The Falling Girl Short Story Analysis

Beauty is determined by society and their standards. Women are expected to be skinny, pretty and a size two which puts a lot of pressure on women. The pressures of society persuade women to go through extreme measures to fit in with society standards. This is evident in the short story “The Falling girl” and “They’re Not Your Husband” as the main characters are impacted by social expectations, insecurity and peer pressure.

In “They’re not your husband”, Earl told his wife “I think you’d better consider going on a diet. I mean it. I’m serious you could stand to lose a few pounds” (Carver 2). This example clearly showed the comments from the businessmen impacted Earl in wanting his wife Doreen to look a certain way and fit in with society.

Compassionate individuals are essential to the recovery of individuals who have experienced extreme trauma. In The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrow, Drew, Aunt Loretta's fiance before her death was always a presence in Rachel’s life. After the death of Loretta, Rachel’s grandmother began drinking heavily, leaving Rachel on her own again. Drew stepped in and became a reliable parent figure for Rachel, helping her even though he was not fully aware of her situation, “ ‘And the blues-- it’s like that bottle... It’s full of those feelings that are in there, but beautiful and growing too.’

In every culture, there are certain societal standards that people are expected to live up to. Some have find it easy to accept and fit in, while other struggle to find themselves within society’s ideals. Society places a great emphasis on the way women should look to be considered beautiful and many women fail to live up to those standards. In the short story “The Fat Girl” by Andre Dubus, the reader sees how the main character Louise, a fat girl, struggles to fit in with pressure society places on her that to be considered beautiful, one must be thin. Louise, for the majority of her life, outwardly appears as if she's trying to conform to society's standards of dieting and trying to be thin, but when completely alone, she hides her guilty pleasure of binge eating candy bars. The pressure is placed upon her from her childhood and follows her throughout her life, until her marriage falls apart after she gains weight. Andre Dubus shows us, through the events that occur in Louise’s life, that only after accepting ourselves they way we are, despite societal pressures of conforming to a certain standard, can we begin the road to becoming happy. She wants to be accepted for who she is, not for what she looks like. It isn't until her marriage dissolves that she acknowledges that she needs to accept herself and be comfortable in her own skin before she can become happy.

The basic premise of The Beauty Myth is that forced concordance to standards of physical beauty has grown stronger for women as they gained power in other societal fields. Wolf argues that this standard of beauty has taken over the work of social force formerly left to myths about motherhood, domesticity, and passivity, all of which have been used to keep women powerless. In the author’s view, the myth of beauty spreads the belief that an objective measurement of beauty exists, and that woman must want to embody it, and that men must want such women. However, Wolf argues that the beauty myth is really not all about women, it is also about men’s institutions and power.

There is a common clique stating that beauty is pain. However, this message has a dangerous connotation to it, and the poems “Barbie Doll” and “Beauty” identify the woes of striving for society’s image of beauty. In today’s society, what is considered beautiful emphasizes physical characteristics over other aspects, also women can drastically change their self-perception depending on whether they are engaged in following the trends.

The society’s standard of beauty is incorporated in our day to day lives. An overweight woman on her way to work may see an advertisement with a skinny, blonde, blue-eyed woman on it. It is clear that this woman has tons of makeup on and was photo-shopped and edited. This may cause her to want to look like that which will make her obsess over her appearance. This will also in turn cause her to feel bad about herself because of society’s constant scrutiny over fat women. In My Hot Girl Manifesto, Zoe Whittall says “Because even feminist magazines publish fat-phobic articles under guise of being a “health issue. Because anticapitalistic activists still use expressions like ‘Fat capitalist pig.’” This proves that a lot of people are brainwashed by the media to believe that thinness equals beauty. Body image is so skewed that even the most beautiful women are being altered to achieve these unrealistic goals. The media creates these ideals and puts it on covers of magazines and advertisements resulting in women feeling insecure and themselves. The creation of these ideas can have a negative impact on women and lead to many eating disorders. Some may even go as far as cosmetic surgery that is promoted by the media. The media also has an impact in children lives also because of Barbie commercials. Barbie conditions young girls for what is expected of their future appearance. This enforces the societal standard of beauty onto

From ancient Greece to modern day, society often tries to define what the ideal body image for humanity is. Beauty, height, and body weight all have to be in a perfect ratio with each other so one can be deemed to be perfect. The truth however, is that only a few can ever live up to society's expectations of elegance. In the short story “Fat Girl”, a girl named Louise struggles with her weight. Louise’s mother, Carrie her friend, and her husband Richard all try to change her, even if it means changing her identity and ruining her happiness.

The oppression of women is due to a ‘global culture machine’, which consists of the advertising industry, the cosmetic industry and communications media (Chapkis, 1986). From this, a constricted, westernised ideal of beauty is encouraged to women worldwide. Chapkis analyses rituals women go through to achieve ‘perfection’ such as anorexia or bulimia, using these to reveal the levels of oppressiveness these regimes are for women. “Women are entrapped in the beauty system, but there are possibilities for change if women are willing to accept themselves and their bodies as they really are” (Chapkis, 1986). For this to be possible ‘beauty secrets’ (the processes females go through to conform to the cultural ideal) would have to be carefully scrutinized

Exposition - A nine-teen year old girl named Marta is on top of skyscraper that houses apartments and businesses. She sees the city as a mess and becomes dizzy over it.

According to Forbes et al, in this aspect, beauty standards and practices, such as the thin-ideal, are seen as vehicles for the oppression of women. This oppression is complex and multifaceted. Among other things, beauty ideals and beauty practices signal women’s inferior status and identify their differences from men, shift social awareness from women’s competencies to superficial aspects of their appearance, undermine women’s self-confidence, dissipate their emotional and economic resources, and reduce them to sex objects (Jeffreys, 2005). Murnen and Seabrook (2012) continue that beauty ideals are functionally and symbolically disempowering to women, who are vulnerable to these ideals due to their lack of economic power and their sexually

The novel The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf focuses highly on feminism in today’s times. Throughout the novel the author describes different situations in which women are stereotypically viewed. So many women believe that the real meaning of beauty is what is shown on the television. Many end up disregarding their opinions and instead molding it into the views of their peers. The author argues that some women are being victims by; work, media, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Beauty was once seen as a respected value for women but it has been socially changed into something far more mainstream. It is now in women 's minds that beauty is to be achieved basically by getting noticed. Wolf 's goal was to create this book to bring out the views and provide an overall proposal on how to possibly end this conspiracy.

Beauty is determined by society and their standards. Women are expected to be skinny, pretty and a size two which puts a lot of pressure on women. The pressures of society persuade women to go through extreme measures to fit in with society standards. This is evident in the short story “The Falling girl” and “They’re Not Your Husband” as the main characters are impacted by social expectations, insecurity and peer pressure.

In this presentation I will be discussing some of the issues faced by the women of today, that find themselves emerged in western culture by being constantly bombarded by images of ‘The thin ideal’.

What is beautiful know was not always beautiful, there was a time in history when being thin “was considered ugly, a woman’s misfortune” (Seid 169). Because culture change, what is ask for women now is different, body ideals might be the same but the actual response of women is what is changing nowadays. In the article “Ideals of Beauty Need Not Hinder Women.” by Raina Kelley, the author reveals surprising statistics of women’s response of what society demands from them, “And believe it or not, trends in beauty-buying back that up. The market-research firm NPD released a study in April [2010] that revealed that teens and women are now using beauty products in significantly fewer quantities, down 6 percent from 2008 to 2009” (Kelley). In her article, Kelley talks about how women’s mentality is changing, and instead of obeying they are reveling from standards held against them. Women are gaining courage and self-confidence to do what they want to do with their lives and body, to please themselves and to look beautiful for themselves. “Despite the $20 billion U.S. beauty industry bearing down on us, and all that media implying that one must look like Gisele [Bündchen, a model] to succeed, girls and women are making extraordinary strides and have done so in a remarkably short period of time” (Kelley). Women in today’s society do not feel the need to follow stereotypes anymore, they are supporting each other and making sure that no one feels less than anybody because they do not have a slim waist, light skin and a thin body. Women are rebelling against the beauty standards that they always follow and made them insecure and