Thoughts from My Psychology of Women Class

So today in my Psychology of Women class we were talking about gender stereotypes and the media. It's pretty obvious that the popular culture does shape stereotypes. But sometimes the ways it does this are very small and "insignificant." One example we talked about was shopping for clothes when girls are little. There is a HUGE selection of clothes for small girls. Of course there are clothes for young boys, but not nearly as many choices as girls have. So from this fact, you could maybe draw a conclusion that this supports or almost encourages girls to be more materialistic than guys. Girls have an assortment of accessories and from the images they see in magazines, in order to fit in, be popular, or just be well dressed, they have to have purses, earrings, necklaces, etc. When I was growing up, I never got my ears pierced. It wasn't that big of a deal to me, and honestly I just didn't want them. It was something that would make me a girly girl in my opinion and I didn't want that. (For those of you who don't know, I was borderline tomboy when I was growing up.) Whenever someone realized I didn't have my ears pierced, it was chalked up to I was afraid.... which was not the case in any way. Also when someone realized that I didn't have my ears pierced, the person's expression would change to an expression that says, "Wow, you're weird." But they would never say this to my face. They would just keep asking why and again, just chalk it up to me being scared of needles or something along those lines. So... fed up with this constant treatment, I went and got my ears pierced on my 18th birthday. It was something you had to have an adults signature for if you were underage so it was the perfect act of being an adult for me. But this brings me back to my original point, why are certain things expected of women. We're expected or stereotyped to have our ears pierced, like clothes and shopping, cook, take care of children and just be a "girl." I'm sorry, I absolutely hate shopping. Ask my sister, my mother or my father. Or for that matter anyone who truly knows me. I detest going to stores and trying on clothes. If I could walk in, pick something up, pay and leave.... i'd be sooo happy. But no, you have to try it on, try on multiple things to make sure you like it, and so on. It's this whole long boring process. AHHHHH! Ok, rant over. But again, in class we talked about how magazines portray women as extremely thin and beautiful which encourages or brain washes our youth that they HAVE to be that thin. If they aren't they are fat and/or ugly. It's a horrible fact about our nation that we put soooo much emphasis on appearance. This trend of girls becoming depressed and developing eating disorders because of this emphasis is SICK. I can only hope that it gets better and that awareness is made that putting those types of images on billboards and magazines is only hurting our youth.... who are our future leaders. I would like to say that in Spain, they have banned pictures of girls who are under a certain weight or under certain body measurements to be put on billboards, magazines, etc. They had such a high rate of eating disorders that it was almost like a pandemic. But, once this ban went into affect, the number of reported eating disorders went down. I'm not going to say it went down drastically, because as far as I know, it didn't. But, it went down none the less. Putting bans into affect like this one isn't the answer or solution to this problem. Better thinking and change is. 




Ok, so I know I went on a few tangents and might have strayed from the original topic, but this is what has been floating around in my head today. If you don't like it, deal with it. :)