True Beauty is Natural
Thin, divine, beautiful, and ideal are some features that advertisements attempt to acquire in attracting audiences of many women (or men). As human beings, it has evolved as a part of our nature to desire images that are portrayed to be ‘pleasing’ or ‘attractive’ to society. However, they may be manipulative, deceptive, and tempting. Bordo gives a clear explanation as to why these images succeed in gaining women’s attention, thus becoming a part of their lives to change their outward appearance. It is not that a significantly thin woman revealing much of her skin is the perfection of beauty of a woman, but the ubiquity of its image captures public vulnerability. In Susan Bordo’s Hunger as Ideology, she incorporates a sensitive pathological appeal, word choice, and imagery, to argue that the inner beauty of women has become tainted by advertisements, slimming products, and other foul mediated propaganda.
Susan Bordo uses an emotional appeal to target a younger audience about the true facts of how the publicity of certain images has influenced them. She explains not only the desire for a certain appearance that women want, but the inner connection that they seek to obtain with and through food. From one advertisement, Bordo states that, “Most significantly… women receive their gratification through nourishing others, in the old-fashioned way (taste and emotional pleasure)… by which they receive love is through food.” This blatantly explains the greatness of the impact that food has on women. It is women that acquire an achievement of an emotional high when they feed others. This act only lasts for so long until they need something else to sustain their temporary happiness. Along with it may arouse feelings of depression, anxiety, jealousness, envy, or self-hatred to occur in one’s physical and mental emotions. She involves the abstract relationship that women have to food. One woman, which was described in a particular advertisement, had provided this difference by “Implicitly contrasting herself to those who worry and fret, she represents herself as utterly “easy” in her relationship with food.” Obviously this woman is comfortable in her state of being able to easily consume food. Some women want to eat food to fill their emotional void that may not be by another being. This woman symbolizes, as in obtaining, a ‘friendship’ with food, something that other women may want but still desire that ‘ideal’ slenderized appearance. Bordo explains this phenomenon by stating, “Emotional heights, intensity, love and thrills: it is women who habitually seek such experiences from food and who are most likely to be overwhelmed by their relationship to food.” It is the inner emotional battle that women obtain from observing commercials, advertisements, and other forms of propaganda that promote this emotional uproar. This sense of ‘never being able to’ accomplish a desired emotional and comfortable state with food, is what Bordo argues in her article.
In Susan Bordo’s article, she uses a precision of word choice to support her argument of the influence propaganda inevitably has on women. The intensity and magnitude of her word choice, both engages the reader to curiosity and admiration as in understanding the logic of her argument. She explains a commercial by using the phrase, “well-publicized prevalence,” to indicate the specific tactics that a Haagen-Dazs commercial used to attract women as an audience of their product. The word ‘prevalence’ automatically tells the audience that the well-publication of the media is effective in being present everywhere that women are. Bordo uses this word to emphasize that women barely have an opportunity to concentrate on themselves. The media is constantly bombarding their intellect, thus being the cause of their emotional downfall. The carefully structural conception of words that Bordo uses to explain the alluring method of the media, may offer an idea to the audience, that her argument is very complex, as the emotions of a woman are. She also states that commercials contain an “artful precision” as in being affectively attractive to its audience. Bordo analyzes the commercials ability in its effectiveness by communicating with women. Since women are generally and naturally artful in almost every aspect of their lives, commercials, thus recognizing this fact, design artful images that are sight pleasing. ‘Artful’ represents the color, shape, mood, and uniqueness that serves as positive attributes for the promotion of the commercials own benefactor of selling products. So women are drawn to these artful abilities and gain favor of the product (food). The word ‘precision,’ is used to complete the total effectiveness of the artful aspect of the commercial. Without a carefully and unrevealed ability to construct the artfulness of the commercial, it would utterly fail in its ability to abstractly communicate to women. Bordo uses ‘precision’ because this is the method that is the determining factor of a commercials goal to be effective. Skillful and artful messages (in commercials) are molded through a blueprint of precision. Thus, the meticulousness of word choice is used to identify the emotional complexity of women and the careful tactics of the media.
The media also uses effective word choice, but that alone would not be fully achievable in communicating with women. When watching commercials and advertisements, the presence of extremely thin women is so prevalent that it is hard not to desire their glamorized or ideal image of a real woman that the media has portrayed to be. The thought that an individual has, about how the world sees them externally, is manipulated by images of slenderness, sleekness, and the beauty of the people in the advertisements. Bordo uses imagery that allows many women of different cultural backgrounds to view themselves either as victims or observers of the influential propaganda of an ‘idealized’ woman. She says, “An increasingly universal equation of slenderness with beauty and success has rendered the competing claims of…female beauty.” Bordo offers a vivid description on the entire claim of her argument. This allows her audience to engage in a deep individual aspect of the imagery provided and to draw their own conclusions of what female beauty truly is. Bordo argues this point by describing a commercial with a mother who drinks a slimming drink to make her thin. She barely eats and consistently consumes the slimming beverage. Her daughter, being her natural observer, is not influenced by her consumption of the beverage because her daughter knows her ‘secret’ to be thin. Bordo expounds on the methodology of the commercial’s ability, to emotionally influence women, as “the psychological acuity of the ad’s focus… represented by the absent but central figure of the mother, the woman who eats, only “not so much.”” If the mother (or individual) consumes a slimming beverage as a secret ingredient to her own idealized bodily accomplishment, spectators are somewhat, deceived into accepting the fact, that that is the mother’s natural state. This statement automatically provides an image of a thin, beautiful woman. It is hypnotizing enough that an individual will begin a metamorphosis of their self-personal thoughts and lives, seeking to obtain that image. An indication of changing the way one eats, behaves, and thinks proves that that individual is lacking inner beauty and self confidence of being in their own skin. Bordo persists that imagery is massively used throughout her article. The persistent of use of imagery informs the reader of the true facts of how an increasing amount of women feel self-consciously. A thought of Black, White, Asian, and Indian (etc.) women thinking of their individual beauty (compared to women from the media), is what Bordo attempts to accomplish in that they all are influenced by the media in merely the same way.
Bordo indicates a definite, specific, and statistical fact to support her argument of people manipulating (torturing) themselves to obtain a certain identified image. People become to feel as if their natural state is perennially lacking perfection, thus experiencing a feeling of low-self esteem. Through her article Hunger as Ideology, perhaps it is not just the physical hunger that women feel, but emotional hunger as well. The use of a pathological appeal, word choice, and imagery, is what drives Susan Bordo’s argument to success. The intricate construction of these rhetorical devises in her article informs and generates self-examination of how personal thoughts should be thought. Discretely, the article warns women to beware of the sneaky tactics of the media. By the increase of love, confidence, and emotional stability, together we have obtained the prime of living life.
