...3 Introduction Cosmetic surgery is extremely popular among both women and men in South Korea. The kinds of procedures that are most popular are double eyelid surgery, removal of fat, nose jobs, and breast augmentation. Koreans favour bigger and wider eyes and they often undergo cosmetic surgery to achieve this. A slimmer body is seen as an important step in achieving beauty, which encourages women to use procedures such as liposuction to eliminate fat. Nose jobs are undertaken to construct a desirable and favourable ‘pointy’ tip to the nose, over a distinctive wide and flat nose.1 Breast augmentations are also common amongst women. Various explanations have been offered for the popularity of cosmetic surgery but no single explanation is adequate. For example, explanations based on the role of traditional Korean values go some way to confirming the high value traditionally placed on the colour white, but traditionalism does not explain the popularity of surgery for ‘Westernised’ eyes. Colonialism and Americanisation are important in helping to explain the popularity of cosmetic surgery in South Korea, but these miss important traditional and gender dimensions. Feminists’ analyses exclude men, and so fail to explain the popularity of surgery amongst Korean men. In addition to explanations based on Traditionalism, Colonialism, Americanism and Feminism, this essay will argue that the dynamic and evolving nature of Korean national identity has brought us to the point...
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...in this article because the author raised a very important issue that almost and probably all women are going through today. I chose this article because I find that it is different from the other articles I have read. I like the article because it is not just fighting the patriarchal world we live in, and stating everything the author wants to change about the world, just like the other articles I have read; rather, this article is stating women’s insecurity and not finding a solution, but rather leaving it up to the readers. On a more honest note, I chose this article because it addresses an issue I personally have. I have considered plastic surgery to fix my big thighs, my hair, and my stomach and so on. The list can go on and not stop. It all depends on how I feel on that day, what I do not like that day and the most disturbing but honest truth, the list get longer after I have seen skinny looking girls around campus. This leads me straight into the article because one of the author main concerns is not the fact that women are choosing to change their image, but it is the fact that, are they being pressured. In this article, one of the arguments the author talked about is the social norms of the western society when it comes to women’s images. She raised the issues that companies are making millions off women in terms of changing the way they look. It might be because these women choose to change their looks for personal reasons, or because they are in a society with strong...
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...000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with it this year, 40,200 of which will die. It is the leading cause of death among middle aged women. If these facts seem impersonal, then you should know that one of every nine women in this class will be diagnosed with cancer and that in the length of one class period over eight women will die from it in the United States alone. Although a total cure has not been found, there are several treatments that can save lives. There is the possibility of surgery if detected at an early state, but most cases require intensive radioactive chemotherapy. These two most common treatments cause serious side effects. Surgery can be painful and leave scars both physically and emotionally. Many victims say that going through chemotherapy is worse than the cancer itself. A longtime friend of my parents, Ruth Haskell has had cancer for almost two decades. During that time she has gone through a series of chemotherapy treatments. The radiation neutralized the cancer and kept her bedridden for days, but the cancer came back in less than a year. By seeing the terrible suffering firsthand, I have seen the stark reality of cancer. I came to the conclusion that no one needs to go through the pain and agony that it brings. I have searched for a solution and after much time and energy I found it right under my nose, or should I say right under any woman’s nose. Breast cancer would not be a threat if women did not have breasts! If all women had their...
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...Tiana Jackson Essay 2-Short Essay September 29, 2014 “Fat is a Feminist Issue” Obesity is an increasing epidemic in the United States, in fact an estimated fifty percent of women are overweight (page 448). Being fat is not just a feminist issue, most women do not have control over their weight gain or inability to be fit. To say fat is a feminist issue is sexist and bias. However the pressures placed on women in American society to maintain a certain imagine is increasing through everyday media. Therapist, publisher and author Susie Orbach wrote “Fat is a Feminist Issue” in 1978, one passage of the book Susie states “fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue. Fat is not about lack of self-control or lack of willpower. Fat is about protection, sex nurturance, strength, boundaries, mothering, substance, assertion and rage. It is response to the inequality of the sexes. Fat expresses experiences of women today in ways that are seldom examined and even more seldom treated…..” (Page 449). Some may argue that obesity is a woman’s disease, I would say this is primarily true, obesity is a disease that affect men as well but in today’s society media plays a big role in our everyday lives. The things that are highly favored by majority can reflect our own lifestyles. However the pressure to look a certain way, and ...
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...the Feminist movement during the 1960s-1970s often referred to as the Second Wave of feminism. This movement’s peak was during these two decades although it lasted until the 1980’s. This historical social movement is interesting because it was almost immediately followed by what is referred to as the third wave of feminism, which began in the 1990’s and still exists today. Both movements focused on aspects of women’s rights although they differ in rhetoric. The emergence and decline of second wave feminism was a necessary event which led to the third wave of feminism. The term second-wave feminism refers mostly to the radical feminism of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Second-wave feminism grew out of leftist movements in postwar Western societies, such as student protests, the anti–Vietnam War movement, the lesbian and gay movements, and, in the United States, the civil rights and Black power movements (Krolokke, Sorensen, p. 8). During this period other movements that were critical of capitalism and imperialism focused on the interest of oppressed groups: working classes, minorities, women and homosexuals. Even during this period of social upheaval women found themselves servicing the revolution, cut off from real influence and thus, once again, exposed to sexism (p. 9). To combat this, women began to form consciousness-raising groups. By doing this they sought to empower and educate women on social issues. The second-wave feminist were...
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...A)Violence against Women -Wrestling with manhood -Violence is connected to manhood (real men invite confrontation, trash talk) -Fear and respect go hand in hand -Bark like a dog (subordination of women is part of the “man” package) -Comparison to women as a challenging idea (you are a “bitch”) -Chyna becomes so strong, she is stripped of femininity (later rejects public image) -violence as “deserved,” even really crazy awful sexual violence (“bark like a dog”) -“...it's only entertainment.” -Sex Trafficking (Trade) B)Gender, Beauty, Normalization -Wolf, beauty as a prerequisite for success for women -“girls learn that stories happen to 'beautiful' woman but don't happen to women who aren't beautiful” -beauty as a market and product -the female body as a constant -Kaw, Asian Americans (3% of pop., 6% of cosmetic surgeries), most likely ethnicity to get c. surgery -encouragement of self hatred -pressuring women to conform to standards of normality -media representation of Asians as “sleepy, dull, uninterested” -origins in facial reconstruction at WWI -now used to “fix” completely natural features -Valenti, beauty as a “shut the fuck up” tool -beauty is a distraction -women are too ugly or too pretty to be consequential/deserve public attention -Bordo, Slender Body -double bind: producer v. consumer -moral coding: fat is seen as lazy, thin as control -cultural...
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...Wednesday, February 02, 2011 Women’s Studies 2010 Professor Sinnott Paper 1 Ideals of beauty and aesthetics have for a long time been a controversial issue throughout the world, usually focused more on what constitutes true beauty in women more than in men. This leaves many people to question, often, more times woman than men, why women are constantly judged on the physical characteristics of their bodies? One possible explanation for this is the daily process of sex segregation, which subconsciously can help to form the ideas that society attributes to men and women. This daily process of sex segregation happens very early in life, at an age when most are so young they are not even aware of what is actually taking place. For instance, if one were to observed how children form into groups when it is time for recess or to each lunch, it would be very noticeable to see how the two groups, girls and boys, segregate from one another, forming “two worlds” (Thorne 2009). At recess, girls form smaller circles, usually based on age, and play nicely or talk with one another whereas boys form larger groups, where age is not a determining factor and rough house with one another through the act of playing sports that are much more physical and aggressive takes place. The underlying question then becomes, “In a given situation, how is gender made more or less salient or infused with particular meanings” (Thorne 2009)? An explanation for this is due to the gender roles...
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...1. My summary of age and beauty; Blacks and Caucasian women of all ages examines their bodies. To recognize and be willing to get cosmetic surgery to reshape their bodies to their expectations of healthy. 2. Thesis and purpose of this Article was that white and black women examines their body image but, colorism plays a part of black women body image. 3. The author studied gender studies with that background to able to inform the article. 4. Primary point the author used to support his thesis was the actual quotes. The research included a variety of women with a wide range of age and different cultures, with real quotes from women that consider healthy bodies in different ways. 5. Body image, healthy body and self-presentation are ambiguous...
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...past 60 years, Female genital mutilation (FGM), the process of altering female genitalia, has been condemned by the Western world for a being an inhuman and oppressive tradition in need of abolishment. At the age of puberty, women living in communities that practice FGM are subject to a forced circumcision procedure that often leads to lifelong physical and psychological implications. As such, anti-FGM discourse universalises the image of the ‘normal” female body by framing female circumcision as a barbaric human rights violation. In doing so, the Western world often fails to acknowledge the practice’s deep rooted cultural significance that have made women “prisoners of ritual”. It will be argued that in order to adequately resolve...
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...Nila Tavangarian Women Studies 30 January 30th, 2017 WS Midterm Exam Winter 2017 Part 1: Brief Essays – the Beauty Myth 1) In Wolf’s “Chapter 6: Hunger” in the Beauty Myth she argues that anorexia and bulimia is taking over women in the West. She claims that, “Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are-less,” (Wolf, 208). I agree with the feminist perspective in “Hunger” that women are affected by pop culture and media to starve themselves until the point where they are unstable. Unfortunately, many women in the US are influenced to look like women in pop culture, however this has caused millions of suicides and health issues that...
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...Theories of Ethics Consequentialism (Utilitarianism) Consequentialism sees the rightness or wrongness of an action in terms of the consequences brought about by that action. The most common form of consequentialism is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism holds that one should act so as to do the greatest good for the greatest number. The good as defined by J.S. Mill would be the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. Utilitarians are concerned with the aggregate happiness of all beings capable of experiencing pleasure or pain including nonhuman animals. They consider the principle of utility to be the act, which produces the greatest balance of good over evil. Utilitarians consider both the happiness-producing and unhappiness-producing consequences of several alternative actions before deciding on one. A nineteenth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham created a checklist called the hedonic calculus. Bentham designed what he termed the hedonic calculus to enable people to measure the overall happiness- or pleasure-producing consequences of actions in terms of their duration, intensity, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent. This tool would not work in today’s society because happiness or pleasure as we know it would be difficult to measure on a numeric scale. There are two forms of utilitarians. Act utilitarians directly apply the principle of utility to each case as it arises. Rule utilitarians apply the principle of utility to general rules of...
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...The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN-10: 1444338544; 365-82. ISBN-13: 978-1444338546 Sex/Gender and the Media From Sex Roles to Social Construction and Beyond Cynthia Carter Introduction In the early years of second-wave western feminism, many gender researchers and feminist scholars distinguished between the notion of sex, defined as biological differences between male and female, and ‘sex roles,’ referring to certain behaviors and characteristics attributed to each sex that was a social construction. The resulting media research centered on images of women in the media (much less emphasis was placed on men) in order to draw attention to inequities in their portrayal in relation to men (in quantitative terms as well as in terms of the use of stereotypes). Since the 1970s, however, the scope of social constructionism has greatly expanded in feminist theory. Some suggest that the distinction between the biological and the social has, as a result, eroded to such an extent that it is no longer possible to understand the difference, while others question the need for this distinction. For instance, in queer and transgender theory and feminist cultural studies, theorists have sought to make strange the ‘sex/gender’ distinction. The key argument made is that biology is no less a cultural construct than gender socialization into masculinity and femininity. While the point is that biology, like gender, is thought to be socially constructed, that does...
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...and treatment of illness. A more refined version of this common sense view underlies the long standing bio-medical model of disease based on the following assumptions. Firstly that disease is an organic condition and non-organic factors associated with the human mind are considered unimportant or are ignored altogether in the search for biological causes of pathological symptoms. Secondly that disease is a temporarily an organic state that can be eradicated and cured by medical intervention. Disease is experienced by a sick individual who then becomes the object of treatment. Disease is therefore treated after the symptoms appear and the application of medicine is a reactive healing process. It I treated in a medical environment in a surgery or hospital away from the site where the symptoms first appeared. During the course of this, scientific medicine has efficiently displaced folk or lay medicine. Modernity is about expertise not tradition. Rather though scientific and technical regulation of the body than mistaken...
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...Functionalism The functionalist perspective is a very important perspective as it focuses on describing each part of society and how they all add to the overall society. The different parts all depend on one another and include the government, which provides children with the education they need, this will then lead on to them being more likely to get a higher paid job which means that there are more taxes paid which helps to keep the government running. With this system, society will be stable and promote productivity but if it does not go to plan, parts of the system will fail and have to find new order and stability. Functionalism highlights the order that exists in society and focuses on social stability and public values. Some functionalists focus on the function of human behaviours, one of these sociologists is Robert Merton who categorised human functions into two sections; ‘manifest functions’ which included the actions that were obvious and intentional such as attending a church to worship as part of a religion and ‘latent functions’ which are actions that are neither intentional or obvious such as when going to the church to worship they are unintentionally going to also separate their personal values from their uniform, work or religious values. Functionalism doesn’t encourage people to be an active role or go about changing their social environment, even if these changes could be useful and good for them. By using the basics to the functionalist perspective, Talcott...
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...Forgive me, for I am here to destroy your last excuse for procrastinating. You couldn’t start your essay being too busy looking for a perfect argumentative essay topic, right? Now you can find all you need in the list below. 80 really good persuasive essay topics are waiting for you a few lines below. Don’t check them if you’d rather continue hopeless browsing and complaining. Gender roles Men shouldn’t open doors to women not to hurt feminists’ feelings. Male pregnancy Further research on male pregnancy should be sponsored. Plastic surgery Actors should be prohibited to have plastic surgeries. Abstinence programs Abstinence programs in schools are ineffective. Civil unions Civil unions should be granted the same rights as married couples if they live together for 3 years. Smoking Smokers are more open than non-smokers. Humor Humor is the best stress coping strategy. Dorm All freshmen should live in the dorm to understand what college life really is. Facebook Students shouldn’t add teachers as friends on Facebook. Extracurriculars Extracurricular activities should be made obligatory. Junk food Skipping meals is better than eating junk food. Bullying Bullies can stimulate other students’ self development. Business Office dress code can boost employees’ performance. Bankruptcy The top reason for bankruptcy is poor leadership. Chinese Chinese should be made a new language for international communication. Globalization The inter-governmental unions...
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