Rodriguez Women's Second Job

The Women’s Second Job:
Western Society’s Impractical Standards
Women’s bodies are a topic of many discussions in different cultures across various countries, from their size, to their appearance, to their clothes. A body means countless different things to different people, so why is there only one image of an “ideal” woman in Western society? Through the media and our culture “beautiful” has been so narrowly defined, women are constantly at odds with their bodies to achieve the prefect look. To make this image even more restricted, Western society even takes into account ethnicity and race. These ideas of beautiful have in turn led women to perform unhealthy and painful habits to achieve perfection. Western society and culture has constructed
this unattainable idea that a woman should be a certain size and have a certain look in order to be beautiful. Graciela H.
Rodriguez was a victim of this definition of beauty and went through extreme measures to be like women on television. In her short story “Breaking the Model” she explains the influences that led a young Hispanic girl to become anorexic and bulimic trying to be something that she was not. “As a young teen, I shared the dream of many girls: I wanted to be a model and an actress” (189). These dreams did not conjure up in a girl’s head; they came from the images girls are constantly exposed to. Rodriguez continues, “I felt the media’s and society’s images of women were more responsible” (191). Her modeling agency even suggested that she “study the models in Teen and Seventeen and watch Beverly Hills 90210 to ‘get an idea of what real models look like’” (190). Since cultural ideas and norms are directly reflected in portrayals of women in the media, the Western culture has a deep influence on young girls trying to find their own
beauty.
To concrete the idea that the body of a woman is constructed from our culture and media, Hunter College Women’s Studies Collective explains that the body, “is not a purely biological entity: its meaning and significance are shaped by differing cultural ideas” (79). The cultural influence is also perfectly depicted in Fatema Mernissi’s narrative “Size 6: The Western Woman’s Harem”. “In the Moroccan streets, men’s flattering comments regarding my particularly generous hips have for decades led me to believe that the entire planet share their convictions” (297). Upon shopping in the United States, Mernissi really grasps the idea that a beautiful body in Western society is not the same as in Morocco. “I realized for the first time that maybe ‘size 6’ is a more violent restriction imposed on women than is the Muslim veil” (299). This statement simply solidifies Gabriela Rodriguez’s underlying argument in her narrative that beauty is dependent on the society and culture you are around.
To add more pressure to women, this beauty is defined as being “white”, forcing this idea to include only white, skinny, tall, attractive women. Rodriguez illustrates this idea further by explaining that, “everyone from magazine publishers to television producers has suggested that Latina and African-American girls aren’t likely to develop eating disorders, that we’re less influenced by the skinny girl image” (188). This suggests that the media does not influence women of ethnic backgrounds because women of ethnicity are simply not in the media; leading one to believe that ethnicity cannot equal beauty. “After all, none of the models I saw on TV were Latina” (Rodriguez 193). This lack of representation of ethnic women in the media puts even more pressure on women of color to be beautiful in other ways.
The undeniable struggle that women go through with their own beauty has been represented through various outlets, with anorexia and bulimia being some of the more extreme measures.
Society has pushed women to become absolutely unhealthy in order to feel normal. Rodriguez explains, “I was so driven to achieve perfection that it wiped out any concern I might have had for my body or my health” (192). Ironically, the fight to have a perfect body can lead to the body actually being the opposite of perfect, but society is only concerned with the external beauty. These unhealthy and painful tactics are also shown in other societies and cultures as well. “In China, for example, the feet of high-status women were once painfully broken and tightly wrapped to produce tiny, erotically charged ‘lotus-feet’ so small that many of these women were unable to walk” (Bates et al. 80). Although there are many different ways a woman can look, western society has created an unattainable representation of what beautiful and sexy is. Under this small umbrella is a specific ethnic background, Caucasian. Because of these unrealistic demands, women have gone to extremes to create their bodies to look the way society wants them to. The women’s body is no longer viewed as an art to admire, but rather a culturally constructed fantasy. In order to marginalize this extreme idea of beauty, society must appreciate every body as sexy and worthy of
admiration.

Work Cited
Bates, Ülkü Ü et al. Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Mernissi, Fatema. “Size 6: The Western Woman’s Harem”. The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities. Eds. Joane Spade and Catherine Valentine. Belmont: Wadsworth. 2004. 197-199. Print.
Rodriguez, Graciela H. “Breaking the Model”. Body Outlaws. 2nd ed. Ed. Opheria Edut. Emeryville: Seal Press, 2003. 188-195. Print