Phenomenal Woman

There are so many things to be said about what we’ve been talking about in class but I feel like the most important thing that I’ve gotten from everything we’ve talked about is that some women are afraid of their sexuality. I think that it frightens them, that it makes them uncomfortable. In class we briefly touched on the fact that it was a man that created Barbie and Ken. While many women seemed to be slightly distressed about such a fact I find that my only qualm is that women have let a plastic doll threaten them. If the issue is that Barbie is unrealistically beautiful than maybe an action figure who is unrealistically enhanced should be created as well. From what I can see, though, the issue is not only that women are comparing themselves to a twelve inch piece of plastic but that they think Barbie is the only kind of beautiful there is.

Sexuality is a very frightening thing to some women. They want to keep it hidden from the world so as not to draw attention to something that is considered immoral. While many years ago it was the man’s thought that seeing even a little skin was slatternly it seems that view is now in the eyes of women. While the fashion has changed the idea hasn’t; if a girls skirt is even a little bit too short she’s improper. If women were truly disgusted with Barbie and everything she “stands” for, which in my opinion is the beauty and brains all women have, then why not just stop buying and promoting her. If the doll didn’t sell than they would have taken her out of production no matter what. While stereotype is that men only think with their “emotions” there’s no way they would have kept a doll in production that wasn’t going to sell.

Even worse is that women have allowed Barbie to increase their own insecurities. These insecurities stem from what each individual woman believes to be beautiful, a concept that is of each persons own creation. If the woman chooses to view herself as ugly and grotesque for not being the same measurements as Barbie that is her own fault. I could choose to think I am not beautiful and sexy because I don’t look identical to Barbie but I don’t. I believe that I am everything a gorgeous woman should be because I choose to believe that I am a kind of beautiful. The idea and manifestation of such an idea is not a hard one, once the woman in question has accepted the concept. Maya Angelou embraced this idea and even wrote the poem Phenomenal Woman as example that being a beautiful woman does not mean looking like a fashion model.

In the writing by Susan Sontag she wrote that beauty had become a feminine thing and that there needed to be a woman that should change the very essence of the word Beauty and how we view it today. What I think Susan Sontag failed to realize is that that woman already exist; she exist in me and every other female in the world. Once woman stop thinking of beauty as one concept and accept it as being exactly what each woman is than the very center of what beauty means to every person in this earth will have exactly the kind of strength that has been missing from it.