Saturday, February 16, 2013

Women on display: Sarah Baartman in the 21st century

After reading the passage and the article discussing Sarah Baartman and listening to the artifact presentation, I came across this disturbing picture on a social networking site.


This image shows how society’s view of enfreakment has been rationalized and instilled as second nature in our modern ideology. Our innate physique is now given a label that has either a negative or positive connotation. Instead of literally displaying 'out of the ordinary' body types and having people pay money to gaze at such oddity, we now accomplish exploiting women through images such as this one across the Internet. Of course the first image that your eyes go to in this picture are the biggest butts (that kind of resemble the buttocks of Sarah), ascribed with undesirable and comical labels. When you think of ‘wide load’ you think a truck that is taking up too much space on the road causing you irritation as a driver. While learning about Sarah and how her body was used as a source of entertainment, you probably were astonished and repulsed, thinking "How could people be so malicious and ignorant?". Well this image proves that we are doing the same thing that we did to poor Sarah of the Khoisan tribe; who was accustomed to her life in South Africa where her body was just like any other woman’s. The ‘freak’ element of women’s bodies (i.e. large and distorted buttocks) has been assimilated into our culture. Do you think women can relate to Sarah in a sense? Has this idea of exploiting women because of their ‘unnatural’ body types has gotten worse with the rise of technology? As terrible as it sounds, we are no better when it comes to reacting to and treating those who have 'defective', unfamiliar, and odd body types.

1 comment:

  1. My post was kind of similar to yours. I wrote about how the sex appeal of Sarah Baartman has gradually become the social norm today and that women often seek to enhance their appearance through enlargement of many such body parts. It's possible to think that women with larger sex appeal are still used as entertainment today and that the male population is still fascinated by them, only in a manner different from Sarah's.

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