'Never Just Pictures'

The article 'Never Just Pictures' by Susan Bordo is about how women of all ages and even men are influenced by infomercials on television and advertisements in magazines to look a particular way, which is very thin and trim. Bordo talks about how fat is the 'devil' and many of us are constantly trying to lose weight in places such as our stomachs. She mentions how there are many tabloids everywhere advertising 'miracle' diet pills and videos with celebrities telling their weight loss stories using these products. Bordo tells us that ten and eleven years were asked to choose from drawings of children who were fat and children who were physically handicaps and they choose the kids with facial disfigurements and missing hands. She says that this idea of how we should look comes from fashion designers and models. There are now even ads with very thin-annorexic looking men as well. Many women in ads look very dead, messed-up, and wasted. Bordo is saying that things such as death, depression, doing drugs, and having an eating disorder has become glamorous. These ads are saying it's okay to have an ugly face, as long as you have a 'hot' body.

The connection between Bordo and Ramamurthy is the representation of gender. Ramamurthy states "The fragmentation of the body-particularly women's bodies-is a feature of recent commercial photography." (614) When many look at an ad with a female, we usually look at her body instead of her face or the background. Bordo is stating that advertisements influence many women to want to diet and look like these models seen in these ads. Ramamurthy says that "...women are represented as objects to be surveyed." (613) Women are seen as objects in these ads. Ramamurthy even says that we used to seeing 'cut-up-ness' in womens bodies. If many of us see a plus size model in an ad, we will probably look at her and

criticize her because she is overweight or obese. Not only is there a connection with gender, but with a connection of race and class. Bordo states "Some feminists complained that I had not sufficiently attended to racial and ethnic difference and was assuming the white, middle-class experience as the norm. Since then it has been widely acknowledged among medical professionals that the incidence of eating and body-image problems among African American, Hispanic, and Native American women has been grossly underestimated and is on the increase." (380) She's also saying that we often assume that white, middle-class men and women usually have eating disorders and we don't see that it has also been a problem among other races and classes as well.