LAURA, I liked that article about the ideal woman. You might like episode 2 (little less than 30 minutes) of John Berger's
Ways of Seeing. It's about women and has a women's panel at the end reacting to it.
Here's the quote he begins with:
Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women.
Women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like
mirrors, reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance
is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real
mirror. A woman is always accompanied except for when quite alone, perhaps even then,
by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death
of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest
childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.? She has to survey
everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and
particularly how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for it is normally thought
of as the success of her life.
-from around 1972
