The Pressure to Be

Susan Douglas wrote about the societal pressure for women to look a certain way. After reading this chapter, I started thinking about if I felt pressure from society to be a size 0. I’m uncertain. I do recognize that there are countless things either on television or the overall media that urge women to be skinny, to be aesthetically pleasing or under the guise of health. I think that there is a countermovement, so to speak, for women not to be a stick figure.

In my personal experience, I do not feel pressure to look a certain way because I see some celebrity on television. Instead, I have felt more pressure to look a particular way based on the women that I have been around. In my middle and high school days, the girls did not compare themselves to the models on a runway but the girl whose locker was down the hallway. The desire was only to be similar to the girls in our area. Granted, the girl down the hallway was probably influenced indirectly by someone on television. However, for the majority of girls that were in my class, I would argue that we compared ourselves to each other rather than to MTV. I thought this was especially true for height. In my small class (25 people), we had an exceptionally tall class and a few of us wanted to be taller to match their height.

I would argue that the proximity to others also has been applicable to my college experience. It is hard to explain exactly, but Colgate girls are different from the girls that are from my area--being one of the most fit campuses likely has something to do with it. I also felt this while I was abroad. For the most part, the women I saw in South Korea were small and could fit into clothes that I could when I was younger. This played a larger role when we were shopping for clothes. We couldn’t try on things before we bought them, so many times we just looked at them and had to realize many were just too small.

I felt that the direct community aspect was missing from Douglas’s argument. I think this plays a significant role. What is told to us by the media can be partially negated by those we are around so it is important to consider these influences as well.