(More Than) Grrrl Power! Girls Studies at UCF

 We as a society have heard, “sex sells” so much that we have taken it as an indisputable fact, and during this time of the peak of shopping, I think it is important that we unpack that phrase. Advertisements have been objectifying women based in this notion that their sexuality sells for decades. Ads from the 50s used the submissive woman stereotype in order to promote products because it portrayed “women as existing to service the man.” (1). Women’s role was exclusively domestic, so in these ads a woman was often seen cooking or cleaning in the household for the man. A woman’s role was to complete the household tasks and physically be present for the man, and this notion appealed to the men at the time. These are some examples of ads during the time that now come across to general society as extremely sexist, and yet we still have the same issue of women being misused in order to sell products. The 2000s found an innovative way to continue to use women’s bodies to sell products w...

  I was out on a study date with one of my coworkers when we started talking about our high school teachers. I didn’t know her in high school, and we didn’t even graduate the same year, but I did have a lot of the same teachers, one of which was a feisty economics teacher who was accused of bullying her students on multiple occasions. Despite that, I personally loved that teacher—  she had an attitude, was outspoken, ungraceful in all the best ways, and an icon if she actually liked you, because she never left room for other people’s opinions about her—  but some of the things she had said to other people were kind of misguided. One of the people whom she clashed with was my coworker. There was a budgeting exercise the class had to do for a theoretical future. My coworker said she wanted kids but did not want to get married and planned her budget accordingly. Thus started the debate—  how could a woman possibly want to be a single mother? My coworker explained to the...