In Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective the women discuss how they decided to write a book that would give other women a chance to not feel as though things that were happening to their bodies were not wrong or abnormal. They talk about things like masturbation, menstruation, and pregnancy and how women can feel alone or different if they are not informed of how other women feel or react to these issues. They portray their experiences with these issues as being improved once they learned about other women’s experiences and that they were not any different from all women and also about how the use of birth control and its general acceptance has led to women being able to control their lives and control their destiny. They also mention how birth control has improved their lives saying “It has made our pregnancies better, because they no longer happen to us; we actively participate choose them and enthusiastically participate in them” (BWHBC, 298). They conclude by saying “our image of ourselves is on a firmer base, we can be better friends and better lovers, better people, more self-confident, more autonomous, stronger, more whole” (BWHBC, 299). This line really made me feel good about what these women were trying to do because if just the information and access to the ability to control their own lives gives them all of that then why should anyone ever have had to live without it?
Steinem’s article Sex, Lies & Advertising was very interesting because of the inside look it gave into the ways that we are controlled by advertisers without even knowing it. Steinem starts by talking generally about women’s magazines and how they do not get the same respect as any other magazines especially in their advertising. She cites many examples of advertisers who are not willing to have their products associated with Ms. and how these advertisers are even unwilling after hearing how successful other similar products are and how the statistics signify an unexploited market and potential sales. She talks about Ms.’s issues with expecting sexist ads and how they wished to only use product they believed were good but eventually had to change some on these views because of how much their magazine was dependent on advertising. She also discusses how their advertising investors had strong stipulations on where ads for their products could be placed as to distance themselves from any sort of scandal. She mentions racial issues like Susan Douglas when she points out how the ads were mostly portraying white women unless the product was specifically directed at an ethnic group. She discusses the difficulty of getting ads for typically male products such as cars and beer and how some companies like Este Lauder felt like they were targeting a different audience than Ms. reached. Leonard Lauder said “Este Lauder is selling ‘a kept woman mentality’” (Steinem, 6). She touches on how advertising is becoming bigger and bigger and encroaching on things like movies where ads a surreptitiously placed. This I have noticed in recent movies I have watched where something like a big Coca-Cola truck is always in the background. She also talks about how good magazines could be if they did not need to rely on advertising and how much they could help women feel good about themselves and understand the issues.
Brumberg in Body Projects talks about a shift in the way that girls and women saw themselves starting in the 1920s. She says that the ideal woman shifted from fuller to “slim and sylph like” (Brumberg, 101) and that this shift made women more self conscious, obsessed with their weight, and it was socially acceptable to be extremely concerned with your looks. She references a journal of Yvonne Blue from that time period and shows how young girls were ever-changing themselves and were very different from their recent predecessors. Brumberg then continues to talk about young girls lives during the 1950s. She says that the trend had switch a bit from legs being the most important characteristic to larger breasts being the thing young girls most wanted to develop and with this came the bra. Before this time women had worn corsets and the bra hadn’t even been invented according to Brumberg. But, Brumberg says, the bra caught on and young girls and young women were obsessed with their bra size, peer’s bra size, and types of bras. She said that this did not replace the way that girls now felt the need to be thin, but instead added to it. Brumberg continues through time to tell us how focus of young women was still on weight but how there were changes in focus onto working out and now women also were expected to have muscles and then these trends further evolved and were added to when thighs became a major area of focus. Brumberg says “when an American woman dislikes her thighs, she is unlikely to like herself” (Brumberg, 128). Brumberg concludes by talking about how women are even subjected to body images issue when finding clothes and how some women have turned to piercings to differentiate themselves.
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