The Perfect Body

A detailed Summary of The Perfect Body

"I am nonetheless obsessed with breasts. I cannot help it. I grew up in the terrible Fifties-with rigid stereotypical sex roles," says Nora Ephron in her essay "A few Words about Breasts." Nora talks about her infatuation with breasts brought on by the fact that she was cursed with small breasts. She believes she would have been a completely different person if she would have had larger breasts. Eventually she even ended up in therapy because of it. In the Fifties young women felt they had to have large, perky breasts to be accepted by men. People, especially men, thought more highly of women with larger breasts. Nora Ephron said, "Well, that time is gone right? All those exaggerated examples of breast worship are gone, right?" No, sorry to say they are not. Men love large breasts and they always will. When you see a group of men standing together and a beautiful, large breasted girl walks by the first thing you will here them comment on will be her chest. It was that way in the Fifties and it is that way today. So, women will always want large breasts in order to impress men and boost their self-esteem. Today, women still want to fit the perfect body image as they did in the Fifties. Now, women

like that is what he really wants me to be like. I am five feet tall, weigh one-hundred fifteen pounds, and am a size four. The girls he is drooling over are more like five feet eight inches tall, one-hundred pounds, and a size two. They also are probably suffering from an eating disorder. It is obvious I will never look like them and I need to learn to deal with it. I know that I am not overweight, I am just unhappy with my body. I guess I want to be like the models and actresses with their "perfect" bodies, as do many others. What is perfect though? Everyone has their own ideas on what the perfect body is. What one person finds attractive another might not.

successful people are almost always portrayed by actors and models who are young, toned, and thin (Anorexia). Almost half of these TV show characters are underweight. Underweight, possibly anorexic, women are what young women are looking up to. Thin is desirable. Females who watch TV three or more nights per week are fifty percent more likely than non-watchers to feel "too big" or "too fat" (Anorexia). TV shows are nothing but fantasies, yet all over the world young women accept them as instructions on how to look and act. Young girls see singers like Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez and want to look just like them. Well, not everyone is built the same way so not everyone can look like them. Famous people also have personal trainers and dieticians telling them what to eat. Average teenage girls don't have those luxuries so they turn to the fastest way to achieve the "perfect" body by bingeing or starving themselves.

The pressure I put on myself to be thin is so great that I am afraid one day I could develop an eating disorder myself. I am so unhappy by the way that my body looks sometimes that it makes me depressed. The only thing that keeps me stable is my boyfriend. He knows that I don't like my body but he won't let it get me down. He constantly assures me by saying how perfect I

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Approximate Word count = 1334
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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