In the first few days of the year 2014, a global music sensation was announced; since its release on January 28th, the hit song "#selfie" has been played on every continent and topped several music charts around the world. The reason the song became such a social phenomenon was not because of its heavy dance beat or celebrity-studded music video, but rather because it was the epitome of the coined phrase the "white girl" persona. The usage of this term is used as an insult, the telltale symptoms being a "female who conforms to her surroundings and claims she is unique. She often drinks Starbucks, wears UGG boots in August, and posts selfies on social networking sites every single day. Also uses hashtags that don't have anything to do with the picture itself" (Urban Dictionary). In response to such negative claims about specific traits that a certain gender may or may not possess, women have stepped up in the defense of themselves and how society often views women as shallow and two-dimensional. Two of these women are authors of a different nature, one being a seventies feminist poet and novelist and the other a twenty-first century comedic television writer. Although there are many differences between Wendy Molyneux's short essay "I Am Sorry That I Didn't Write a Comedy Piece" and Marge Piercy's poem "Barbie Doll", the messages of both are that women are often viewed by society as being a weak, materialistic, self-conscious gender that rely on others' affirmation of themselves rather than their own. 

In Wendy Molyneux's 2009 essay "I Am Sorry That I Didn't Write a Comedy Piece", she relies heavily on female stereotypes and satirical humor to state her point that the male views of women are so outlandish that they are, in fact, funny. Throughout her short piece, she plays on all the usual modern female stereotypes, such as being over-emotional, baby-hungry, unintelligent, chocolate-obsessed, etc. She often references her pesky P.M.S symptoms or her " cats, [who] crawl all over me, purring and being symbols of how lonely I am" (Molyneux, 417), all of which are signs of the telltale two-dimensional female character. Molyneux is not the first to create such a persona; the media has been using this "white girl" personality for generations to draw in audiences for comedic theater. Famous characters such as Cher from the 1995 movie "Clueless", Penny from the currently running FOX TV show "The Big Bang Theory", or Regina George from the pop-culture phenomenon movie "Mean Girls" have had a large presence in western entertainment for decades. More recently, the trending insult of being a "basic white girl" has appeared widespread throughout social media sites. Although being a "basic white girl" is thrown around by means to offend women who enjoy normal things such as coffee, baking, and cats, it is clear that through their constant appearances on television and in movies that these personalities create entertaining characters that the audiences enjoy to watch and are willing to pay for. This is when Molyneux's argument becomes evident; she is stating that even though people behaving in a condescending manner and acting superior towards women who like things such as fashion and romantic comedy movies, the same people will pay money to watch the same types of personalities in characters on TV or in theaters because they find these women amusing and humorous. In fact, Molyneux even makes a specific argument against Christopher Hitchens, a man who in 2008 wrote a journal article claiming that women are not funny, saying that women are not funny is equal to calling Hitchens a " huge douche who runs a successful child pornography business and has an inability to get an erection unless he's reading Nazi literature" (Molyneux, 418). Molyneux is pointing out the blatant hypocrisy within modern-day society that although women in real life are degraded and denounced for owning a white iPhone 6S or eating Chipotle burritos, they are then celebrated for being hilarious on television for doing the same thing. She also points out that women are, in fact, dealt harsh inequalities when faced with men, stating that " I guess humor deficiency is one of those womanly crosses I have to bear, along with P.M.S., making seventy cents on the dollar, and paying for my own rape kit. You know what they say though, you can't make the willing pay for their own rape kits" (Molyneux, 417). With this sentence, Wendy Molyneux turns her short essay into not just a piece written to show how ridiculous some of these stereotypes against women are, but also to express her frustration that people would rather spend their time critiquing the brand of shoes a woman wears rather than the evident inequalities between the genders on a social, economic, and political scale. 

Marge Piercy's 1970's poem "Barbie Doll", however, takes a much more serious approach to the anti-feminine social trend; she writes her piece on a young girl who was born and raised to believe that her worth was only in her physical appearance and how successfully she was able to attract boys to marry. However, the young girl was told, " in the magic of puberty, a classmate said: you have a great big nose and fat legs" (Piercy, 334). Although she was too young to realize that her face or her legs didn't define her, following this incident, the girl became deeply unhappy and self-conscious, " [going] to and fro apologizing. Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs" (Piercy, 335). Although there was nothing physically wrong with her, because " she was healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back, abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity" (Piercy, 334), her unhappiness remained until she eventually killed herself at a young age. Since the early days of the human race, there is the misconception that between the genders, men are viewed as strong and intelligent while women are emotional and fragile. There is the idea that while men are valued for things such as hunting for food and sexual drive, women are valued simply for physical appearance and childbearing. This idea of shallowness has carried over throughout the centuries until it has finally arrived in modern times, telling women that their self-worth is to be determined by the number of children they have, how expensive their clothes are, or how physically attractive men find them. Young girls are even raised from birth to become mothers, house caretakers, and objects of beautifications; the opening lines of Marge Piercy's poem explains that her character, at a young age, was " presented with dolls that did pee-pee and miniature GE stoves and irons and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy" (Piercy, 334). Additionally, as the character grew up, she was taught that the way to attract a potential husband was by " [playing] coy, exhorted to come on hearty. Exercise, diet, smile, and wheedle" (Piercy, 335). Eventually, the character's " good nature wore out like a fan belt. So she cut off her nose and her legs and offered them up" (Piercy, 335). Even while she was "In the casket displayed on satin she lay", society was still determined to see only her physical appearance and not appreciate the human being who had killed herself under the pressure to be perfect, because even most-mortem, she had "the undertaker's cosmetics painted on, a turned-up putty nose, dressed in a pink and white nightie. Doesn't she like pretty? Everyone said" (Piercy, 335). Piercy's final two lines of the poem, "consummation at last. To every woman a happy ending" (335), leaves readers with an ominous tone, meaning that even though this girl had committed suicide at a young age because she felt insecure and worthless, society would view her death as a success story because her nose was fixed and she wore makeup so she was finally beautiful. 

Although Molyneux and Piercy are two different women, of different eras and different writing techniques, the same can be said for both; they think that society weighs too much judgment on how a young woman presents herself and not enough on who she actually is. Wendy Molyneux does this by arguing in her essay with a harshly ironic tone, displaying how unreasonable and silly it is for people to assume that all women fall into certain stereotypical categories such as "knitting tampon cozies" or "calling telephone psychics" (Molyneux, 417), and that it is hypocritical for men to think women are not funny when in fact, actresses (or even successful television writers such as Molyneux herself,) are often paid large sums of money to portray these characters in popular comedy television or movies. Marge Piercy argues her claim in her poem by telling the story of a young girl who cut her own life short because of the enormous amount of peer-pressure towards her to be physically perfect and always be successful in attracting men, otherwise she was deemed a failure of a women. While there are several distinctions between Wendy Molyneux and Marge Piercy and their written pieces, the final takeaway of both articles are that too often, women are perceived or projected to be shallow and materialistic, and that by continuing to encourage such beliefs, society is teaching young girls that their worth is not based on who they are or what they do, but by the designer brand they wore or the state of their hair as they do it.

