My favorite part:
"That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women."
I've been trying to make this point to my ENGL 360 class all semester. Some of them get it (or say that they get it), but it's surprising how hard it is to convince everyone. And it's hard to believe how often we can find ourselves reproducing harmful patterns even when we know we shouldn't.
1 comment:
I believe that we live in such a society now that today's youth are too busy "Keeping up with the Kardasians" and are so busy trying to live up to unrealistic standards pf how life is supposed to be that they forget to work on what they have inside instead of what they look like on the outside...
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