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The effects of the role society has on women
The effects of the role society has on women
Impact of gender inequality in society
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When a woman walks in the room, she steals everyone’s attention. A thought goes into every mind present. Some might be of disgust or of admiration. Women are treated with the same respect that each thought is; violent or loving. In Colombia, it is not uncommon for women to be beaten by their husbands. Weiss discusses this problem, she says, “They think this violence is natural, just because they’re women. So any type of violence is considered part of daily life, or their fault,” (Weiss). Women have faced many unjust judgments and treatments. Beauvoir writes about this in her book “The Second Sex.” The title itself is saying that women are being treated as second best. The book contains the problem of how women are having trouble with jobs, education, and judgments of both those fields. From Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” there …show more content…
No one judges more than a woman. Waking up in the morning, the first thing they do looks into the mirror and judge how much makeup to put on to cover up their already beautiful features. Throughout the rest of the day they speculate and judge other females, either building themselves up, or destroying their self-confidence. Coyne writes on how women treat each other, in her article she says, “There is tremendous interest in the manner in which individuals, particularly girls and women, manipulate relationships to intentionally hurt others,” (Coyne). Women do this only to make them feel secure. Everywhere they are bombarded by images that are considered perfect, or the world’s view of perfection. Beauvoir touched on this as well. While she was talking about marriage, she commented that, “The unmarried female… was more or less excluded from social life,” (P 177 ¶ 2). Women are being unjust to themselves, judging themselves and others around them. Unjust in the way they are treating
“that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (Fitzgerald 13). The “New Women” of this era were valued for their beauty, rather than their intelligence. And the only way for a woman to be able to survive in this kind of society is for her to remain ignorant beautiful for the entirety of her life. Though this is stated at the beginning, its meaning isn’t realized until the end, after all the girls are trapped by their decisions. Because of this, women are often thought of as the “second sex” being unable to fend for themselves.
As Rafaela, Mamacita, and Sally’s examples show, the men living in the Mango Street neighborhood persecute their women. The men force their women to stay home. They also restrict their women’s rights by making them speak a new language, and in the extreme case, they beat their women. Although many negative aspects of gender may have lessened over the past few decades, the society should still work toward lessening more of these negative aspects around the world, and especially in the Middle East and North Africa, because extreme gender inequalities still exist today. Treating women inhumanely should be considered as extremely immoral, since we’re all human beings and born to be equal.
The narrator and her husband’s interactions shows her as submissive in terms of gender equality. Although John perceives the narrator as a child with no volunteer ideas, it is shown in her journal that this theory is not valid because she was shaped to comply by the society and the norm. The narrator’s inferiority negatively impacts her mental and physical health to the point she had to rip off the wallpaper to break free. Nevertheless, when read critically, the story also unveil the women’s suffrage movement and its struggle. Since this story was published, women are slowly breaking away from men’s suppression and gaining more rights. In short, society and culture define gender roles; however, the changing economic, social, and education environment open up a new path for women. Nowadays, women are given the chance to prove themselves and can act beyond their gender roles. However, the equality between genders has not been achieved yet. Therefore, women should continue to fight for their rights and freedoms until they are treated with respect and enjoy
Beton discovers men’s anger toward women by glancing through an apparently well-known Professor von X’s book titled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. The mere title makes her angry—outraged that the words could even form the title of a book, which, to Beton, is the natural response to “be[ing] told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man” (32). She does not know at first why men are so critical of women, but she does know that their arguments say more about them than they do about the women they write about. The books “had been written in the red light of emotion,” she says, “and not in the white light of truth” (33), meaning that the men Beton speaks of are responding to something—some feeling or condition that they, as a sex identifying with one another, are sensing, rather than merely expressing a natural fact as their rhetoric seems to suggest.
Women have the right to live their own life the way that they please. Women are not properties, nor are they incompetent. Women have the same opportunities to thrive in society as does any male, but some customs and traditions of some cultures prevent women from soaring to such heights. Culturally traditional men want complete dominion over their women. But who can blame them, it’s how they were raised and these things have been rooted in them since they were young children. When one thinks of a culture’s virtue, they automatically think of women’s behavior within her family context. A woman is gold in any society but yet is treated as properties. It is safe to say that one’s honor depend on a woman.
Adele had learned these values by living in Poland, which possessed a far more egalitarian view of women’s roles in the community, which allowed Adele to evaluate American patriarchal society from a differing point of view: “I—a servant? Even in our worst poverty in Poland none of our people have ever been servants. Tailors, storekeepers, but never a servant. Should I be the first to go down? In this perspective, Beauvoir’s theory of the historically constructed gender roles of women as the “other” are subjective, since many differing societies can possess egalitarian views of women: Beauvoir focused not on an individual consciousness but on a relationship…She redefined feminist discourse through her epistemological privileging of female voices.” These are important aspects of Adele’s view of the world, since she has an alternative perspective on how women should be educated from her experiences in Poland,. Beauvoir argues that women can make an actual choice about their gender role identity, since many subservient aspects of female identity are artificial creations by patriarchal social institutions. Certainly, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex defines the social aspects of women’s choices, which Yezierska implies in her main character, Adele, as she struggles to eventually start
...e, women are the weaker of the two sexes. Women are slaves and spoils of war, if they are valued for sex they are used for sex. The universal portrayal of women causes a reevaluation of modern day gender balances by the reader.
Why is a woman “the other” of a man? The term “the other” describes the female’s secondary position, to a man, in her own mind and in society’s standards. In The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, the understanding of reality is made up of interaction between opposing forces. For an individual to define oneself and have a true understanding, s/he must also define something in opposition. “[A]t the moment when man asserts himself as subject and free being, the idea of the Other arises,” says de Beauvoir. Throughout history, men claim themselves to be the subject or the superior to women. A man sees a woman as the object to his success. She is essential in sexual pleasure and in producing children, but as an independent she has no substantial value. A woman completes her partner when she, herself, isn’t complete. This idea leads women to hesitate in following their own dreams and asserting their freedom. Even though this imbalance is closer in modern times, the situation is still present. Society accepts “roles” a man and a woman should play, when in reality everyone should ...
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
In Simone De Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, the term the other is used in reference to women. Women are regarded as the inessential and the dependent sex who needs the one in order to exist (De Beauvoir, 1989). The one is referred to as man who is the norm that we need to conform to or else we will be marginalized if we fail to do so. This ideal norm has been present in society since the very beginning of time. Maybe it is because man was created first before woman in the creation story of Genesis and how the religion, Christianity, has a man as their Savior. This is why women are regarded as the weak ones as they are incapable to comply with the norm and are alienated in society. In addition, those men who fail to prove their manliness and do not meet the standards of what it means to be a man are often referred ...
Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1949 text The Second Sex, examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are subjugated, oppressed, and made to be inferior to males – simply by virtue of the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. She sees women as unable to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives as freely as men can, and, tragically, mostly unaware of their own oppression.
When you see a man who is hurt or in pain a realistic answer instead consoling him would be " be a MAN, stop being such a GIRL." Now if a woman was hurt, an instinctual thing to do is ask " are you okay? or do you need help?" Why do we have such differences. What’s really happening between women and men in contemporary society? Society loves to say "You’ve come a long way, baby" whenever an individual woman rises to the top of a "male" profession. It also enjoys turning househusbands into afternoon talk show guests. Throughout history, women have had the misfortune of being labeled as “the other” to men. According to many philosophers, women are the second sex. This idea of women as the second sex is fueled by the notion that the feminine is a mistake, and that masculinity is the correct approach to life. This idea has even been given a new name recently: androcentrism. Androcentrism is a new kind of sexism that, rather than just favoring men over women, favors masculinity over feminist universally. In Paradise, Toni Morrison shows through her style of writing and the way she sets up the chapters shows different images of how men in the town of Ruby are oppressing these women in the convents.
The concept of “beauty” is something that everyone feels, thinks, or wants, in order to fit society’s standards. In today’s society, we are often faced with the unrealistic ideals of what beauty is. Due to society’s constant portraying of unrealistic beauty ideals, this reinforces a negative influence upon women’s idea of beauty, resulting in a negative impact in their confidence, and self-esteem, which leads to others, specifically women to be manipulated by society’s corrupted outlook of what beauty is. To add onto this issue, we are constantly surrounded by sources of this negative influence in our everyday lives, including magazines, television, advertisements, and so on. However, women specifically, are more prone to be victims of this negative effect, thus will have more pressure upon themselves to match society’s idea of “beauty,” which includes unrealistic and sometimes unattainable beauty standards. Women especially, can sometimes be so deeply manipulated by society’s unrealistic ideals of what is beautiful, such that it’s possible that they don’t even realize it Furthermore, in order to do so, women often will receive negative impacts rather than positive impacts, such as in their confidence and self-esteem. The negative effects of society’s beauty ideals also lead women to have an overall corrupted idea of what is “beautiful.” Society creates unrealistic ideals of beauty towards women through the media by creating an unrealistic image of what women should look like to be considered beautiful. Men negatively affect women’s idea of beauty by using the unrealistic beauty standards exposed by society which further pressures women to try to fit society’s idea of what is beautiful. Beauty pageants negatively affect women’s ov...
Since the beginning of time, women have always been seen as things purely for the pleasure and benefit of men. Women have always been objectified. Objectification is seeing and treating a person as if they did not have thoughts and feelings, as if they had the status of an object.{1} Only in recent years have they begun to be seen as individuals of equal intelligence and ability. You may think, ”Women have had equal rights for a while. I do not see how this is a problem.” It may not seem like women were given their rights recently, but in our history, women have been treated objectively for thousands of years, even dating back to biblical times. Still, even when women have the same rights, opportunities, and responsibility as men, women can be found almost everywhere being treated as though they were incompetent and lesser human beings.{4}
There are only two genders in the whole world, one is male and the other is female. There are lots of advocates and sociologist who has spoken for the equality between men and women but till now the goal of equality has not been achieved yet. Women have always been dominated by the men in the Patriarchal society where men are the head of the household and the rule makers. Men are the supreme authority and women are the followers. When we hear these things, even in the 21 century it is not the new or surprising things because it is still being practiced in our society and there aren’t any women in the world that had not been through this discrimination at least once in their life time. It is not that, women have not fight for their right but the fact is that nobody is there to hear their voices. Women have always wanted to gain their rights and they have also fought for it too but it is their misfortune that their privileges and opportunities are always taken away from them by the men. The question might arise whether all human beings are equal? If so why male and female are not equal? Being a woman brought up in a developing country, I have experienced the effects of this societal dichotomy. Thus, I would like to delineate this aspect of the division in the society by using the Feminist Theory to analyze women’s position in the Patriarchal society and I am choosing Simone de Beauvoir as my theorist.