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人们可能认为女性主义已经取得了很大进展，六七十年代的激进女权主义者游行示威活动，八十年代权力调整见证了女性在城市、政治领域位置的变迁，甚至是从早期投票选举权，就已经见证了女性地位的提升。但是人们只需要看一眼当日报纸、女性杂志或者是一部好莱坞电影，更别提是男性杂志了，就能够意识到，对女性的物化依然像以往一样的猖獗。即便是在高雅艺术世界里，比如弗洛伊德的怀孕的凯特•摩斯绘画，还是把女性作为了被观赏、渴望和占有的物品。

'Men look, women are looked at,' said John Berger in his seminal 1972 documentary series Ways of Seeing, and in this one sentence, Berger summarised the relationship between men and women, and the objectification of women by men. From Susannah being looked at by the Elders, to Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, women in art have been continually portrayed as not only objects of desire, but objects to be owned.

One might like to think that feminism, and women, have come a long way, not only from the bra-burning days of the '60s and '70s, and the power-suited days of the '80's, that saw women in positions of power in the city, and in politics; even from the days of early suffrage. Yet one has only to look at a daily newspaper, a woman's magazine, a Hollywood movie, let alone a man's magazine, to realise that the objectification of women is as rampant (and I use that word deliberately) as it has ever been. Even in the world of 'High Art', paintings such as Lucien Freud's of a pregnant Kate Moss still portray woman as something that can be looked at, desired, owned.

One would most definitely like to think that women have come a long way since Rousseau stated, in typically succinct fashion, that 'the doll is the peculiar amusement of the females; from whence we see their taste plainly adapted to their destination.' One presumes Rousseau was talking about baby dolls, little girl dolls, to be played with and dressed up in pretty clothes, to sit quietly, prettily and well dressed in a corner, unobejcting and unobjectionable, good practise not only for motherhood but womanhood; but he could equally as well have been talking about that most contemporary of dolls, the Barbie - curvaceous, well dressed and pretty, with a wardrobe of clothes that would enable her to follow any career, from astronaut to vet, sexy but sexless, epitomised by the most recent addition to the sisterhood, Burqa Barbie, so that all girls feel represented in a globalised 21st century. All girls that are curvaceous and well dressed, pretty and sexless and quiet, anyway.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of European feminism, believed that as long as men saw women as trophy wives, and took mistresses, that the oppression of women should continue, yet she did not solely blame men, believing also that women were complicit in their own objectification, and referring to them as clay figures to be moulded by men. Girls, Wollstonecraft believed, were enslaved to men through their social training. With the coming of post-feminism, one could hope that women had finally broken this male-oriented patriarchal perception of them, but it seems in fact to be the reverse. Young women expose more and more of themselves, stating that they are in control, and they may show as much flesh as they wish in this post-feminist world, but one cannot help but think that Wollstonecraft was right - wome本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。