I'm sure most of you have seen the posters around campus such as the "I'm more than a Facebook Page" and other posters that have photos of students and tell a little bit about them. There is a poster kind of like this hanging in my dorm hall that is supposed to be an athletic motivational poster. It has a picture of a female athlete from a D1 school posing with a basketball. I overheard a boy in the hallway today comment on her body. He asked him girlfriend "Is the girl in this poster pregnant? Because she looks." Almost as startled as I was his girlfriend replied "What's wrong with you? You can't say things like that!" I was appalled when the only thing he said back was "Well, it's rude of her to look pregnant in today's society."
This whole conversation made me so angry that I didn't know what to do! So I thought I would blog about it!
Hearing things like this actually come from peoples mouths about women's bodies is so upsetting! It just shows how much the male gaze is verbally communicated that goes unnoticed in our everyday lives. And the fact that she simply laughed his comment off made me more upset about the entire situation. It really just showed me that because males are known as the 'superior sex' that some of them think they can say anything and comment on women and their bodies as they please. Unfortunately!
This makes me think a lot about the Goddess text we read for class a couple of weeks ago. I think the ability to say "who cares if she's pregnant and posing for a picture" will be a big step forward for women and it will signify the acceptance of the natural changes of their body. I know a lot of people take offense to nudity but I personally love the magazine covers of pregnant celebrity mothers. To me, it demonstrates that they appreciate motherhood and the natural state of their bodies (although, let's be real -they might have photoshopped some features of the body) as oppose to their "normal" celebrity body.
ReplyDeleteI noticed a similar thing about males considering themselves the superior sex when selling Vagina Monologues shirts. The shirts this year -- and in the past -- say Vagina Security on the back. Multiple times this year, I heard boys buying the shirts making jokes about the statement. They were all so excited to own and wear the shirts so they could be "vagina security." Their intentions were not the same as the Vagina Monologues' intentions in creating/selling the shirt, but I couldn't refuse to sell these boys the shirts.
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