Study Questions on Women’s Body Image
from Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1991)
- 181 -- up to one tenth of American women and up to one fifth of American women students have or have had eating disorders
- 185 -- The average model, dancer, or actress is thinner than 95% of American women
- 187 -- “A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. . . . Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.”
General Questions on Body Articles
- What are the repeated, general ideas you fid in all three essays?
- How is body image and sexual attraction a function of “social construction”?
- What particular details and experiences were most shocking, telling, or familiar to you?
Brownmiller, "The Body" (X)
- How have ideals of the female body changed over time?
- What particular body parts have women (and men) fixated on?
- How do ideas about relative size of men and women reflect social roles?
- We have given up corsets and girdles; what hobbles women today?
- How are ideas of beauty linked to class?
- How is the “feminine aesthetic” as outlined by Brownmiller on p. 34 played out today?
Dworkin, "Chinese Footbinding" (X)
- Why did the Chinese continue to bind women’s feet for 1,000 years?
- How is footbinding an example of the social construction of sexuality?
- How did footbinding affect women’s actual social and political roles?
- How does footbinding fit into Chaffee’s four circles of control?
- What contemporary practices is footbinding analogous to?
- Dworkin’s critique of romantic love (p. 21) is pretty extreme. Are there any aspects of her critique that seem acceptable?
- What are some of Dworkin’s complaints about ideals of Beauty?
Hesse-Biber, “Am I Thin Enough Yet?” RCG 489-97
- What is Delia’s definition of success; do you agree with her?
- What are the economic and political consequences of women’s insecurity with their bodies?
- Cui bono: who profits?
- What are some of the more devastating contradiction’s in our attitudes towards food and women’s bodies?
- How is the labeling of eating disorders as an addiction another instance of the “ideology of individualism”?
- Why do women continue to pursue the thin ideal?
