The Functions of Gendar and Power within our Society Essay

The Functions of Gendar and Power within our Society - Essay Example Because the body image is integral to identity, for a woman to protest that these expectations are not realistic and perversely adolescent is to admit she does not possess it. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf (2000) states that a womans compulsion to diet and wear makeup can largely be blamed on a society that assigns value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard. It is an expression of power relations that has women competing for the privileges of employment and status that men have secured as rightfully theirs (Wolf, 2000), and in a comfortably patriarchal society is important to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable. As long as women are compelled to wear makeup and conform to an elusive beauty archetype, the seeds of the feminine essence remain. The expectation firmly places women below men in the gender order, as the sex which must prove its femininity in order to enter the masculine realm of employment, politics and to gain power (Ragins, 1999). In conclusion, the power relations in the gender order still remain in favor of man. Early feminists believed that femininity contrasted many womens lived experience, but it was not exposed as a false ideology, rather the women who questioned it were exposed as unfeminine. Women across the world experience gender discrimination in different forms and cultural stages, and even though gender impartiality is becoming stronger by the decade, this social difference is still deeply in control of cultural practice around the world, particularly in Africa, the Middle East and oriental Asian states such as China. Inequity next to women in the developing world is an overwhelming authenticity. It consequences in millions of entity tragedies, which add up to lost prospective for whole countries. (Mullins, 2005) Worldwide studies have exposed there is a direct connection between financial growth and a countries