...African American Women & America’s Standards of Beauty: What Legacy Will You Pass On? For most young girls, the mother or “mother figure” is a model. Without truly knowing for herself what it is to be a woman, a girl finds, both consciously and unconsciously, some direction from her mother. Imitating her mannerisms, her characteristics, her every make and move, young girls start to identify with their mothers and subscribe to many of their beliefs. Commonly, little girls are fond of all the “rituals” that women in our society, their mothers, practice in order to be “beautiful,” and one will see everything from “mother and daughter” apparel in catalogs to the fun and simpler “dress-up” days at home, where small girls wear mommy’s make-up, clothes, and high-heel shoes. While this “mother-daughter” scenario exists in our society as a whole, the mothers in some ethnic groups sometimes have different takes on what it is to be “beautiful” and, naturally, pass these confusing and sometimes self-deprecating values and beliefs to their daughters. For many young African American girls, particularly, sometimes the imitation of their mother and all that is sacred to her results in low self-esteem. When daughters are exposed to “race-conscious mothers,” who “admonish [them] to make it a habit to pull their noses to make them thinner” or to do other things to alter their physical appearance, it is difficult for them to feel good about themselves (Seyersted 51). Julia A. Boyd, author...
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...Alicia A. Smith October 29, 2014 Eng.4705/Essay #2 Beauty Complex The word beauty has many negative connotations for African American women. Over the years African American women have been subjected, misrepresented and also dehumanized by the exemplification of beauty and identity. This pattern of internalizing the perception of beauty to coincide with European standards have caused many African American women in the process to alter their physical appearances and personify a culture that has disregarded the uniqueness of being “ black and beautiful”. The cultural aesthetics of being “black and beautiful” has been distorted in literature, movies and television shows to appease an acceptable standard of beauty that in reality is unrealistic....
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...(Bode 63). Unfortunately, there is an additional form of racism that is often not discussed or explored much in our society and those are feeling that a particular race or gender places on their own self-image. The saying goes that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. When it comes to some young African American women, beauty is the eye of society. Some gage their level of beauty according to what is popular in today’s society. Even though Dr. Kenneth Clarks was conducted in 1939, there were the same results in 2005. Some young African Americans feel that they lighter the skin, the prettier or nicer the person. This is strictly based off of society and what they have been exposed to. A young lady from the study made a statement to the fact that not knowing her heritage or culture make it difficult to define herself and due to the fact that many African American’s are unaware of their specific culture puts them a t a loss and accept others opinion of what should and shouldn’t be acceptable due to the lack of self-knowledge. (Davis, 2005). African American women have been known for years to straighten their hair as well as add hair extensions as a sign of beauty. In the documentary, “A girl like me”, one young African American woman spoke of her aunt using bleaching cream as well as using the bleaching cram on...
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...has influenced African American women’s perception of their natural hair. Advertisement reflected and influenced African American women’s negative perception of their natural hair. The stages as to why they are starting to go natural are coming back in style. The issue is examined throughout history from slavery to present day with a visual analysis of hair care advertisements. Natural hair is gaining more positive implications; this can be affected by creating more positive images with natural hair. Image is part of the problem, image can create the solution. Loving yourself in your natural state; there is nothing like it! If people believe on the opinion based beauty tips in advertisements, they often...
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...In Toni Morrison’s the novel “The Bluest Eye”, it provided a comprehensive understanding of how whiteness is the preferred beauty standards, which misleads the lives of African American women and children. Morrison is a master at examining the relationships between the races and genders. She also talks about the struggle between civilization and nature, despite the fact that if it is myth. Morrison has a unique way in her writing that causes the reader to get visual through her narrating stories. Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye demonstrates her creative techniques to express the struggles of how African American girl’s deals with society’s concepts of beauty, self-hatred, self-worth, and family. As many individuals may know that beauty is...
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...Gordon, Maya K. “Media Contributions to African American Girls Focus on Beauty and Appearance: Exploring the Consequences of Sexual Objectification.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2008, pp. 245–256. Sage Journals, doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2008.00433.x. Accessed 15 Sept. 2017. In this article, Maya Gordon explores how sexual objectification can hinder and influence girls’ beliefs about their appearance. She specifically focuses on young African American girls whose ideals have been affected by the media’s distortion of beauty. To study this, Gordon took a survey of 176 young African American girls to understand the correlations between media and their need to focus on their appearance. The measures used within this study...
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...diction and figurative language in “The Unreal World”, Jennifer Pozner arouses fury from the audience that helps prove reality TV forces an idea of unattainable beauty on women and creates hurtful gender and racial stereotypes. To elicit anger from the audience, Pozner uses diction to demonstrate how Reality TV gives women unachievable standards for beauty. Pozner explains how Reality TV has this idea of a “perfect ten” (445). The use of a numbered scale implies that women are constantly being judged on their looks. It also insinuates that women can achieve a perfect score on this scale even though perfection is unattainable. A scale implies that everyone is judged the same way; however, beauty can come in many different forms. Both of these implications are incredibly hurtful to the young women watching these shows because it puts an onus on external aspects of the human body rather than the internal. Shows exist that are completely devoted to finding flaws in women such as “Are you Hot?: The Search for America’s Sexiest People.” This show uses a laser “flaw finder” (446) to rate women completely on their looks. The use of the term “flaw finder” gives the impression that all women must be flawless to be beautiful. Both examples of “perfect ten” and “flaw finder” show how reality TV forces a certain standard of beauty on the public and looks down upon people who do not meet the conventional requirements of attractiveness. Naturally, these implications cause anger from...
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...are blue, but you ain't white! Your hair is straight 'cuz you pressed it last night!" -School Daze Dehumanization comes in its most rampant form, towards black women, as colorism. A community of African American women stand by with broken self-esteem from a history of colorism creating stigmatism on the ideal body image of an African American female in today's society. The quest for straight hair was often a torturous obsession for the slaves, but it was not just about conforming to the prevailing fashions of the day. Straight hair translated to economic opportunity and social advantage. Because many of the more than one hundred thousand free Blacks in nineteenth-century America were the mulatto offspring of the first African arrivals and their European companions, lighter...
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...Christina Tellez English V01A Heather Aguailar 19 March 2014 Women- “the less attractive” In today’s society, women are held to an extremely unfair standard. Women are perceived through an image of appearance not an image of character. If women do not meet a certain appearance standard they are looked down upon because they are what society considers “less attractive." Doesn’t matter what type of personality “the less attractive” has because most people won’t give “the less attractive” the time of day to find out, unless they are in some way socially interacted by work or school but even then they are usually looked at as a second option. What exactly is the deciding factor to be in an attractive standard as a woman? Susie Orbach, author of “Fat is a Feminist Issue,” states that women must have good looks and a pleasuring manner. Orbach states, “To do this she must look appealing, earthy, sensual, sexual, virginal, innocent, reliable, daring, mysterious, coquettish, and thin” (451). This standard of having to look attractive that the media portrays is sending women all over the world a wrong and unhealthy message. Fifty thousand per million Americans suffer from eating disorders, trying to fit in, not realizing the harms that it can bring. The media should portray a positive image like instead of trying to be attractive, just try to be healthy. Women are held to unhealthy circumstances, they are being targeted to make unhealthy body decisions because of what they...
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...Gifted, and Black: Identity, Sexuality, and Black Girls,” is focused around the stigmas that society has placed on African American women and their perceptions of themselves and self beauty. It goes into depth to analyze how certain interactions and encounters shape how African American females develop and how they identify sexually. In the research, it talks about what a Jezebel is, and it is identified as a light skinned woman with long hair, who is perceived as “seductive, manipulative, and unable to control her sexual drives” (Townsend 274). Then they go on to identify who Mammy is, who is unattractive and obese and of a darker complexion. Both of these images were that which were projected onto women of African American descent, by the media and the European culture. This created an idea of “colorism”, and it made things that were of a lighter skin, or closer to their Caucasian and Latina counterparts to seem more accepted. It goes on to speak about how stereotypes have negatively affected the development and actions of African American women of all ages, from Jezebel all the way to the modern, do it all super woman, essentially being the single woman. The connection between childhood sexual abuse and the likelihood of continued victimization and sexual exploitation is also explored. The research goes into detail to see what is affecting the ways that African American females are looking at themselves. For instance, they value intelligence and it plays a role within their femininity...
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...secret that the media plays a major role in influencing the way that women compare, judge, and discipline their bodies. Though it has made great strides in how it portrays women, the media still continues to place great emphasis on how they look, promoting the idea that “identity is created and manipulated through one’s appearance, encouraging women in particular to view their bodies as commodities or texts from which their values can be read” (Rubin, Fitts, Becker, 2003, p. 52). In Western cultures, the media constructs and upholds narrow, rigid, standards of beauty that primarily center on being thin, fair, and having fragile features (Zeilinger, 2015). It is also no secret that in an attempt to attain these ideals, thousands have fallen victim to body dissatisfaction disorders, such as dysfunctional eating....
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...Dorothy Roberts in her books speaks directly on issue affecting African American women whether social or moral such as: gender segregation, mistreatment, oversexed all of these all in a negative way. Yes, many persons are of the view that the topic of Africans in general is one of pity, desperations, poverty and worthlessness. So much so, that when it involves African women the thoughts even goes much deeper to a great extent. Enslaved African women were dealt with like animals rather than children. They were forced to take part in long stretches of physically requesting fieldwork and regarded pretty much as cruelly as subjugated African men. Furthermore, subjugated African women were beaten and over and again raped. African women were not regarded as woman, yet were spoken to and esteemed as sexual objectives and workers. Racism and gender discrimination towards African women has also been around from the days of slavery, with whites abusing and mistreating African women who worked on their plantations. Because of this sexual abuse, many African women were given sterilization in order to suppress fertility in black women and to reduce the burden of unwanted pregnancy on society. There are delights and distresses that most moms share. They are the delight of nursing her child, the depletion from pursuing her toddler, the satisfaction of viewing her kid accomplish whatever goal, the dread of undesirable pregnancy and the lose faith in regards to surrendering yet another dream to...
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... From the mentioned points above, I believe that western culture leads women’s eating disorders through media and personal relationships with westerners. I found specific researchers and their studies to support and explain my possition: a essay, entitled “The Globalization of Eating Disorders” written by Susan Bordo from Gilbert H. Muller’s book The New Worlds Reader, an research article published in the magazine International Journal Of Eating Disorders entitled “Boday Image and Eating Disturbance Among South Asian-American Women: The Role of Racial Teasing”, by Dana Sahi Iyer and Nick Haslam, and the seventh chapter, entitled “Sociocultural Influences: The Impact of Western Culture on Eating and Body Image Disturbances”, of the book Too Fat or Too Thin: A Reference Guide to Eating Diorders by Cynthia R Kalodner. During reading three resources, I come up with question how western culture impacts eating disorders due to the standards of beauty among women through media and personal connections. Susan Bordo argues that the globalization of eating disorders crosses the economic levels of countries, races, genders, classes, and ages in her essay. She believes that eating disturbances become universal events in both developed and developing nations. The foundation causes of global phenomena rely on western media that...
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...will be faced with some obstacles, mainly dealing with my appearance, “attractiveness”, and how it attracts customers. As an African-American woman, there has been a positive increase of African-American women in the sports industry. However, those that have made an impact in the industry are not praised for their work ethic and journalistic work, but their appearance as being physically fit with long hair and categorized as “hot”. On the other hand, other African-American women who work in the sports industry who do not...
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...“What’s Your Sign?” : Cornrow Braids Countless women in mainstream American culture search to find ways to look their very best from the head down, beginning with their hairstyles they chose to wear. In fact, a popular hairstyle coming up in publicity now is a form of braids, know to many as “cornrows”. Numerous women who are doing YouTube tutorials on this style and modeling it in ostentatious magazines do not even know the history and mentality surrounding the creation of this complex hairstyle. Rather they are wearing it as an impetuous way to stay in trend. Cornrow braids are not only another hairstyle to wear in America’s evolving beauty system, they are also an added layer of cultural meaning that shows African history and cultural expression. During the 1970’s, braids close to the scalp, or cornrow braids, were used as a way to show black power...
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