Is the media to blame?
I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that. The media is market-led, in other words, it supplies people with what they want , or what it thinks they want. Women are obsessed with their looks to a degree that has nothing to do with seeking male approval.
The programme I mentioned -- 'What Not to Wear' -- goes out on the BBC, which doesn't carry advertising, and it is phenomenally popular. The book of the series was top of the bestseller list for months. The rudeness of the two harpies who present that programme is unbelievable, yet women queue up to go on it and be flayed. There is no end to women's obsession with their looks, and there's no use blaming it all on men, because it's not all about them.
My father, for instance, did not at all care for the makeup my mother used to plaster on her face. "Why do you always cover yourself with that claggy muck," he used to grumble, but she kept on doing it. She was doing it almost up to the day of her death, which was ten years after my father had shuffled off this mortal coil, and five years after she had gone into a nursing home, where there were very few men about at all. It was nothing to do with male approval, she did it for herself.
Women never stop obsessing over their looks, and other women's looks. I mean, a few weeks ago, a supposedly intelligent woman journalist, writing for a supposedly serious newspaper, devoted a good half of her column to bitching about the size of Cherie Blair's thighs in a picture taken of her on holiday which had appeared in other papers. It's no use saying that it is men who make women behave like this, because it isn't, it's something women do to themselves.
by Louise C on 2004 Nov 8 - 06:26 | reply to this comment
If You Read and Watch Trash...