“The Body Project” by Joan Brumberg was interesting insight in today’s female society. She starts by intruding the term “Body project”; this term refers to the fact that most American girls today are obsessed with the way their bodies look. This is a different thing from the past, Victorian girls did not worry about their shape, size, or muscle tone. Today the body is believed to be the physical way to describe who you are. No longer is your personality determining who you are mainly, you are now judged first by what you look like. The looks of the twentieth century took a major turn towards more revealing clothing. Women’s bodies were exposed and if they were going to be they needed to be smooth and thin. This large cultural change came from a move from agrarian and religious society to industrial and secular society.
Brumberg explains that during the 1920s girls started watching their weight and going on diets and exercising to lose extra weight. This she says is a direct result of the Parisian designer, Paul Poiret, whose dresses “…shifted visual interest to the legs. The new, fashionable figure was slender, long-limbed, and relatively flat-chested (Brumberg 99).” We See fashion shifts like this all the time. The fashion is always changing what the focus is on the female body. Here we see a major change that many designers would try to emulate.
Yvonne Blue was one of the most interesting parts of this article. Here we see a relatively fit girl try desperately to lose weight so that she feels she fits into to society. And why does she do it? Because of American pop culture she wants to be like the women in the magazines and in the movies. And why wouldn’t she when she sees women and men admire these women. Joan Brumberg brings up a good point she says that, “[young women], their self-esteem began to have more to do with external attributes than with inner qualities, such as strength of character or generosity of spirit (101).” What a shame that society has turned into this superficial being. Having something nice to look at can only take you so far, people need more than that, they need substance of mind and personality. Yvonne tortured herself throughout her whole adolescence with dieting, changing personalities, etc. She was too busy worrying about other people’s opinions instead of just living her life and doing what made her happy. Her “Image” was all that matter to her and probably a lot of girls like her. She re-created herself in different years to see what people liked and started dressing “sexy”. Things all concerned with her look. I wonder how happy in the end she was.
Breasts were the next topic Joan Brumberg decided to talk about. Breasts were a part of the way females were viewed. Ms. Brumberg discusses how girls switched from wearing a one-piece “waist or camisole with no cups to wearing bras or training bras. The Bra was developed by Mary Phelps Jacobs in 1913. Mass-produced bras change the way adolescent girls thought about their breast (110). This mass production of clothes brought a whole other sect of problems. Because instead of making your own clothes, you now had a size to fit into and if you didn’t fit into a particle size you thought of yourself as not normal. Having a bra and fitting into one became a sign of status in adolescent girls. And In 1952 even physicians were giving medical reasoning for wearing bras, saying it prevented sagging breast, stretched blood vessels, and poor circulation, which create problems for nursing children later on (112). Of course people are going to listen to doctors; people trust what they have to say. But this whole bra thing created considerable economic wealth for these corporations. “Junior figure control” added even more to this wealth. It was a campaign for young girls to go get bras and to have the special fitted. This could only be done by skilled workers at department stores. JFC also created different types of bras for different occasions and activities and most middle-class girls and their mothers embraced what they had to say and spent their money on what JFC had to say. In the 1950s weight took a back seat to breast size and American girls began comparing breast size instead of weight. “There was a special intensity about breast because of the attitudes of doctors, mothers, and advertisers, all of whom considered breast development critical to adult female identity and success (117).” This quote makes me think of the stereotype that women with big breast are stupid. I wonder when it switched from big breasts being successful to being big breasts being stupid. Training Bras were also introduced which was probably not a good idea because “we imply adult behaviors and, unwittingly, we mark them as sexual objects (118).” This is not good, little girls should stay little; they shouldn’t be given any reason to think that they are grown.
American girls really started watching their weight like eagles. Their self worth depended on how much they weighed and they took drastic measures to lose weight. Carol Merano was one of these girls. She only ate Carnation Instant Breakfast for dinner and smoked cigarettes to suppress her appetite. She just wanted to be thin so she could stop having to obsess over it. This describes Judith Rodin is what she calls “normative obsession” of American women. This someone who habitually monitors everything they eat (122). Women need to stop worrying about their weight and focus on being healthy. If people aren’t going to like you because of how much you weigh, than their probably not good people anyway and your better off without them
According to Brumberg in the 1990s the focus of the female body was the lower body, the thighs and the buttocks. Women wanted “sleek thighs and sculptured behind” (125). Thunder thighs was a termed for women with big thighs and was every girls nightmare to have. Women didn’t want that or cellulite and women all over America were spending millions of dollars to rid themselves of it.
Bodying piercing also started to emerge in the 1990s. People were now not only piercing their ears, but also their eyebrow, nose, naval, or even genitals. Piercing took up a way to symbolize yourself for example if you pierced your left ear you were gay or if you pierced your eyebrow you were badass. And genital piercing was a way to a have a bond with your boyfriend or so that you could have a secret that no one or few people know about. Piercing to me is really whatever. I’m not going to lie it gives me the chills because I could never get myself pierced in certain places people do. But like I said to each its own, if having a penis piercing makes you happier than go for it.
“When underwear becomes outerwear, as it has in the past decade, adolescents of both sexes are likely to become confused about the nature of intimacy (136).” Joan Brumberg says this towards the end and it really struck me because it’s true. The line between public and private is really blurring and I really don’t think that, that is a good thing.
I choose to focus on this article only because I think compared to the others, it’s a lot more important. The amount of emphasis put on the “right” female body is incredible. Women should not have to worry about being judged on how they look.
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