Dissatisfaction with body image.

Many gender based stereotypes are maintained through discrimination against women and girls. The differential gender roles played by women and girls lead to an obsession with their physical bodies and attractiveness. The high standards of physical beauty created by the media produce significant and demoralizing pressures on women who compare themselves upward to beauty standards that for most are impossible to reach. Dissatisfaction with body image has motivated women to undergo millions of cosmetic surgeries in the United States every year and supports a large cosmetic industry that function to help women meet ideal cultural standards of beauty (Gangestad & Scheyd, 2005). In recent decades the preoccupation with thinness has produced anorexia and bulimia in many young women and teenagers with untold damage to women’s health, reproductive ability and self-esteem. Ironically in less affluent societies thinness is associated with poverty and larger women are preferred. However, the results of globalization and ubiquitous Western media are that more women even in the developing world are buying into thinness as an ideal body type (Grogan, 2008).

Why are women dissatisfied to such a high degree with their physical appearance? There are of course many sources of influence that determine self-images including family, educational institutions and the media. However, the media in particular must be criticized for portraying women who are very thin as ideal. Models from the catwalks to popular magazines strive to portray extreme thinness to the point of looking anorexic and ill. The average woman in society compares herself with such socially prestigious models and is disappointed with her body image (Leahey, Crowther & Mickelson, 2007). As a result of globalization these extreme models of thinness are now accepted as ideal in many parts of the world.

The role of dolls for girls growing up in Western societies also reinforces unrealistic feminine physical proportions in girls. The Barbie doll is an example of how the mania for thinness is introduced to the minds of girls in early childhood.

There are many negative health consequences for women who are dissatisfied with their body image. We have already noted the relationship of body image to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. At the psychological level dissatisfaction with body image lead to mental health related problems including depression and low self-esteem. These negative factors also have consequences for physical health including anemia, low blood pressure, kidney failure and heart related problems (National Institute of Mental Health, 2008). The media could help correct the negative modeling effects by ensuring that a broader range of women’s body types appear in both the printed and visual media. Social learning by observing healthy models of all body types would reduce the pressure women feel to comply with the absurd challenges of super thin models.

10.2.2 Equal work equal pay?

Whether women work outside the home depends somewhat on egalitarian and traditional cultural values. In Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia only few women are economically active outside the home. However, in most of the world more than half of the women contribute to family income by participating in the economy and holding jobs. However, as we have seen this generally means that these women carry both the burden of the larger share of home work and child care, and also in many cases a fulltime job. Women are still paid only a fraction of the income that men make. Here again cultural values of egalitarianism or traditions play a role. In the Scandinavian countries women experience the smallest gender gap in pay by earning 77 % of men’s wages in Norway and 81 % in Sweden. By comparison women earn only 67 % of men’s income in the U.S. However, that compares favorably with women’s income in countries where gender roles are circumscribed by traditional religion. For example in Yemen women earn only 30 % of men’s wages (Hausman, Tyson, & Zahidi, 2008).

It should be remembered that even in the advanced countries women are not paid equally for equal work. Some of the reasons may be women’s role in home making that allows less time for outside work and therefore less experience or opportunity customarily rewarded by larger salaries. On the other hand these gender discrepancies in pay are also likely the consequence of discrimination and a devaluation of women’s work. Although women have progressed significantly in recent years, particularly in Northern Europe and North America, there are still very significant gender gaps in the rest of the world. This is especially disheartening to report since where men are absent due to death or delinquency the woman may be the sole breadwinner for the family. Discrimination in pay results in children growing up under conditions of hardship and poverty.

10.3 Violence against women: A dirty page of history and contemporary society.

Violence toward women takes many forms from husbands or lovers who are physically abusive to rape in intimate relationships or in war. As a result of norms that support male dominance women are often sexually exploited in prostitution, pornography and other forms of servitude. The struggle of feminists in the past century was to create laws and policies that support equality and equity in access to resources and power. Personal empowerment is not a free gift but the outcome of men and women working and struggling together across many decades.

10.3.1 Intimate violence: The ubiquitous nature of rape.

Recent surveys show that 1 out every four females in the U.S. have been assaulted over the past year (CNN, December 15^th, 2011). A study sponsored by the World Health Organization found that between 15 % to 71 % percent of the women interviewed in ten countries said they had been sexually or physically abused over their lifetimes, and between 4% and 54 % claimed the abuse had occurred over the past year (Garcia-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise, & Watts, 2006). The rape figures are consistent with the cross-cultural abuse statistics with one out of every five women claiming she had been raped over the course of her life time (Parrot & Cummings, 2006). It is hard to believe that this level of violence by men could occur unless there are culturally supportive values that view such behavior as permissible when directed against women. Women who are especially at risk for rape are those who live in cultures that emphasize male dominance and strict separation of the sexes and where a high degree of interpersonal violence is present (Sanday, 1981). Some researchers argue that it is the higher status attributed to men in a given culture that provide the support for intimate violence.

Rape statistics show that rapes are not isolated instances of abuse, but may occur over long periods of time by men who are acquainted with the victims and the victims are often blamed. Recent news tells about a young woman by name of Gulnaz who was raped by a cousin in Afghanistan, and then given a 12 year prison sentence. She was placed in prison with the child produced by the assault for the crime of adultery. It was put to her that the only way she could leave prison was if she would marry her rapist (Zakaria, 2011). Such cultural norms are incomprehensible to people who grow up in the West, although the rape figures in the West also show terrible and frequent violence toward women.

Women are also often the victims of rape in war, and these assaults have been used historically in male to male violence to demoralize an enemy population. During the genocide in Rwanda about 25 % of the women were raped, and in the wars in the former Yugoslavia tens of thousands of women were raped. When women are raped during war it is often used as a means of humiliating enemy soldiers and populations. During the Second World War probably millions of women were raped and exploited. When the enemy population is demonized in the discourse of hostility it provides the excuse and rationality for men to later take out the enmity on women who don’t have the means to defend themselves.

One of the most disheartening forms of violence occurs in cultures where women are considered property to be controlled by men. In some societies the culture permits and encourages the murder of women who have somehow transgressed against cultural norms of propriety and thus brought “dishonor” to fathers or husbands. In some conservative male dominated societies such cultural transgressions may occur simply by the woman going out with men not approved by the male hierarchy and in more extreme cases having intimate relations with or marrying a man not approved by the family. According to the United Nations Population Fund (2000) about 5000 women are murdered each year to uphold this idea of “family honor” in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Israel. The tragedy of these killings are compounded by the intimate nature of the murders that are often carried out by a close relative like a brother, and the fact that the violence are often treated lightly by society with little sanction. Honor killings are the most extreme examples of intimate violence against women that grow out of cultural norms of male dominance and women as submissive.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 903