Interesting Articles

Monday, March 26, 2007

Objectified Women and Consumerism

This goes back to an article from one of my classes last semester.
In the media and advertising, our society has objectified women which not only acts to degrade the dignity and value of women and affects the way that men treat them, but it also takes advantage of the glamor that women feel necessary - and often have been taught to even enjoy taking part in. Fashion and cosmetics are big business and they only succeed by creating a "need" for such superfluous things by telling women that they are not beautiful unless they alter their appearance with such cosmetics. As the article says, the 'beauty' companies "thrive on what might be described as an informal and perpetual feminine beauty competition." And like most things in our society, we are exporting this model to the rest of the world.
One man in this article feels that what had been exported to Iran "was the glamorous and sexy supermodels and movie stars who were not respected for their minds or talents, but, if respected at all, for their bodies and sexuality... Women had been degraded and victimized by western society. Their bodies were objectified and used to push consumer goods."
So here again, we have yet another example of how our consumeristic society is in opposition to our faith that tells us that we are to treat women as sisters, with absolute purity (1 Tim 5:2) - not as objects for our own personal gain (whether that be in the form of monetary profit or of lust and pleasure) ...food for thought.

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