As I read Joan Brumberg's "Body Projects" and Boston Women's Health Book Collective's "Our Bodies, Ourselves," I noticed the differences and similarities these two articles revealed about the correlation between women's bodies and empowerment. While Brumberg provided the historical swifts of different body parts as a sense of women's empowerment, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective advocated for women's empowerment through the knowledge of their bodies; theses two articles illustrate the divide between the external body and internal body of women's power. On another note, both of these articles present a common theme: change--whether it's the change in body images society, mainly females, focused on or the changing knowledge society have about females internal bodily functions.
In Brumberg's article, she discussed different accounts that illustrated society's shifting focus on females' bodies--the evolution from hair to legs to breasts to everything below the waist line to weight and being tone. For me, the different body parts which society focused on in a specific period suggest that the standards of "beauty" are changeable and, more importantly, power is also malleable. Furthermore, I wasn't clear what Brumberg meant when she wrote, "But as young women became more independent of their mothers and more knowledgeable about the world, their self-esteem began to have more to do with external attributes than with inter qualities..." (101). This quote can be taken in two ways: is Brumberg suggesting that women need to be dependent on their mothers and docile/oblivious (or else they won't develop morally righteous) or that women have misused their freedom and knowledge (or is she suggesting something different)? I also find her statement "it should not surprise us that some young women today regard the entire body, even the most private parts, as a message board" problematic (137). Are we really? This statement, for me, gives the impression that girls are dressing and doing things to their bodies with alternative motives beyond the reason for just, simply, for themselves. Lastly, from Brumberg's article I see the beauty and health to be closely related to class and race. Not only does eating healthy and looking "beautiful" is associated with wealth and privilege, there is also a cultural component to leanness. When she mentioned how family is a factor that pushes their children to be skinny, I thought about the Asian culture and our take on what's "fit." I have often been told by others how they have never seen an overweight Asian person before, especially a female. Why are some races more likely to be overweight than others? How much does our body image have to do with cultural, social, and monetary factors/value?
Gloria Steinem's "Sex, Lies & Advertising," discuses the plight Ms., a feminist magazine, have with getting advertisements in their magazine. Her article sparked a very interesting question: can a magazine exist without any advertisements? On a larger scale, can any form of media exist without advertisements (if we don't take into account that money is the key factor of ads)? A good majority of any magazine is filled with ads, of and hour television show 20 minutes is devoted to ads (and even within the show, the actors are advertising products), and just generally we live in a society cluttered with advertisements. Since Ms. magazine have a difficult time finding advertisements that 1) align with its belief and 2) advertisers who want to invest in placing their ads in the magazine, this reveals how strategic marketers are with their target groups. This idea isn't something new or something consumers don't know about; the more important things this reveals, is how consumers continue to feed the system (in this case advertisements and consumerism).
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