nacirema essay

In "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" Miner is ridiculing how much society cares about their appearance. He talks about the unnecessary rituals that we go through just to please society. An example the author uses is how people are never pleased with what they have. Everyone is trying to fit in with what society thinks is right. Since society has its own perception of what is beautiful women try and do whatever it takes to fit into that definition. This is why women get breast implants or breast reduction surgery. In the authors point of view these are unnecessary surgeries that people shouldn’t waste their time and money on because theirs no real benefit coming out of it. The author talks about how our whole society has become so reliant on medication. We all have a cabinet full of medication in our house and we are depend on these medications for everything that’s wrong with us. We rely on our medications so much and expect them to cure everything as if they’re magic. He also mentions that we take our time to go get our prescription, take our medicine, and store it in our cabinet yet we never use it again after our initial dosage.
He talks about how we spend so much of our time just to get ready in the morning. He says that the human body is ugly and your only hope is to avert these characteristics through using various products to make yourself look better. Spending a lot of time getting ready has become normal to society now and it seems like how you look means more to people now then it has ever before. The author made some strong points about how society has become throughout this story. You can tell he isn’t fond of the fact that our society has adapted to caring a lot more about our appearance then other factors. He made some other points but this one was repeated through many examples.