Kathy Tran
Sociology 1100
April 16, 2013
Final Paper

Women and Society

Even though women generally receive respect in today's society, the view of how a woman should be and the role of how a woman should act unfortunately remains the same. There's no clear way of telling how both men and women have learned these concepts. Stereotyping women has only gotten worse throughout the years. As a young adult woman living in the United States, I have only grown to resent society because of the way men view women and also the way women view each other.

I grew up in a world where it is known that if you were born a woman, you must be “perfect”. There's no leeway for flaws. Society thinks of the “acceptable” woman as tall, thin, fit, beautiful skin complexion, big breasts, long hair, great facial features, and the list just keeps going on and on. The “unacceptable” woman is known to be overweight, bad skin, bad hair, even small things such as if her middle toe was longer than her big toe. The problem with the way society views women is that they only focus on the physical traits of a women. We have to constantly keep up with this image of something that simply does not exist. It has been proven in Jean Kilbourne's, Killing Us Softly 4, a documentary about the image of women in advertisement, that the perfect woman does not exist on this planet. In her video, she talks about how model industries would photo shop and combine four different women to make one perfect one. This is false advertisement that billions of people actually fall for. This false advertisement cause young girls to think harshly of themselves as unworthy. Because of this, eating disorder rates have sky rocketed in the U.S. Young girls everywhere are brutally harming their health just to look acceptable in our society.

Not only do women have to be physically attractive, but they must also have an attractive personality. This consists of being compassionate, confident, caring, understanding, smart, independent, but also women must be naïve, conformative, classy yet naughty, kind yet fiesty, and this list goes on as well. I don't think that society understands that women cannot be like this. As a woman myself, I know that we do nag, and lose our temper, and jump to conclusions, and even have accusations but that's only because society's perfect woman is not real. Throughout my four years attending high school, I've witnessed many girls “dumbing themselves down” to get guys to like them. In another documentary called The Bro Code, it talks about how women must act a certain way in order to get attention from men. One example was how women must appear to be dumb because a smart women would be too hard to handle. Why is it that society thinks a women should be smart and dumb at the same time? There's no possible way that women can have all of these personality traits. It's true that we see these traits in movies and music videos, but that why they call it acting. Things like this just don't exist.

In the documentary, The Bro Code, it clearly depicts how women have become sex objects. Whether it's movies, music videos, television, books, etc. women are only known for one thing, sex. In our society, if a man were to have many sex partners, it would be a good thing. It'd be taken as games to see who can “score” the highest. Yet, if a woman were to have many sex partners, she'd be marked as a whore or “easy”. There is a huge gap of sexual inequality between men and women. This is where I'm interested in finding out why men view women as object, but also how women view themselves as objects. From my own experience with me cousin, Micheal, it shocked me how these views has crawled its way too young teenagers. I remember seeing a picture of Micheal and two girls. I asked him who the girls were in the picture and he replied to me, “Those are my bitches”. Micheal was only 14 years old. My jaw practically hit the floor when he said that. Where did people learn this?