Women on the Cover

Rachel Nee
2/20/15

 

Enlightened Sexism: Women on the Cover

            One of the quotes that stood out to me while reading the introduction in The Rise of Enlightened Sexism by Susan Douglas, was the quote she made on page 16-17 which states, “What so much of this media emphasizes is that women are defined by our bodies, our identities located in our bodies, and those must be sexually alluring and conform to a very narrow fashion-model ideal of beauty. This is nothing new of course, but it was something millions of women hoped to deep-six back in the 1970s. Indeed it is precisely because women no longer have to exhibit traditional “feminine” personality traits…that they must exhibit hyper feminine physical traits…” Here we are in 2015 still dealing with the issues of the way women’s bodies are shown in the media. Today we discussed a few of the most recent images seen, such as Beyonce and Cindy Crawford’s untouched photos and Kim Kardashians infamous Paper Magazine cover. When young girls look at a woman on a cover they think she’s perfect, she has nothing wrong with her, and that they want to look like her. People don’t realize the process that goes into making these women look like that. Technology has become so advanced and people are able to do whatever they can to make an image look a certain way. Sometimes that woman on the cover has another person’s body put on her to make her look perfect, or a lot of her body is made slim because she wasn’t good enough to be put on the way she was. Society isn’t a big fan of being natural when it comes to being in the media. Kim Kardashians cover was a perfect example; she posed naked which was an image that ended up breaking the internet. In my opinion, it was uncomfortable, and I didn’t find it appropriate whatsoever. I also knew that her whole body was photo shopped and nothing about it appealed as beautiful or natural. Because the media loves the Kardashians and their drama, to them this cover was a miracle. The process to make that photo what it became and make Kim look the way she did took a lot of editing. These pictures are then put out for people to pay attention to when they pick up the magazine. These pictures are what are going to sell the product, this is why it amazes me when I see society’s reaction to women revealing their natural look. Recently supermodel Cindy Crawford released a photo where she is posing in a bikini and her entire body is untouched. Her stomach area is not flattened and shaped to perfection, she actually shows off what her stomach looks like. I love that finally a super model of all people was revealing that not everything about being a model is perfect; however society had a different view. They felt how can a super model do this to herself? She’s revealing herself all natural, god forbid we saw what she actually looked like instead of what a magazine cover showed her as. Cindy received a lot of backlash for the photo, which I found disgusting about the way society reacted to a woman showing her flaws. I was relieved to see someone willing to put this out there and receive whatever support or criticism came her way. The same incident recently occurred with Beyonce, untouched photos of her had been released. Now everyone sees Beyonce as an icon, young girls look at her as flawless and beautiful. Beyonce has been verbal about her flaws, she doesn’t like being called beautiful, and we all know she doesn’t wake up flawless every morning. It’s like society is shocked to see that these women don’t actually look the way they did in that music video, or that magazine cover. They have flaws; it’s just photo shop that is able to hide all of them making the young audience especially feel they have to look like that. You would think that in 2015, this problem would be solved, but it still causes controversy. There are certain women who are famous that send out mixed messages to their audience that you don’t have to be perfect but then you do, but it’s woman like Beyonce and Cindy Crawford we have to look at and see this message that flaws are normal they have them and they accept them. It reassures the audience that they don’t have to go to extremes to have this ideal look, you have to work on yourself for health reasons and because YOU want to do it, we have to accept just like these women do that we have flaws and that the way someone looks on a magazine cover isn’t real.