grown and know what ur doing great! but be wary that puberty is difficult enough let alone being compared to these uber women. I know i will never have legs that are long lean and thin , like keri hilson’s but at least i am grown up enough not to let it bother me. If i were still developing and has the same enviromental pressures on me as young girls today, i would crucify myself..
Growing is an extremely long aduous journey and we all have to come out of the other end intact mentally as well as physically. what is disturbing is that some young women as young as 18 are having surgery when they have barely started to fill out. Trust me little girls at 18 i was 32b at 20 i was 32c a few years down the line i am almost a 34d and still in size 10 so please wait for your body to settle down.
At the moment the woman du jour is cheryl cole a nice enough geordie lass who can pack a punch ( she beat up a nightclub attendant boooo-hiss) whats worrying she may be a similar age to me but she appears to have lost sooo much weight that her pretty face seem gaunt!!
this is an old pic and well she looks fab but what i am worried about is that alexandra burke’s mentor is an icon for so many girls of my sisters age and as stunning and untouchable as she is in the pic imagine how much more she is in the next photo 
she is naturally slim but maybe a little too bony here. she is lovely and while i am waffling at this point, i want all girls to feel that way.
It’s not thse women ’s fault they are photographed the way the are due to something called the male gaze that my fellow blogger abagond has written about.
we need to tell each and evry young girl and developing woman aboyt the way that affect female depiction in the media, and that is how we can attemppt to inoculate against feelings of inferiority.
just my 2 cent
Housing crisis and bigots!
Whats been irking me for the best part of the last decade is the housing crisis and misguided peoples false beliefs that all the blame can be laid at the door of immigrants. One group of papers that is partial to this particular line of journalism, is “the DAILY MAIL” and the “DAILY EXPRESS” i find that their mild brand of xenophobia is cultivating a culture of fear amongst the cherished “middle Endland” that they foundly talk of.
They bolster the cries from the far right, that “african immigrants are given council homes above waiting english tenants” or that “asian immigrants fiddle their benefits to cheat” or “polish people are taking all the bedsits”. I can barely read one of these papers without runing into the shrill cries of “white people will be minorites in our own country!” these are the phrases of the far right of course, The aforementioned papers are a tiny bit more respectful than that. That i believe that is down to the fact that their journalists are a tiny bit more educated than the average far right politician/supporter.
Now i feel that the housing shortage in this country is a lot more complex than just “bloody foreigners”. i will outline my beliefs below.
-In the 1980’s Margret Thatcher sold off a large portion of our social housing, thus places are restricted.
-People are living longer thus they are not returning housing stock to the market, thus increasing the “value” of the remaining houses on the market by the scarcity of the commidity.
-the buy to let market is one that has allowed several wealthy, or middle class persons to buy up second homes, or several properties. this increased their own personal wealth, while pushing the housing market further skyward by making the commodity even scarcer.
-People are living differently in modern society, the housing stock is still largely consistant of family homes, 4 bedroom, 3 bedroom houses. While many more single households are existance than ever before. so thus if the needs of people who need to be housed are not being met by the houses that are suplied we obviously have a situation when people will have to wait for an adquate house is found, they may watch people with differening circumstances appear to waltz in and be housed straight away because the house best suited to their requirement is availible.
So there we have it, in my opinion.
What really pisses me off is that bigots take the easy route they do not even try and be intelligent about it they just pull thoughts out of the sky and do not be rational about your arguements.
they cant see that life exepectancy would have anything to do with it. if people used to die at maybe 65-73 and now they die on average 79-100 that is about 20 additional years that their home will be occupied, thus a family who is waiting for that home when they are 65 will have to wait 35 years for that home to become availible, by which time lets assume they have grown up and their children might be awaiting a home.
Margret thatchers government sold off a large portion of social housing, that stock was never replaced, despite the growing population, the tory government was selfish, greed was good, and in essence i can understand their arguement that home ownership is a good thing, but it was not given a sustainable plan.
The buy to let market has also chocked the private market as well. This market has been driven by greed, it took up homes that struggling families needed and priced them out of the market. This is especially hard in rural areas where the wealthy city living elite bought up summer homes in beautiful areas that they only inhabit maybe 3 weeks out of 52. meanwhile the local folk often on vastly different wages look on while their housing market ascends out of the range of their pockets, they cant afford the homes in the region and sometimes have to move away from their area to raise families.
So instead of everyone realising or trying understand they are assaulted with this mistruths that it’s all down to the fact that foreigners are comeing into the country and other such vagrants. The question is when was the time when we did not have foreigners coming to our country? Queen Elizabeth the first was dismayed at the sight of so many “blackamoors” and the tolerant folks up north had several anti jewish pogroms in the middle ages as they were seem as foreigners.
Yes we have people coming to the country and if they pass all the revelant tests then they will be housed in the same fashion to you.But our problems started with us and the way we have handled our housing and business over the past 30 years.
I hate people who base their opinions on stereotypes.
I despise people who base their opinions of people based on stereotypes. Today has been a reall humdinger for them, they seem to be around every single corner.
Sitting down with a young colleague of mine ( well they are 22) while we had a deep and meaningful over lunch putting the worlds to right, she talked about how she hated how her community was portrayed in the media and how it was affecting how people interacted with her as a person. she is a pakistani, but born and raised here in the uk , she is a muslim and no does not wear the hijab, she is very beautiful and funny. I love this girl we have know each other for 5 years.
we were reminiscing over an event in 2004 when we were talking about our communities, we had not known each other long then, she made a hurtful faux pas. She insulted my mother, she made the assumption that my sister and i did not share the same father, when i corrected her she then assumed that my parents were not married. She was very comfortable in making these assumptions to my face and we exchanged a few heated words. i put her right. How dare she make such assumptions, she only knew me on sight, i would not have made an assumption about her or her family, because it is likely that i may be wrong and i had nothing to base them on. whoops !!!! she was momentarily cowed.
The Thursday 7th July 2005 the day that a few so called muslims blew a few tubes and a bus up and took 56 people to their deaths. This girl and myself happened to be working the evening shift together. By the time we signed in for the evening we had an idea of who had done the act, we had been seeing the scenes since 9 that morning. People started with the ignorance. She was teary eyed when we started. we talked in hushed tones, she had already been on the recieving end of harsh looks and while people hadn’t done anything she had noticed that on her walk in that people had been spitting very close to her. By the end of that week she was exhaugsted she had had a huge row at college with some very thinly veiled racism.
she was fed up by august she had gone for a week in ibiza and she had been treated like a criminal, she was singled out for extensive questioning, her luggage was searched over and over, and tipped out and all her underwear was displayed for all to see. she missed her flight and was put on the next availible one with an upgrade… little consellation. ” people see my skin and hair , they see my ethnicity and then they guess my religion and then everything changes… they do not see a person any more, i stop being singular… i become a threat, so great is this threat people have to intimidate me, humiliate me. like i’m responsible for every muslim and every pakistani.” In that moment i knew she understood why i felt so insulted when she made those assumptions. It was sad that she only understood when people started to do the same to her.
Today we sat down talking about some vast nonsense when a young guy sat down with a few cronies, they all had some kentucky fried chicken. I was being good and eating a bacon, chicken casear salad. So from where i sat the smell of the heartattack inducing fried (stroke in batter) chicken, smelt very good. i murmered something about the smell being so inviting. mr diversity 1900, said “god you black people love fried chicken do you eat anything else!” and i was scratching my head, while the table of men dissolved into laughter. where the hell did he get that impression? I generally hate chicken and white meat, love red meat, chicken is meat for people who cannot afford better animals. but fried chicken is a rarity on the grounds that it’s greasy and not as nice as wagamama’s or my local restaurant noodle nation.
I refused to argue with him on the grounds that when i try and do something like that i usually get called an “angry black woman” and that usually ends in more arguing and thus perpetuatng an untrue stereotype. they then started to mock some other black female stereotypes, this man seemed to base his entire image of black women on what you see on maury and yes he hit upon the paternity shows.
DREAD!!!! that is what i did not want to hear, i had to argue with him after he started to super impose the actions of the slutty few onto most black women. He got vile, so did i. he was being vocal about how these women. but he did not leave it personal, he said black women, i told him that black women were not the only ones on that paternity show, and i did not like the way he was broadcasting it although it was exclusive to black women. I said thats like saying that all paedophiles are white based on the fact that all the paedophiles i saw on crimewatch were white.
I thought i was doing well, i did not raise my voice, i stuck to the topic i did not even swear at the ugly cunt. but oh here is the surprise i got called unreasonable, i was an angry black woman and whats more the ugly cunt thinks he touched a nerve…… well with the torrent of abuse i got i guess the whole paedophile thing must have touched a nerve… (just kidding)
