Rhetorical Analysis

Growing up and still to this day I am told how to uphold an image, a reputation, the same as Lynn Peril wrote about in her essay “Pink Think”. Femininity suggests that women and girls will never be looked at as someone who will ever reach an expectation of anything higher than being the wife at home raising a family and loving their husband. Being seen as that gentle, soft, delicate, nurturing being as Peril notes, pink think is a set of ideas and attitudes about what constitutes proper female behavior. She opposes this narrow view of women from the beginning stating how she felt from the moment she knew what was happening. “I formed an early aversion to all things pink and girly.” In order to support this, Peril uses former Miss America Jacque Mercer’s vivid description of the proper way to put on a bathing suit, in her guide How to Win a Beauty Contest. “First, roll it as you would a girdle. Pull the suit over the hips to the waist, then, holding the top away from your body bend over from the waist. Ease the suite up to the bust line and with one hand, lift one breast up and in and ease the suit bra over it. Repeat on the other side. Stand up and fasten the straps.” Peril hates the way women base their lives on someone else’s way of thinking. The author earns the readers respect because of her logical presentation of the pink think issue. Peril refers to May of 1961 when Betsy Martin McKinney told readers of Ladies’ Home Journal that, “for women, sexual activity commenced with intercourse and was completed with pregnancy and childbirth. Therefore, a woman who used contraceptives denied “her own creativity, her own sexual role, her very femininity.” Furthermore, McKinney asserted that “one of the most stimulating predisposers to orgasm in a woman may be childbirth followed by several months of lactation.” Peril also refers to Miss America 1961, when the five finalist were asked two questions, “what would you do if “you were walking down the runway in the