This past Wednesday night, I joined a room full of women and a handful of men in Cushing 001 to hear one of the events of Boston College Women’s Resource Center’s Love Your Body Week. For those of you who are unaware, Love Your Body Week is a week of programming dedicated to promoting healthy body image on the BC campus. The week is hosted every fall semester by the WRC and provides a time for students to consider their relationships with their bodies.
The program was titled “SuperSexed: Pop Culture Images of Women in a Hypersexed Society” and was headlined by Gail Dines, anti-pornography activist, lecturer, author, and professor. Dr. Dines gave an absolutely incredible presentation which highlighted how our generation is, as she refers to it, an “experimental generation in an image-based culture” that is “bombarded by hypersexed images.” I never truly considered how true this was until Dr. Dines showed images from real magazines of celebrities and models, such as SportsIllustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair, of women mainly being portrayed as one image: skinny, blonde, white, and toned.
Dr. Dines explained that there is a double-standard in our society and that ultimately what is considered in media as “hot” is for women to look sexually vulnerable. When magazines tell us to “love your body,” they really do not want us to do that at all, Dines explained. Global capitalism is on the shoulders of women as we continue to dive into cosmetic surgeries, beauty enhancements, and countless other “remedies” to make ourselves look and stay more attractive to men. Without women and their constant desire to look and feel better about themselves, the global market of women’s beauty products would simply crumble.
Dr. Dines even went so far as to state that we are living in a “perpetrating culture” that is “grooming us for inauthentic sexuality” and further explained that this oversexuality in our society and in media is promoting the rape and hookup culture so prevalent today. To say my eyes were opened during this speech is an understatement as Dr. Dines was able to demonstrate to not only me, but also my fellow audience members, how real this image-based culture is.
She concluded her program in discussing the importance and real definition of feminism. “Every woman in this room is a feminist,” she stated, “if you believe in equal pay for men and women, and equal rights for men and women, then you are a feminist.” While we may all have Rosie the Riveter in our head when we consider the word feminist, Gail Dines represents the modern feminist of the 21st century. She stated that her mission is to, “stop the porn culture and to have women view themselves as more than just a sexual object.” Her mission, she continued, is, “about liberation, not individual empowerment” and that true feminists will not be satisfied until their task is fully complete. One by one, for the last 25 years, Gail Dines has made it her mission to empower women and give them the tools to tackle a hypersexed society. In just one hour long discussion, she certainly convinced me that we all have the confidence and self-esteem to rise above the social norms cast upon us through media and society.
Many thanks to the Women’s Resource Center for this amazing event and all the other great Love Your Body events going on this week! Be sure to check out their website for more details about the rest of this week!