1. Bordo discusses the rise of anorexia as a cultural force in the modern time. It is still a prominent issue today, as women still suffer from this and languish under societal expectations. She explains this condition because of some of the cultural forces, including capitalism and the pressure placed on women to look one specific way (Bordo, 2004). Ultimately her view of anorexia is that the disease is a force that pushes on women who feel immense pressure to fit and to change their bodies in order to stand up to the wholly unreasonable expectations created by Hollywood, the clothing industry, and other societal forces. Another disease was hysteria, which came about in the 19th century. During this time, the dominant societal expectation …show more content…
Feminine body displays demonstrate a woman’s power by showing that she is in control of her body and her own sexuality. She gets to make the choices about when to display her body, how to display it, and what that body looks like. If women of all types are able to display their femininity through their bodies, then the elements that make women special are emboldened in many respects. This becomes healthy, empowering women to be their true selves rather than asking them to conform to what other people want them to be. At the same time, this can maintain the position of women in the gender hierarchy. This happens in many ways. The long-running history of the matter is that women are often put into difficult positions because of the ways that women’s bodies have been the currency of female value. By even engaging in this sort of game, where women are again assessed based on a body, one might say that women are playing into the hands of those people who see to keep women subjugated as a matter of societal hierarchy. It is a catch-22, where women who are trying to change the long-standing norms on body are giving power to the thing they seek to destroy. This becomes …show more content…
Women feel immense pressure to conform to the idea woman’s body. When an image of that particular perfect body is displayed in many types of media, and women are led to believe their entire lives that they must have a certain body to be accepted by boys, by their families, by employers, and more, then they can begin to internalize this (Aronson and Kimmel, 2014). Rather than having a healthy relationship with food and healthy, they will see it as the enemy to progress toward the bodies they want. Women develop anorexia as an exaggeration of femininity. It is a suggestion that if one wants a person to be very skinny, then the person may go one-step farther, essentially saying, “I’ll show you skinny.” Over time, it becomes an obsession, and these conditions are very difficult to break. The social pressure is there, requiring more and more adherence to the norm, but those with these conditions never feel as if they are quite to the ideal that they want to