Women And The Rise Of Runch Gwendolyn Brooks Analysis

The effect of feminism on the world during the past century has been massive – but not enough. Equality still does not prevail between the two dominant genders of society – male and female. Everything that deals with being weak is still associated with femininity and frailty. Women who try to defy the norm of being gentle, submissive, and soft-spoken are seen as masculine and raunchy. What’s even worse is that women further bury their own gender by slut-shaming other women, implying that what men do to them to undermine their worth – catcalling, objectifying, and trivializing – is acceptable. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the mother,” she talks about the struggles of a woman who goes through abortion. While in Ariel Levy’s “Women and the Rise of Raunch
She is trying to admonish the fact that they destroyed a person’s life when it hasn’t even started. However, she does not take into the account the potential damage that bearing and giving birth to a child could have done to the mother. By admitting one’s flaws as a person, in this case, as a mother, shows the strength of an individual. The mother could have been emotionally unstable, physically incapable, or psychologically unpredictable to have a child – but the narrator simply talks about the lost potential of the unborn children. This one-sided view is exemplified when the speaker states, “The singers and workers that never handled the air.” (Brooks l. 4). Her lack of concern for mothers shows that Brooks belittles a woman’s decision about her own body, making her appear like she is not a supporter of feminist movement. Similarly, in “Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,” Levy suggests that the resurrection of stereotypes of female sexuality that feminism “banned” is not good for women (160). Levy neglects to take into account the empowerment and liberation that most women feel when they are free to express themselves in all ways possible. She seems like she is the one who is objectifying women when she mentions that she sees women while walking down the street “wearing jeans cut so low they exposed what came to be known as butt cleavage paired with miniature tops that showed off
When one puts oneself in the place of another person, there is usually a misunderstanding because of the various circumstances that one goes through. For example, one cannot simply say that they felt what poverty feels like by spending a few hours with the poor. The same goes for a person who “was starting to show signs of impact” of raunchiness (Levy 159). She claims that she has been immersed in “raunchy culture” when she was merely dipping her toes into it. She misinterprets the views of women who want to feel good about themselves as their want to be sexualized. She has not experienced what it feels like to be thought of as someone who is vulgar or crude, yet she uses her immersion as evidence of her credibility. Similarly, Brooks talks about abortion in her piece – she does not even try to empathize with the mothers, but she tries to undermine them. By her mere use of lower case letters in the title “the mother,” she implies that women who have abortions do not deserve to be called true mothers because their motherhood was short-lived. Moreover, by using lower case, she weakens a mother’s worth just because she gave up a child. She continues to neglect the fact that some women are physically and mentally unable to bear a child without sacrificing their own lives. Furthermore, all mothers want