Journalist Nancy Jo Sales goes to a mall to sit with teenage girls, and hear about their social media life. She writes a book called “American Girls: Social Media, and The Secret Lives of Teenage Girls”. Which is about the life of this era of smartphones and social media. Her book is based off a girl she met with who had tried to commit suicide over cyberbullying. The girl had social media and would post pictures and would get awful, rude, and nasty comments, until one day someone contacted her and her parents about her bullying issues.…
“She is twenty-two, pretty, but not beautiful. She wears a cotton summer dress. She carries a small composition –paper suitcase. There is tense, distraught air about her. She may have been crying. She looks about nervously, as if she doesn’t want to be seen.”(5)…
She believed she was becoming more beautiful; she let go of the panic, shame and guilt-ridden resolves regarding her weight and eating habits. One day she clothed herself in traditional Gambian dress and made her way to the shops. As she returned, she placed her newly purchased items on her head, and made her way back home, slowly, swinging her hips in the manner of the natives. She was transformed. Now, when she looked upon the skinny European tourists, she did not see an ideal; she saw something more skeletal than slim, lacking in shape and substance. Her ideal had…
So often in relationships we find the smallest idiosyncrasies or characteristics charming at first. However, after the initial “honeymoon phase” these characteristics cannot be overlooked any longer. This is especially evident in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark”. A man named Aylmer is no longer able to overlook the birthmark that was bestowed upon his wife, Georgiana’s, cheek. Even though the mark was small enough to be covered by two fingers, he was not able to allow it to disrupt the utter perfection of the rest of her face.…
It was a casual August afternoon in Minneapolis, people walking the down the sidewalk, strangers passing by. We were visiting my old hometown. I was walking with Beth, and we were messing around. I used to have an inside joke with one of my friends from fifth grade, “Girl you need to chill.” It stuck once I moved. Anyway, Beth had just told me to chill, so, I walked into the nearest cold building. Which of course, ended up being a meat locker… 15 minutes later I was coming out and saw an all too familiar pair of square glasses. Before I could see her face, she turned away. Her bleached tip hair swung across her shoulders. The dark skin, the hair and glasses, it had to be Miracle Brown. This is the girl who was one of my best friends in sixth grade. She started heading down the street, so I told Beth to meet me back at our hotel.…
The extract from Kate Grenville’s “The Idea of Perfection” is one that focuses on a particular bridge, located over Cascade Rivulet, probably in the outskirts of their town. In this passage, the extensive use of descriptive language is clear; the main character picks up many details of the bridge and its surroundings as she explores it. A thematic point in this extract is linked with the title, “The Idea of Perfection”, where through the tranquil style in which this extract is written, we get an idea that his bridge, though it looks simple, is in its own way, an idea of perfection.…
Denton, N. A., & Villarrubia, J. (2007). Residential segregation on the island: the role of race and class in puerto rican neighborhoods. Sociological Forum, 22(1), 51-76…
A girl does not live up to society’s standards of beauty and gets bullied for having a “big nose” and “fat legs.” Unable to keep up with having two identities, the girl kills herself and ends up, ironically, pretty to everyone’s eyes.…
The poem, “Barbie Doll,” by Marge Piercy, implicitly criticizes the way that women are mixed into stereotypical roles from the time they are young. This poem makes it clear this standard of perfection is impossible to achieve--at least not while one is alive--and starts with something relatively careless at a young age, a Barbie doll. The Barbie doll, one of the best-selling “toys” of all time, has become an icon of U.S. culture for the way it idealizes the female body. Young girls all around the world attempt to model themselves after this “perfect” woman. The urge to become a disproportionate female with a painted on smile overshadows the ideal to love yourself as you are. However,…
In Aronofsky’s Black Swan, the main character Nina struggles with her own body image. Throughout the film, the viewer is able to see first hand the obstacles Nina faces with her obsession of becoming ‘perfect’. Much like the initial focus for this paper, Nina encounters influences from individuals in her life on the ideas of perfection and body image. She is also confronted with various individual pressures such as sexuality and the male gaze, the second focus for this paper’s discussion. With the external and internal stresses on her ideas of body image, Nina quickly begins taking harmful measures to reach ‘perfection’. These harmful measures or consequences of poor body image, the third point of consideration, play a huge part in Nina’s life. Unfortunately, this obsession and Nina’s body image dissatisfaction essentially leads to her insanity and death (Black Swan, 2011). Aronofsky’s representation of a woman’s battle with body image and the ideas of perfection in our 21st-century society begins to bring an awareness to the true significance it plays within individual’s lives. He is able to express to the viewers how our society is affected by body image through the experiences Nina…
The dance studio that he'd spent most of his time in as a wide eyed five year old in his first pair of tap shoes was akin to his home. In fact, it felt more like home than his actual home, where his dad often teased him about his 'prancing around the stage like a bloody pony' but he knew that his dad preferred him doing this - his passion - than on the streets at ten o'clock at night smoking glue or sniffing weed.…
One girl was only able to think of three things, while another came up with ten. The things they liked about themselves ranged from superficial, such as the way they dress, or their hair, to personality traits, one girl saying she liked that she’s “crafty”, another saying she’s glad she’s colorful. While the answers spanned a wide spectrum from external to internal, the thing that perhaps struck me the most was the way some of these girls seemed to only see value in themselves through their appearance. It was hard to see that the traits they saw worthy of praise within themselves were almost purely based on their appearance. This was mirrored in how they responded to the prompt for the third page, things they liked about each other. Again, a lot of “I like you because of your hair” type of answers were given. Even at 6 and 7, this was the traits they deemed of value that other girls…
Shizuka Yokomizo was born in Tokyo and now works; and lives in London, her ‘Strangers’ series is a portrait series in which Yokomizo has sent out an anonymous letter to random strangers which contained the possibility of an agreement which would in turn allow her to again return to their window to photograph the suspecting stranger. From the use of this communication Yokomizo is now able to capture their eye contact which has then helped in creating a stronger sense of their existence within the…
How certain can we be of that which we claim to “beauty”? How can we be absolutely certain that what…
The snow painted the lively streets of Shibuya, Tokyo as couples, hand in hand, pass the humungous Christmas tree displayed in the center. No single person was left unaccompanied except for a girl, standing 5’4 feet tall. Her hair was put up in a very neat bun. A few strands were left hanging, complimenting her face. Her petite body was clad in a very simple pink dress with laces at the bottom. No one would’ve been brave enough to go out alone in the couple-filled streets of Japan during Christmas. But it seems like fate had a different plan, for a man, waving his mitten-covered hands, approached the said girl.…