Girls v. The World
You should really straighten out your hair, it looks better. You should smile more. Why don’t you do your make up like that all the time? These are some of the things that women hear at some point in their life. They get told to their faces how they need to look or how they should act and everybody thinks that its okay. It’s “positive criticism” and only being said to help, so why get mad? Why find these kind of things offensive in the first place? It’s bad because it shows how society influences women in an extremely negative way. They are being told how they should be and to be okay with it. But why do they feel like this in the first place?
People start off with expectations of how a baby’s gender is supposed to be before they are even born. Joan Scott says in her article, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis that gender denotes cultural constructions of what is appropriate roles for men and women. What does even mean? It means that people have specific expectations depending on their culture. An example of this for women is the expectation to become mothers.That this is their life goals and what this is what they should strive for. This is mentioned in the article by Carla Trujillo. In her article Chicana Lesbians:Fear and Loathing in the Chicano Community, she mentions the expectations that a Chicana woman is supposed to fulfill. Trujillo mentions that Chicana women are expected to become mothers and to suppress their sexual needs. This is what they are expected to strive for and not something like a career. Even though this article was written in 1997, there are still some that believe this. A personal example is a conversation I had with a female family member a few years ago. We had been talking about what was going on with our lives and the subject had turned to having children. Or more specifically when we would have them. She had said that she wanted children before she turned thirty and was shocked when I said that I wanted children after I turned thirty. She spent the next half hour trying to convince me that having children while I was young was a good thing. This opened my eyes to the fact that people expect women to have children while they’re young. This does not mean that having children young is wrong but the expectations that women have to is wrong. Women’s choices have to be respected because in the end it’s what they want and they shouldn’t be coerced into anything.
As shown in the video above, society has some how made being a girl a bad thing. Why is being a girl a bad thing? The older women and men/boys see being a girl as weak. They over-exaggerate how they perceive weakness in girls. The young girls in the video are amazing because they see being a girl as being them. They don’t see a girl as being weak or “girly”. They see being “like a girl” as someone who can do anything they set their mind to. The scary part of this video is when did being like a girl become a negative thing?When did girls go from believing that they can be anything they want to be to growing up to believing that being a girl is a joke. This is something that needs to change because if it doesn’t, girls are going to grow up thinking that being a girl is something to be ashamed of. They are going to think being a girl is a joke. People need to change this mindset because when they do, girls are going to believe they can do anything.
