Appraising Gods Property
Young women face so many challenges in their lifetime, and the book Audios,
Barbie displays several of the trials and tribulations that each individual
young lady might encounter. The bulk of the stories deal with body image and
self-identity, and I chose to focus on a particular story titled, “Appraising
God’s Property”, by Keesa Schreane. She works out in her essay a backward
situation of being part of the “in” crowd or the “out” crowd. To emphasize a
problem in this area I also located an article to contrast and compare to
Keesa’s essay, which was written by Fiona Stewart, of Deakin University,
concerning the “Implications of Reputation for Young Women’s Sexual Health and
Well-Being (pg.373)”.
In the essay that Keesa writes, she reflects and
works out the confidence in herself. It contains her struggle of staying strong
within herself and dealing with the coolness (or better yet non-coolness) of her
chosen lifestyle, abstinence. She was raised with old-fashion morals and values.
These are important to her, yet contradict all the “action” that takes place in
most young women’s high school and college years. She remembers “wondering what
it would be like to get a little ‘groove’” on of her own (pg.159). She found
that she had to work hard to keep temptation in the background. Keesa found
sexuality “as pure evil” whether she was thinking of it herself, showing it in
her body movements, or seeing the look of desire in males who sought her out
(pg. 159-60). She was an individual, out of the ordinary. She found herself very
involved in traveling places and teaching others what abstinence was all about
and how important it was to uphold. She felt that “if I was going to be a
virgin, at least I could be an enlightened one (pg.160)”. This, and her strong
will, gave her advantage over the normal pressures young women, like herself,
had to face. Knowing that “in a land where booty calls were ‘in’ and waiting
until the third date to hold hands was ‘out’”…and she was “definitely out
(pg.161)” placed Keesa above the rest of her peers. She felt she was the “last
lone soldier (pg.161)”, and for good reason she probably was.
Keesa was
overcoming what most women are victims of. Young women find themselves
constantly having to deal with the pressures of living up to the standards of
what everybody is doing and keeping a good reputation, all at the same time.
These women are subjecting themselves to the same issues that Fiona Stewart
addresses in her paper. She feels that the technologies of reputation pervade
every area of young women's lives... and that these technologies may have
serious implications for the ways in which safe sex practices are, or rather are
not adopted by young heterosexuals (pg. 374). Stewart uses the terminology
technology to describe the ways in which young women are subjected to the
pressures of peer's, and the effect of these on their social behavior (pg.
375).
To discover how these so called technologies affect young women,
Stewart used the findings from a three-year study, particularly from one of
eight focus groups as part of a study concerning Australian teenage women and
sex. The findings from the groups were used in developing a questionnaire that
was administered to 300 young women in state high schools on these issues. The
girls who participated in the study were 25, sixteen and seventeen year-olds,
Anglo-Australians, who went to lower income government secondary schools.
Stewart felt these girls were helping to contribute towards the production of
new insights about young people's lives and their sexual health status (pg.
373). The girls only supported the hypothesis that Stewart possessed, by showing
that the cultural definitions, of femininity, it has been suggested, range from
passivity, helplessness, and victimization to a relinquishment of control (pg.
374).
When reviewing the results of the study Stewart concluded that she
was more interested in finding out why it is that women measure up themselves to
each other based on aspects of their behavior which, at face value, have nothing
to do with their sexual practices (pg. 381). The girls all showed that what they
each do and how they rank in the hierarchy of schoolmates, is inflicting upon
their reputation. Stewart feels that this is the very mechanisms which
disempower women within heterosexuality (pg.382). The article goes side by side
in respect to the book on the idea that young women strongly structure their
lives to keep a good reputation or status. Keesa noted how she stood out among
other's, but was aware of what position her choices put her in.
Along
with comparing the account of Keesa's life and the study of the young women that
Stewart reviewed, I find that although they each deal with the situation from
opposite sides of the issue, they each contain the same ideas on pressuring
young women into testy situations. This idea is exactly why the book Adios,
Barbie was written. It is all about taking away the stigma that surrounds a
young women’s life that causes her to consume her thoughts and actions around
what society presents as cool, or acceptable, or pretty. Fiona Stewart addresses
the issue of not letting other’s determine how you approach your sexual life,
and Keesa Schreane works out her empowerment she grants herself by placing what
the rest of kids think and do in the back of her head, and focusing on what is
really important. You see it’s not the rest of society that you must please be
accepted by, it is the one person you see every morning in the mirror that must
be happy and accept how you carry out your life. If more people lived by this
standard we would have a world filled with beautiful people who loved
themselves, not to mention happiness.
Title: Fighting the
Pressures
References:
Adios, Barbie: “Appraising
God’s
Property”, Keesa Schreane.
and
Fiona Stewart
“Once You
Get a Reputation, Your Life’s Like …Wrecked:
the Implications of Reputation
for Young Women’s Sexual Health and Well-Being”, Women’s
Studies
International Forum, Volume 22, No.3, pp.373-383,
1999