Analysis Of Judith Lorber s Believing Is Seeing ...

A Suffering Self-Esteem Society changes a person. Whether these changes make positive impacts or not, they exist. A young boy enjoys playing football and exercising because his friends and family enjoy such activities. On the flip side, a young woman starves herself because her friends starve themselves; they all desire to look skinny and to match magazine models. In Judith Lorber’s article â€Å"Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology† and Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber’s article â€Å"The Spread of the Cult of the Thinness: Preteen Girls, Adolescents, Straight Men, Gays, Lesbians, and Ethnic Women†, the authors explain how society influences people. Lorber’s article portrays that society holds an extremely negative power over women while Biber provides specific examples of how this diminishes their self esteems. Society defines the gender, and thus the lifestyle, of a woman. Lorber explains this idea in the following quote. â€Å"Gendered people do not emerge from physiology or hormones, but from the exigences of the social order, mostly from the need for a reliable division of the work of food production and the social (not physical) reproduction of new members† (Lorber 732). Society decides and enforces the gender of each and every person. Biber takes this idea a step further and provides a specific example of some girls using the idea of a tomboy to protect themselves. â€Å"Being a tomboy protects some young girls--- it relieves them from being attentive to fashion and body image and from