Domestic Goddess or Sex Symbol

"Do these pants make my butt look fat?" If you are a woman, you know you have asked it. If you are a man, you know you have heard it. You might ask yourself why someone would even care how big their butt is. The answer, my friends, is that America has created a standard for women and this standard began long ago, only it was a different standard than we have today. Throughout the changing times America's views of the gender roles of men and women have also changed. These gender roles have evolved from women being thought of only as wives, mothers, and house keepers to women being used as sex symbols to sell pretty much anything. I believe that what women really want to be seen as is found somewhere in between what is thought of as the "perfect" model family and Americas obsession with sexuality. What will it take to achieve this happy medium? It may be a drastic change, but it will take a removal of sex from advertisements and the media for the American people to even begin to judge women less on their sexuality.

I see men looking at women in skimpy outfits, their eyes popping out of their heads at the woman's curvy figure and fake breasts. I see other woman staring at said woman in disgust because men find said woman so attractive. In my experience, being a woman myself, women only look on in disgust because they wish they looked like said woman. But do we really want to look like them or is it that we wish that men would appreciate us more without the skimpy clothes, curvy figure, and fake breasts? It is a bit of both, women want to be beautiful and feel beautiful for who we are and how we are made. Today's women cannot feel beautiful when the pressure to be skinny and have models body is plastered on every bill board and magazine advertisement.

I remember when I was a growing up it was rare to see a whole lot of skin on the television. Women were dressed more conservatively; they still looked attractive and feminine without exploiting their bodies. Jean Kilbourne wrote a piece called "Two ways a woman can get hurt" In this piece she talks about sex and violence in advertising. She says that "Sex in advertising is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women, and because it fetishizes products, imbues them with an erotic charge-which dooms us to disappointment since the products never can fulfill our sexual desires or meet our emotional needs." This explains why women do not want to look like the kind of women in the advertisements. On the other hand they do want to look like the sexy women in the ads because these women are what men appear to want. Wanting to look good for boys is when the pressure to conform starts and it begins at a very early age. David Kupelian says that our children are victims of the media and corporate America. Hence, our teens are using these advertisements and the media as role models. Do we really want women to be viewed as sexual objects? Think about it, the model in one of those ads for panties could one day be your daughter.

We as Americans are setting a standard for our young girls that they must grow into women whose bodies must be thin, muscular, and large breasted. We as Americans are telling our young women that it is all right to show their bodies right down to the bare minimum and we are also telling all women who don't look like them, that they should.

Some of the advertisements and what is seen in the media could even be considered obscene. Now let's ponder what exactly is obscene. I believe that commercials with women who are pretty much naked except for panties and a thin shirt which we can see their nipples through as obscenity. An article about the debate on obscenity, states that "Obscenity is a mercurial concept whose nature has evolved through different periods of history. The Supreme Court's definition of the term, in the 1973 case Miller v. California, gives individual communities the task of determining what is obscene. Hence, what would quickly land someone in jail in Salt Lake City might be routine fare on New York's 42nd Street." This, I believe, is a mistake. If the government would create one law against anything obscene, pornographic, or sexually violent than I think America could have a firm grasp on the start of censoring sexual content from advertisements and the media.

Now, let's talk about the "perfect" model family. You know the one where there is a bread winning dad, a couple of kids, and stay at home mom who always has on her apron except when she goes to the market. Um, sorry, that one doesn't exist. However, the image of this family remains to be something that many families desire. Stephanie Coontz wrote a piece called "What we really miss about the 1950's." She states "What most people really feel nostalgic about has little to do with the internal structure of the 1950's families. It is the belief that the 1950's provided a more family-friendly economic and social environment, an easier climate in which to keep kids on the straight and narrow, and above all, a greater feeling of hope for a family's long-term future, especially for it's young." In this statement we can see that people look back on the 1950's and think they were better times. The key word here is think; they think that they were better times. There are statistics that Coontz states about the 1950's "Unmarried people were hardly abstinent in the 1950's, but the age of first intercourse where higher than now. Teenage birth rates were almost twice as high in 1957 as in the 1990's, but most teen births were to married couples, and the effect of teen pregnancy in reducing further schooling for young people did not hurt their life prospects the way it does today." These are only a few facts that show how sex was still there even though it wasn't spoken of or exploited the way it is today. Also, "nearly 60% percent of kids-an all time high-were born into a male breadwinner-female homemaker families; only a minority of the rest had mothers who worked in the paid labor force. These facts are pertinent because we need to know why men especially would like a woman who is as domestic as the women were in the 1950's.

The women of the 1950's were wrapped up in their nuclear families, wanting to appear to be the "perfect" family. I am going to quote Coontz a couple more times. "They were discouraged from diluting their wifely and maternal commitments by maintaining competing interests in friends, jobs, or extended family networks, yet they were also supposed to cheerfully grant early independence to their (male) children-an emotional double bind that may explain why so many women who took this advice to heart ended up abusing alcohol or tranquilizers over the course of the decade." Also, she states in regard to sitcoms like "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father knows best" that "People didn't watch those shows to see their own lives reflected back at them. They watched them to see how families were supposed to live." Clearly we can see that the fifties were more of a prison for women than a "perfect" world. Men still do, as they did then, want a good wife. So, it is easy to see why they did and still do today find the gender role of women of the fifties attractive.

In an article about sex violence and the media Robert Lichter, co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, agrees that TV nowadays depicts, "A lot more foreplay than gunplay." And the context of sex has changed dramatically, according to his monitoring of more than 1,000 shows from the 1950s to the 1990s. "Before 1970, sex on TV was left to people who were in love," he says. "After 1970, recreational sex was OK, and by the 1990s it was happening 20 times as often and being presented as a positive, even among teens and Hollywood views America as dominated by repressive, 1950s-era puritans and prudes,"

It seems that there is only one extreme or the other. You can either be what some call a "domestic goddess" or you can be a sex symbol. I do believe that there is a happy medium to this, but I also think it is a long time in coming. For America it has become the norm to see naked women. (And men) Personally, I do not want this to be the norm for my children nor do I want them to be a slave to themselves and others to the point that they would abuse alcohol or pills. In "Rereading America" there is a picture in the visual portfolio of a woman in her living room with a vacuum cleaner. Her hair is done perfectly, she wears a dress and shiny black high heels, her white ruffled apron is unmarred, and her makeup is strategically applied. In this photo she is smiling and holding her hand up as if to say "I am woman, hear me roar." When I vacuum I usually have my hair pulled into a ponytail and am wearing sweats, no makeup, and absolutely detest the fact that I have to do it therefore I am certainly not smiling about it. The woman with the vacuum is not real, she is probably an ad to buy that vacuum. Hence, we have gone from women as domestic symbols to women as sex symbol sin advertisements.

In conclusion, I believe that we need to understand that as Americans we need to raise our children to be respectful of women, to respect themselves, and to associate sex with love. By teaching them this it will help to instill good morals into the future citizens of our great country. Women can be somewhere in-between the fifties domestic goddess and the fabled sex symbols. Let's set a new standard for America by trying to rid our advertisements and media of sexual content, by creating new standards that arent as strict as in the 1950's yet less obscene than our current ones. We as citizens need to take a stand against the sexual content that plagues the United States of America. If you are a parent, think about what you want for your child and if you aren't, than go to a park and look at the little kids running around and think of how sick it is that many of those little girls will be running around in skimpy outfits, boobs hanging out, and dancing to "I kissed a girl" all because Americans are obsessed with sex.

Works Cited:

Coontz, Stephanie "What we really miss about the 1950's" Rereading America. Gary Colombo Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. Boston, New York: Bedford/ St. Martins 2007. 31-47

Kilbourne, Jean "Social Class." Rereading America. Gary Colombo Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. Boston, New York: Bedford/ St. Martins 2007. 417-441

Kupelian, David "Killer Culture" Rereading America. Gary Colombo Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. Boston, New York: Bedford/ St. Martins 2007. 646-664

No photographer named "Reading images of Gender" Visual portfolio. Woman with vacuum 409

Clark, Charles S. "Sex, Violence and the Media." CQ Researcher 5.43 (1995): 1017-1040. CQ Researcher Online. CQ Press. Your library's name, city, state abbreviation. 10 Dec. 2008 .

Clark, Charles S. "The Obscenity Debate." CQ Researcher 1.31 (1991): 969-992. CQ Researcher Online. CQ Press. Your library's name, city, state abbreviation. 10 Dec. 2008 http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1991122000.