Women's bodies throughout advertising

Each of us is born male or female, but not masculine or feminine. Our bodies are transformed into recognizably masculine or feminine bodies through various cultural disciplines and practices. If both women and men are culturally disciplined, how does patriarchal domination incorporate itself into our cultural practices to create the docile bodies of women? In American society, there is currently an emphasis on excessive thinness of women and girls. This obsession with the slenderness of female bodies which advertising both creates and perpetuates is an essential part of the struggle aimed at restricting and immobilizing women's lives within patriarchy.

In Susan Bordo's anthology titled Unbearable Weight, she examines the body as a text of femininity. Bordo writes that we learn what femininity consists of and how to achieve it directly through bodily discourse "Loss of mobility, loss of voice, inability to leave the home, feeding others while starving oneself, taking up space, and wh...