Do you buy it?
“I had to leave the house of fashion,
Go forth naked from its doors
Because women should be allies
And not competitors.
I had to leave the house of television
To start noticing the clouds
Its amazing the stuff you see
When you finally shed that shroud.”
-ani difranco
In my final paper/project I argue that in a media culture that perpetuates representations of the female body that reduce it to an exchangeable commodity, the female cannot find self-actualization or experience self-love.
Germaine Greer States:
-. “The media, which makes news as well as carry it, are the real sources of power in our pseudo-democracies
-“A woman’s body is the battlefield where she fights for liberation. It is through her body that oppression works, reifying her, sexualizing her, victimizing her, disabling her. Her physicality is a medium for others to work on”
I argue that the female body in advertising media is exploited in three ways:
1. She (the female body) participates in the perpetuation of self-hate to sell products for female consumption.
“As a way of inducing them (women) to buy products of no use or value, women have been deliberately infected with BDD (Body Dysmorphic Disorder).
Multi-million dollar industries exploit both her need for reassurance and her need to do something about the way she looks” (Greer 25).
2. Using the erotized female body to sell objects, sell commodities.The act of eroticizing the body is an act of silencing. It reduces the woman from “seer” to “seen.”
3. The media fully claims and oppresses the female form by transforming it literally into the sellable object. . This is a crafted representation, a ploy to dismantle female liberation under the guise of sexual freedom.
"If equality means entitlement to an equal share of the profits of economic tyranny, it is irreconcilable with liberation. Freedom in an unfree world is merely license to exploit."( Greer13).
Women must acknowledge that the institutions governing the media under which we function do not want our self-actualization, do not want our independence, these attributes take away from their control of our bodies. Take back the power, take back control, take back your body.