#impossible expectations

You enter the house and close the door behind you, leaning heavily against the wood as you let your things slip from your arms to the floor. You lean your head back with a soft thunk as you look up at the ceiling. Why did you ever agree to any of this? being the chosen one is nothing like the glamor and praise you were promised. Its just dark circles and nightmares. A trembling fear and weariness that weighs you down like a chain. And with every day they seem to add another shackle with each new impossible expectation. Every time they ask you to do the impossible, to do the unthinkable, to do the things that they are too scared to do. It’s blood and tears and scars. 

          This video is about a woman called Jill Kilbourne who is presenting a Ted Talk about how her own experiences with being compared to sexist advertisements caused her go into different career choices. Jean Kilbourne appears to be a white middle aged woman. She described how when she was young, job options were limited for women. She said how she was a secretary, a waitress, and eventually, people pushed her to go into beauty pageants. Although this doesn’t seem so negative, the reasons she started beauty pageants were extremely disturbing

           In her Ted talk, she shows some of the advertisements that she was exposed to while she was young. These advertisements had language that objectified women. For example, one advertisement had a picture of a white woman with straight blond hair. The caption reads “If your hair isn’t beautiful, the rest hardly matters,” (Killbourne). There was another advertisement that had a woman saying that if she hadn’t lost weight, then she probably would have never been married. These advertisements don’t portray women as people, they portray them as objects that need to look and behave a certain way. The advertisement is particularly horrible because it is basically saying that in order to be beautiful, a woman has to be white and have straight blond hair. In addition, the advertisement is also saying that is a woman isn’t beautiful, then she really isn’t worth anything.

           These were the types of advertisements that Kilbourne saw on a regular basis. She started modeling, but soon realized that is was a very close minded and ignorant business. This is what she said encouraged her to study and try to change the way companies portray women in their ads. She points out how an advertisement of a man and a woman are completely different. On the left, she shows an image of Brad Pitt, and the other, a female super model. She says that Brad Pitt gets to look human. He doesn’t have make up on. However, she points out that the woman looks almost like a cartoon. Her eyes have been dramatically enlarged, and her nose thinned.

           https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8yLaoWybk

Like now, by the time Friday June 7 rolls around, I expect myself to pack my entire life into my VW Beetle, go to work on time, spend as much time with my sister as possible, eat, make homemade watercolored cards for my two teachers, my fellow para, my roommate, and my sister&brother-in-law, take all my medicine at the appropriate times, plan a last hurrah with my pals, do all the North Dakota activities I didn’t get to in this year and a half, all while being a weepy, scared, anxious, depressed piece of shit with absolutely no motivation to leave my bed. 

Okay, Mia.