The Perfect Woman

Well...it's been a week or so. I've had about the busiest week of my life since school last year, ha. But I realized I'm changing the purpose of this blog. It used to be about my everyday life/feelings and yeah, they'll be some days where something super special awesome will happen and I'll blog about it. But the purpose of this blog is changing to just my feelings. I'm a sociology major; I spend A LOT of my time analyzing and just plain thinking-and most of the time, it drives me crazy. I think that's part of the reason why I've been feeling kinda miserable this week-I think too much and most of the time, I keep these thoughts to myself.
So from now and hence forth, I will be using this blog as a way to control my thoughts. Somedays, I'll rant. Somedays, it might be just a simple thought that got me through my day. And somedays, it'll be more of an analysis of those around me, that I watch and interact with 24/7.

Soooo....my comeback blog post....
I titled this "The Perfect Woman." I want you to think about this for a second. When I say "the perfect woman," who comes to mind? My guess would be a woman who is skinny, wearing lots of beautiful makeup, fashionable clothes, smiling and definitely hot. Right? Don't tell me you were thinking something different, because if you were, you're an outlier (blog post coming soon...). Most of us tend to think of a hot, sexy, skinny woman who most would claim is "beautiful."

So today, in my sociology class, we talked about the effects of the media. Ohhhh, the all powerful MEDIA. Scary. Really, it is. The first video clip we watched was enough to make me a little bit frustrated with the media....

Really? Ha ha ha, media. Yes, while it is true that women drivers are not the best (I'll admit, I feel more comfortable driving with a man than a woman....and to this day, I'll sit in the front seat if it's a man driving rather than a woman), really? I found this pretty degrading. Being a woman, I grew up and still get the women jokes, the "make me a sandwich" boyfriends, and even the Mormon outlook that I should be an excellent chocolate chip cookie maker (I am, by the way).

But why does the media continually push society into thinking this way?

In addition, in my sociology 111 class, we watched this AWESOME documentary. I don't exactly recommend it, because my professor had to edit it out for us (and told us that if we felt uncomfortable watching PG-13 movies we didn't have to come to class) but it was inspiring. I cried (yeah, I'm a crier so it was probably expected) but it was honestly really inspiring. It's called "Miss Representation." It was entered into the Sundance Festival and it's all about women and how media's effects are harmful and degrading.

One aspect of the media that it focused on is women in movies. Movie directors were interviewed and explained that when making a movie, they realize that they will get the most audience from these strong male influenced movies (Iron Man was featured quite a few times, think action packed with hot girls hanging onto a millionaire's arm) because all men will want to go see it...and bring their girlfriends. On the other hand, a strongly influenced female movie (such as Eat, Pray, Love) will bring a whole different audience, mostly women. So movie directors will continually put out movies like Iron Man, where Tony Stark can do whatever the heck he wants, with whoever the heck he wants, because he's a millionaire.

Is "real life" like this?
NO.
So why, WHY do we as society buy into this!?

The same goes for the flip side--chick flicks. My wonderful "inspired" friend Cortney posted this article to my Facebook wall yesterday (which was actually kinda inspired, as it led to my thought process for sociology today) that talked all about chick flicks and how life IS NOT like this. (If you care to read the article, here's the link, sorry it's not entirely language appropriate.) Let's take the classic example of The Notebook, which I only saw last year. My initial reaction was....what? This main girl cheats on her fiance to go back and find the love of her life? Really? And that's exactly what the article talks about!

So, let's take chick flicks and see what "Miss Representation" says about them. In the documentary, it talked about how in click flicks, even though the protagonist is a woman,  the woman still lives in a man's world and tries to find her knight in shining armor to take her away and provide for her, because clearly women can't provide for themselves. But (and here's my main point, it took me awhile to get to it...) how does this woman protagonist find said knight in shining armor?

By being "The Perfect Women" and fitting the media's ideal image of a woman. If you notice, majority of click flicks/movies/tv shows, the beautiful skinny girl wins the date.
SO...what is this telling women of my day?
I have to be perfect size two model with beautiful straight blonde hair and dazzling blue eyes to thrive in this world.
If you haven't seen this video, you must have been living under a rock for a few years. Every time I watch this, I get chills...

See? This is what I STRONGLY WISH women/girls/my friends would understand. There is no humanly possible way to be as perfect as the way media portrays women. There's no way. Stop trying. You won't succeeded. I'm sorry, but unless you have a way to mess with brains and photoshop yourself, you can't reach media's level of beauty. So why do we as women focus so much on the media and trying to fit into a size 2 pair of jeans? I don't have an answer. I just urge our society to become "media literate." As it said in "Miss Representation," “we need media literacy as much as we need to learn how to read.” And I'm not guiltless. I need to do better in realizing that a perfect body isn't necessary for success, recognition, or just being overall well liked. Why would I want a guy out there who is as shallow as to judge me because I don't have the perfect size two body? I don't. 

As an ending note, I leave with you the words of Elder Holland in a talk entitled "For Young Women." (Again, we watched it in my class and it made me cry. Here's the link if you want to watch the full talk, which again, I urge you to do).

"I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: “You can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people’s opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. … The key to feeling [confident] is to always listen to your inner self—[the real you.]”