The Feminine Ideal - Marianna Thesander

After reading through various sections, it is clear that the feminine idealogy of being "transformed" into something else goes a long way back. Right at the beginning of the book, The Feminine Ideal quotes Margarat Mitchell's Gone With The Wind when saying "Pull them tighter, Lou. See if you can make it eighteen-and-a-half inches, or I can't get into any of my dresses." This mentality of shrouding your body with make-up, or in this case, pulling a corset so that it modifies your body's shape more.

Several pages in, and you find a great question: Who produces the varying physical expressions? And why is it especially the female body that has, in the course of history, been endowed with specific symbolic significance?

This very question intrigues me. The female body is symbolic, it holds a lot of significance for important things - the main one being life. So, to dress up the body as a sacred place for growing life would not be strange, and it's likely how that has happened. But that happened a long time ago. Humans have evolved, and so has the ceremony of dressing the woman's body. 

This dressing up became ceremonial, the woman's body became a place of ever-altering "physical ideals" as Thesander puts it. These physical ideals, according to Thesander, can be split up into 4;

1. The Status Image
2. Morality, Perception of the Body, and Aesthetics
3. Dress and Fashion
4. Propagation of the Fashion Ideal

The status image is very much about status within society, showing yourself to have status amongst a social hierarchy. Body aesthetics are becoming ever more important these days, clothes ask more of you so that they fit your shape. Overall, the book has a lot of knowledge to offer and I will use it as a way to shape my idea properly.