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Susan Douglas starts the chapter entitled Lean and Mean by describing what young women should aspire to look like. How they were told that they had to be a size zero with huge breasts and look like a Victoria secret model in order to be sexy. Douglas says that young women are suppose to desire the body of a twelve year old boy with the breasts of Pamela Anderson. The media perpetuates this idea that young girls need to have large breasts, on every magazine cover is a slim girl with large breasts. Douglas also talks about the rise in Anorexia and Bulimia. Fox’s show “Swan” that aired in 2004 is an example of how women are objectified and are primarily there to be looked at. Shows like this and Mtv’s I want a famous face glamorize plastic surgery to young girls without fully explaining the risks involved. These shows did not tell us that saline breasts implants can “ rupture, change shape, and shift position” (227) of breasts. Cocaine is an infamous drug that is known for keeping its users skinny. Kate Moss a renowned supermodel was caught using cocaine and briefly lost all her endorsements. Within two months she had resigned with Burberry and signed a one million dollar contract with Calvin Klein, telling young girls that its more important to be 95 pounds then having a serious drug problem. Virginia Madsen, the spokesperson for botox compared using botox to a healthy lifestyle choice like working out or eating properly.
it is funny to me how this woman can compare physically altering your face to something as simple as working out. The second half of the chapter Douglas shifts from what young girls striving to look like to how they are trying to act. Girl on girl bullying has seen a dramatic rise in recent years. Young girls try to emulate these women they see on Tv on shows like the hills and Real World, they see these girls engaging in cat fights and they think that is how they are suppose to behave. The movie Mean Girls premiered in 2004 and was an instant box office hit. Every teenage girl strived to attain this mean girl image

In the article Hormonal Hurricanes some of the myths about menstruation were hilarious. PMS was said to make women commit suicide, miss work commit crimes, and beat their children. A key issue in this article was clearly defining PMS what is PMS. Everyone experiences natural ups and downs so what makes this different. Historically, women complaining of pain or physical or emotional changes during menstruation were thought to be delusional, in fact despondent because menstruation had proved that they had failed to fulfill their duties as women. When women were finally taken seriously, the medical profession responded by finding biological/hormonal causes, proposing the need for doctor-supervised cures. Furthermore, as a syndrome it implies that women aren’t truly in control. The article concludes by stating that women are by nature abnormal and inherently diseased. Due to poorly done studies on menstruation and menopause, many of which express deep hatred and fear of women, can be a discouraging experience. One begins to wonder how it can be that within so vast a quantity of material so little quality exists.