Susie Orbach Losing Bodies Summary

Improved Essays
In this essay I will be examining “Losing Bodies” by Susie Orbach, an essay on the body-shaming of women in modern western culture. She argues that our culture’s obsession with attaining the perfect body has caused women to take drastic measures to achieve modern western beauty standards. When Orbach states that we are “losing bodies”, she is saying that our bodies are no longer seen as our homes, but something in constant need of reshaping to fit into western beauty standards. For decades, the media has perpetuated a western ideal of femininity so narrow that almost no can live up to it. We constantly see this ideal displayed in advertisements, magazines, movies, television, and digital media. The “perfect woman” is consistently portrayed as thin and pale, with hair no other place than the top of her …show more content…
Women all over the world have become desperate to achieve the idealized westernized body. In Asian countries such as South Korea and Singapore, it has become increasingly common for women to have plastic surgery to change the shape of their eyes and noses to fit the western ideal. In Shanghai, leg-lengthening surgery has become popular. In Argentina, citizens can receive cosmetic surgery in public hospitals. Bikini waxes have become incredibly common among western women. Orbach argues that this occurs because of our culture’s disapproval of pubic hair on women. It is also becoming more common among western women to have labiaplasty, which is a plastic surgery procedure that alters the labia. Orbach argues that this is a result of the media’s narrow representation of what a “normal” labia should look like. Orbach also critiques the Body-Mass Index (BMI), stating that it determines what is an acceptable body and encourages people to reconstruct their bodies through dieting. This has led to a billion-dollar diet

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    The media shapes society’s opinion on what the “perfect” women should look like. With the increase in technology use, the media is able to leave its imprint on women of all ages. By portraying models in TV commercials and social media sites, the media influences a large amount of women, provoking them to look like the models shown. However, the models are unrealistically perfect, with their unattainable features and thin bodies, causing women to reach for unrealistic expectations. Therefore, the unrealistic images of women portrayed in the media harm a woman’s physical and mental health by causing eating disorders, plastic surgeries, and low self- esteem.…

    • 1079 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Whose Body is This? Whose body is this? Mine or societies? Mine, or my swayed conscious’?…

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Unrealistic Body Image

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Photo manipulation, cosmetic surgery, and models are all found in media and are the three main contributors to unrealistic body image for women. Media has evolved greatly over the past few decades due to the growth of electronics outlets…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Gender And Gender Analysis

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Throughout history race and gender have been closely intertwined in the construction of both black and white women’s bodies alike. The female body being viewed as natural, the medicalizing of the female body, and advertising the ideal beauty are concepts that have been embedded in Western thinking for many years. These three theories show the interaction between gender and race in the construction of thoughts concerning, and the interpretation of, the woman’s body. The first concept that affects how we view the woman’s body deals with relating the woman to the body.…

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In magazines aimed at the general population, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair, women are oversexualized with provocative slogans, little to no clothing, and electronically edited photos. This creates an apparent distinction between what the media reinforces as the ideal woman and what women really look like. Here, a phenomenon called the feminine beauty ideal arises. The feminine beauty ideal is "the socially constructed notion that physical attractiveness is one of women 's most important assets, and something all women should strive to achieve and maintain." (Spade 3)…

    • 932 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    (334). Society claims that if a woman is to be considered beautiful, acceptable, she must be slender and toned; firmness is the real goal, and in order “to achieve such results…a violent assault on the enemy is usually required; bulges must be ‘attacked’ and ‘destroyed,’ fat ‘burned,’ and stomachs (or more disgustedly, ‘guts’) must be ‘busted’ and ‘eliminated’” (Bordo 337). This assault on unsightly imperfects is a social assault on women in an attempt at, like the physician’s goal,…

    • 846 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    However, a women’s view of body image could be changed. Adrienne Rich says in her book Of Women Born, Some contemporary theorists suggest that girls and women are increasingly able to ‘perform’ gender in a self-conscious manner. Accepting Judith Butler’s view that gender is to a great extent enacted or preformed, there is a possibility that, in the relative freedom of the postmodern world and armed with a postmodern consciousness, women will be able to variously accept, subvert or resist the normative enactment of the…

    • 1410 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the novel “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body,” Susan Bordo illustrates the impact that media has on women and their relationships with their bodies. Susan Bordo highlights how modern advertising has morphed what women think of as an “ideal appearance.” Bordo utilizes factual evidence, modern allusions, and examples to portray the consequences of an idealized figure on a contemporary woman. Although Bordo’s argument is primarily based on philosophy, she uses logos to establish her notions. Before depicting her thoughts about the impact of an idealized body on women, Bordo defines the basic elements of her argument by providing evidence about the “$1.75-billion-a-year industry in the United States” (Bordo).…

    • 421 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Women are continually bombarded with images of the 'ideal' face and figure. In addition, most women are trying to achieve the impossible: standards of female beauty have in fact…

    • 256 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Female Body Image Essay

    • 1303 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Downfall of Female Body Image: Media’s Influence In our generation today, obsessing over our looks and bodies has become a day-to-day activity. Over the past decade the media industry has vastly evolved, influencing people all around the world. Media has provoked negative self-perception among the society. It has influenced our definition of beauty.…

    • 1303 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    American Beauty Standards

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages

    (Suddath 203). For men, we are not that concerned about our size unless we want to be healthy, although, there are some men who, "... are having plastic surgery to get rid of their love handles and tighten their eye bags and beef up their chins and flatten their bellies..." (McLaughlin 168). Trying to have the ideal body is difficult for women and men alike when that standard of beauty is impossible to…

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In her piece, “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” Susan Bordo provides a compelling, yet flawed, account of the differences in the ways men and women are portrayed in popular culture and advertisements. She illustrates how men are rarely sexualized in the same fashion that women are. Her argument is persuasive and effective. But she errs…

    • 1286 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Television, glamour magazines and the internet are a few of the powerful social forces that influence the impossible body image of perfection. Both men and women strive to gain their self worth and self confidence from mirroring what society brands as beautiful. Consequently the journey to achieve this false sense of beauty leads to erroneous eating disorders, unnecessary medical procedures and other poor choices that puts their life at risk. The impact of this destructive social influence leaves physical and psychological scars that do not heal.…

    • 1802 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The short story “Disappearing”, written by Monica Wood, is about an overweight woman who falls into an addiction. Nowadays, society has been changing a lot and specially in the way people should look in the exterior. As we can see in T.V., movies or magazines models are now with perfect bodies. But people should as themselves whenever they see this, “what is really a perfect body?”. The perfect is how you feel and whatever makes you feel comfortable.…

    • 837 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Dove Real Beauty Campaign: An Attempt to Revise the Definition of Beauty The definition of “beauty” depends on many variables including age, gender, and culture. Furthermore, it is subjective to the interpretation of individuals and its portrayal in the media. In recent years, the media has generally portrayed the "ideal woman" as tall, white, thin, with a cylindrical body, and blonde hair (Nelson). Dove’s…

    • 1318 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays

Related Topics