Harvard Sailing Team

This video from the Harvard Sailing Team (a You tube comedy sketch group) features men acting like women. In the video, the men embody physical characteristics of women as well as many stereotypical sayings and habits of the opposite gender. The video is based entirely on stereotypes of women and the aim of the video is to pinpoint and depict (with a lot of exaggeration) a day in the life of a teenage girl... 

I think this video is very funny, but after completing a semester of this class, I see how it could offend women and how it is unfairly stereotyping females. At the beginning of the video, one guy makes a call to his 'boyfriend' asking him all sorts of questions about his plans for the night, poking fun at the notion that females love to talk and make plans with their friends. The video then delves into more serious issues such as weight loss and diet. At one point, a man is talking about how many pounds he wants to lose, while another points out, "you already weigh that much right now". While the video takes on these issues from a comedic standpoint, these are problems that girls may face on a daily basis. The fact that these men are even portraying women talking about this proves that the beauty myth and the skinny phenomenon have infiltrated our culture to the point they may someday to define it. 


These men had only four minutes to make comments and observations about women's culture or the feminine nature as seen through the eyes of men. Amazingly, they spent almost two of these minutes talking about food, diets, weight loss, and pinkberries (a brand of frozen yogurt). The skinny phenomenon, the belief that if you aren't skinny you aren't pretty, is a very real and very scary idea. This phenomenon also includes the belief that weight can always be taken off, the number on the scale can always go lower, and lower, and lower. In Beauty Myth the belief that models are getting skinnier and skinnier shows no hope for women. Is it a self-esteem issue? Fitting in? Or does the need to please others and conform to societal and media pressure so much that it forces these women to starve themselves and mistreat their bodies?