Today, so much of the conversation about women and fashion focuses on body size that we discuss weight as though it were the most important aspect of our life. It seems like media is on a mission to demoralize the average, chubby woman.
The beauty ideal portrayed by media has always been slender.
Being saturated with so many media messages about how we should do gender and what we need to consume in order to do it appropriately creates an anxiety. Susan Bordo calls it “the tyranny of slender,” and how the slender, firm, fit body is taken as a statement about ones character. This assumption that if you are fit you are somehow a disciplined person, you self manage, and you have managerial abilities. You are an ambitious, achieving person.
The cumulative weight of advertising in our everyday life is the insecurity, and the struggle, to constantly live up to this slender body. Not always consciously, but there are pressures that nag at us in our everyday life. One of the fears of losing femininity for me is whether I live up to this beauty ideal, in terms of how I dress and the amount of time I spend doing hair and make up in order to keep up.
We think that if we are lucky to have a job we better live up to the expectations that come with it - the expectations that are hanging over the work situations and that demand to perform in a public sphere and to live up to the notion of “the universal worker.”
Instead of changing the system, I have built my life around it, around the organizational structure, and I navigate, while negotiating my femininity, toning down sexuality and feminized communication style in order to survive in a bureaucracy that is not gender-neutral, but is built around men and masculinity. According to Joan Acker, it is the organizational system that is gendered.
(As Acker illustrates the concept of hegemony, she claims how the bureaucracy creates gendered hegemony that presses everyone, and how we all buy into this norm.)
I have functioned under the assumption that the barriers to women's advancement are created by expectations and habits surrounding communication, and the assumption that masculine communication style is more naturally professional and managerial, realizing that the only way to be in a strong role is playing a part originally written for men.
Acker acknowledges that there are women who are able to step into “a men’s world” and succeed, but it generally requires what she calls “becoming a social man, whose personal and private needs are taken care of outside work,” in order to live up to the idea of “the universal worker.”
