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Marked Women Deborah Tannen Summary

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Marked Women Deborah Tannen Summary
Have you ever thought about what makes almost every woman want to be tagged with the word “sexy”? Social media presents us with the images of woman with unrealistic figures and impractical capabilities of women, which satisfies the societal standard while giving pressure onto women. Driven by this pressure, women force themselves to reach the impractical standard which brings about a host of bandwagon issues which negatively impacts women.
Women often are judged outwardly based on their appearance, focusing their attention to the importance of dressing themselves well in order to balance with the societal pressure. In Deborah Tannen’s essay “Marked Women”, she asks herself that “what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men’s. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.” (270) which emphasizes how women can be marked. She implies that women have a certain duty to choose a style and can hardly dress without judgment being passed on their dressing. There are no “unmarked options”, everything we do is “marked”. Women express personas through clothing, reminding me of an observation developed in high school. It was a private Christian high school that had a strict dress code on our uniform. The uniform skirt was long enough to cover our knees, however, girls rolled their skirts up, trying to act pretty and sexy as …show more content…
Women are judged superficially based on their appearance and forced to conform to a sexy figure due to the continuous influence of social media. They are supposed to behave and master skills both femininely and masculinely. Therefore, in order to reach the societal expectation and prevent from being non-compliant, women have to completely conform to the standards which bring a negative impact on them and narrow their way of expressing
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