How Females Are Told To Display Femininity
There isn’t a day that goes by in our society where a female has not been judged on how she embodies the stereotypical traits of femininity. Whether it is a simple comment about what a women hair style all the way up to whether women should be allowed in the work place. Females bodies are an outward display of femininity. Females show femininity through notions of control. Female hunger — for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification is to be contained. For females to be successful in the professional arena they must embody stereotypical masculine traits of self control. In advertisement females are shown as not assertive. When women are placed in advertisement they are shown letting the environment control them. Females are expected to show their femininity through self control and a logical extreme of self controls manifests its self as illnesses such as anorexia and agoraphobia.
Females display femininity through the symptomatology of mental disorders. Females demonstrate femininity through anorexia. Anorexia is a type of eating disorder in which the person has a very low body weight coupled with the fear of gaining weight and an extremely high desire to be thin. For hundreds of years the ideal female body has been described to be slender, therefore anorexia is a logical extension of hyper-slenderness.
In our society women are required to learn how to feed others but not themselves. They are taught that any desire for self-nurturance and self-feeding are greedy and excessive. Females present femininity through agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder in which people feel anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe and with no easy way to escape. Agoraphobia among women began to escalate in the 1950s and 1960s, which was a time of reassertion of domesticity and dependency as the feminine ideal. Career woman became a dirty word, much more so than it had been during World War II, when the economy depended on women’s willingness to do men’s work. The reigning ideology of femininity was childlike, non-assertive, helpless without a man. The thought was that women were content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies and home. The house bound agoraphobic lives this ideology as a literal display of their femininity.
Whether we look at agoraphobia or anorexia we can find the body of the sufferer deeply inscribed with the ideal construct of femininity that reflects the period in question. Females exhibit femininity through the use of body language. In advertisement women are often displayed lying down. The lying down position gives the impression of defensiveness, submission and sexualization of the person lying down. All of these are stereotypical feminine attributes.
Another pose typically associated with women in advertising is referred to as the bashful knee bend. This pose shows women off-balance, unready to react, expression and expectance of subordination. These are typically associated with personality traits of women and femininity. On the other hand, men are always standing, active, and alert. The standing position shows men are dominant and active in their own environment. The men are typically shown protecting and cradling the women that they are posing with. For men to be considered masculine in advertisement they must do the opposite of their female counter parts to display their masculinity.
Society tells women that “you are your looks” thus we are atomically associating a women’s femininity with her outward appearance. When our society reduces women down to their outward appearance we greatly diminish their role in our society.
