Agency or lack there of

The above pictures, to me at least, illustrate the two biggest problems facing women today. The first picture is perhaps the most disturbing rhetorical device of our generation: female submission achieved under the guise of female empowerment. The first picture is taken from Dove's Dove girl ad campaign. The campaign is centered around the idea of showing women that do not like supermodels and showing how truly "sexy" they are. The ad propagates the idea that  these "real" women every bit as attractive as supermodels. However, this ad still focuses on the wrong thing, the women's physical beauty. If we are truly trying  to combat the idea of women as nothing more than objects that gain worth through a man's desire (empowerment), then why does this ad say that these women are every bit as desirable as supermodels? All this ad does is say "Oh big girls... don't worry they're just as desirable as skinny girls. Because that's how we define a woman, by how many guys want to have sex with her... because really that's all a woman needs in a life, a man's acceptance." Nothing about his picture is empowering. Rather than focusing on what makes these women productive members of society it turns them into sex objects. The second ad showcases what I think is the 2nd biggest problem women face: they can never be a truly untied front. The second ad implies that even as a man is beating the shit out of you, it's still important to look pretty and have nice hair. While the image and message are disturbing enough, the most troubling fact is that a woman willingly posed for this picture. No matter how hard certain members of the women's movement try to redefine what a woman's place in modern society is, there will always be someone who's willing to pose with a black eye and sadly that black eye reaches a much wider audience than any feminist manifesto does. Because women cannot form a unified consensus, they are doomed to be undermined from within to the point that the movement will never truly gain large scale traction.