Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique straightforwardly holds psychologists, educator, and the media fully responsible for the socially constructed image of women as only wives and mothers. These three sources Friedan blames is interesting because they are generally sources which people view to have knowledge and we normally don't question their information because they are viewed as expert on the subject. What is troubling about this, is that society tend to just accept what they hear from a source of authority as true. For example when Friedan started to explain the concept of "The Trapped House-wive" and how doctors believe there was something wrong with the women instead of analyzing their unknown problem in terms of their societal role impose upon them. Although Friedan refutes the image of women as being just wives and mothers, it seems that in today's society it is still hard for women to be both successfully business people and traditional views (mothers/wives) at the same time; it is like women today are forced to choose between a career or a family. Friedan's reference to clothes and how women are made to fit them and not for clothes to fix the woman's figure interestingly suggest women have bound to make sacrifices in life.
Both Beauvoir and Levy touch upon the topic that women are there for men's pleasure, weather it be sexual, visual, or others. Beauvoir goes into discussing how language, religion, and biology have define women in terms of men. The example of how men incorporates both women and men whereas women only suggest female. I find it interesting how female terminology are usually view as negative. For example, the idea of calling someone an actor oppose to an actress, which have a negative connotation attached to it; actor implies skill and talent whereas actress implies materialists and superficial matters. It is interesting to note how many words in our language and even Spanish have gender associated with them. In last week's post I mentioned an article by Tannen; she suggest a really interesting point where in biological terms two X chromosome makes a female and an X and Y chromosome makes a male. She further suggest that two Y chromosome makes nothing; therefore in biological term, men should be define in terms women instead?
Levy's article makes the notion of sex, female sexuality, and pornography more easy to talk about. While many people in society tend to shy away from having and conversation about the above topics, especially pornography, Levy shone light on these topics is way I would never think about. What troubles me about this article is that it seems that women either have to accept the standard image society place upon them or they completely rebel against that image.
While reading Echols' article it is noteworthy to realized that this is the first reading in which the feminist movement was told through the lens of American American women instead of what we have been previously reading which audience targeted white, middle-class, educated women.
On that note, I believe that feminism have expanded beyond the walls of older women. I think in our society today, especially through the portrayal from media the idea of what a woman is, how they should look, behavior, etc. have targeted women and girls of all ages. The first example that comes to mind is TLC's television show called "Toddlers and Tiaras." This is basically a beauty pageant for extremely young children to even infants. Television shows like this makes me wonder what does the show convey about our society?
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