Social Expectations

In today's world there are spoken and unspoken expectations of how men and woman shook look. This happens in almost every culture throughout the world and each and every culture has their own expectations for each sex. The most common expectations come through the popular media and are affecting anyone who comes in contact with it. These mainstream ideas floods the minds of millions of people and create a physiological battle between what they look like and what they are expected to look like. These expectations go beyond just the general population, but they go into the work environment as well. Certain types of careers have expectations of there workers. For example, dancers and models are expected to be unnaturally thin and tall, construction workers are expected to be muscular and buff, and there are many more examples of this. There are, also, certain features that are promenade within certain racial groups that are deemed to be socially unacceptable. Throughout the world there are men and woman that will do anything to make themselves fit into what is accepted within society and their work environment.

There are many examples of how people have changed their appearances in order to fit in socially or to maintain or gain a profession. One of these examples is in the novel Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi (2010), where de Rossi entered into the movie business and how Hollywood's expectations of female actresses drove her into the world of anorexia. Her personal story begins at a young age when she started into the modeling world. This caused her to become very weight conscious, and once she entered into Hollywood it got worse by a hundred times. After a few years and many times of being cruisified for her weight and her looks, de Rossi started to cut her calorie intake to less than five hundred calories per day, and exercising obsessively for hours upon hours at a time. After eight months of extreme dieting she went from a hundred and thirty pounds to weighing only eighty-two pounds. The extreme expectations the movie industry had on their actresses to be thin and always ready for photo shoots and filming of movies, she fell into a deadly cycle that almost killed her. In her novel, she goes onto share one of her experiences with her family on Christmas and within this experience she allowed herself to eat some turkey and potatoes. This was her reaction after she was finished with the meal, "Eating those potatoes could cost me my career, money, and my ability to make money" (p.224). De Rossi feared losing her career, because of her weight so much she almost killed herself in the process of trying to meet the expectations of the industry.

Another example of how people change their appearance to gain or maintain their career was in the movie, Memoirs of a Geshia (2005) by Rob Marshall. This movie demonstrates the process of how Japanese women are transformed from being girls in childhood into performing sexual objects of men. Not only do these women go through physical changes, such as painting themselves white, to their physical behaviors to sexualize themselves. If these women refuse to change themselves in these ways, they could lose their job