Elline Lipkin Article Summary

The article “Girls’ Bodies, Girls’ Selves: Body Image, Identity, and Sexuality” by Elline Lipkin is an informative article describing how men and women are treated differently in certain scenarios throughout the country. The title of the article suggests that females are having trouble figuring out who they really are with or without the help of media and advertisement. The title also suggests that women are the only ones who suffer from sexual objectification, which is not the case.
Elline Lipkin interviews a teenager named Ashlee who decides to go to a ball and with that she participates in all of its rituals one of which is shaving her armpits. Ashlee states “People just buy into the unattractiveness of unshaven armpits,” which is absolutely believable. (596) In today’s society women are always pressured to have freshly shaven everything when the men who shave anything are ridiculed. For example, women are expected to shave their legs at the very least when they wear shorts and if she fails to shave she gets called dirty and/or
Although everything Lipkin adds of Brumburg is good information supporting Lipkin’s article she uses too much. For example, Brumberg examines many middle-class girls’ diaries from before World War I. The diaries were often praised for the lack of attention to their bodies. Just by the 1950s’ girls felt they needed to improve their hair, skin, teeth, and weight. (598) It seems Lipkin almost was not thinking for herself. She references so much from Brumberg’s book the article does not really seem like it just consists of Lipkin’s own writing. Lipkin was not responding to Brumburg’s book, yet she used the information from the book in her article. Maybe Lipkin should write about more of her own ideas and experiences and not reference to someone else’s work so much the next time she writes an article like