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After watching “MTV’s True Life I live another life on the web” again and watching the girls exploit their bodies to lure in boys on the internet I started thinking about how many women do that, and not just women but girls too. I remember when I first heard of myspace and when I created an account, I found a girl that I knew from my high school and her profile picture as her standing in her bra and underwear posing in front of a mirror. She was only 14! What in the world causes these girls to think that the only way to talk to boys is through displaying their bodies on the web? I found an article titled “Babes on the Web. Sex, Identity and the Home Page” by Marj Kibby.
In her article, she talks about a site called Babes on the Web that was created by – no surprise here – a guy names Robert Toups. “It featured a list of women who had Web pages that included a personal photograph. Toups rated them on a scale of one to four on the basis of the appeal their image had for him.” Toups knew that several controversies would start to boil and of course, as he predicted, the National Organization for Women (NOW) complained along with the creation of a quite a few anti-Babes on the Web sites. One was actually called Babes on the Web II and it featured men instead of women “in an apparent spirit of the gender equity.”
I am not concerned about equality between men and women; I have already accepted the fact that men (and not all men) are always going to view women as inferior to themselves when in reality they need us and could not live without us. What I am disturbed by is the women and girls who are putting themselves out there to be gawked at and rated. Kibby states in her article that our physical bodies create a placement for our sense of self – our identity. The reason for their actions is that “most of the women choose to separate their sexual identity from their personal identity.” Therefore, most of these women do not accept their personal identity so they take advantage of their sexual identity. But why do girls feel the need to exploit their bodies on the internet; girls who have not yet come into their full development of becoming a women? It still remains a mystery to me and the internet is just full of these little girls.
In her article, she talks about a site called Babes on the Web that was created by – no surprise here – a guy names Robert Toups. “It featured a list of women who had Web pages that included a personal photograph. Toups rated them on a scale of one to four on the basis of the appeal their image had for him.” Toups knew that several controversies would start to boil and of course, as he predicted, the National Organization for Women (NOW) complained along with the creation of a quite a few anti-Babes on the Web sites. One was actually called Babes on the Web II and it featured men instead of women “in an apparent spirit of the gender equity.”
I am not concerned about equality between men and women; I have already accepted the fact that men (and not all men) are always going to view women as inferior to themselves when in reality they need us and could not live without us. What I am disturbed by is the women and girls who are putting themselves out there to be gawked at and rated. Kibby states in her article that our physical bodies create a placement for our sense of self – our identity. The reason for their actions is that “most of the women choose to separate their sexual identity from their personal identity.” Therefore, most of these women do not accept their personal identity so they take advantage of their sexual identity. But why do girls feel the need to exploit their bodies on the internet; girls who have not yet come into their full development of becoming a women? It still remains a mystery to me and the internet is just full of these little girls.
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