




Throughout centuries women have always been told how to think, feel, and look. Stereotypes have been forced down on us and we’ve been the butt of many jokes. Between the two texts Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy and I Am Sorry I Didn’t Write A Comedy Piece by Wendy Molyneux, the references to the objectifications of women are very similar to each other as they directly confront gender stereotypes but with many differences in the form and tone. When analyzing the two texts together, we can see two different voices of feminism and in each they bring out a different kind of recognition of the feminist movement that is needed to reach out to our society today as women search to find their “perfect” image.  

The pieces I Am Sorry I Didn’t Write A Comedy Piece and Barbie Doll are interesting because they are both very similar in what they are trying to say but they both use completely different ways to do it. These pieces both work the same way in trying to bring awareness to the table of feminism. Piercy’s piece is a poem that is about a young girl growing up not following the gender normative of what girls and women are supposed to look like. She writes that the girl eventually kills herself because of constant ridicule and heckling that the people she grew up around gave her. Molyneux’s piece is a response to a journalist who stereotyped women saying that women weren’t funny. So in turn Molyneux responded with a snarky short satiric piece filled with stereotypes on women. Though some of the stereotypes she writes about we think are laughably inaccurate, some are really what people believe about women. Molyneux does a great job of pulling them out and making them so ridiculous you wouldn’t believe they existed and if you actually believed them you could see how ignorant they can be. 

There is one main overlapping theme among these two texts. They both show examples of how society pushes woman to become who they want them to become. In Barbie Doll, Piercy writes of a “girlchild” that was “advised to play coy/exhorted to come on hearty/exercise, diet, smile, and wheedle.” (Piercy 349) The world shapes women because of how they tell us to be and how we should look. Molyneux writes “I probably shouldn’t even write a comedy piece since Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Vanity Faire saying that women just aren’t funny.” (Molyneux 522) This is another example on someone of society telling women who they are and stereotyping a whole group of people without factual knowledge. These two quotes show just how judgmental society as a whole can be.

Both of these texts propose many cliché conventional images of women and both have different ways of dealing with this oppression. But the real question lingering beneath both of these texts is wondering what the real image of women should be. We see it all the time on TV, diet and exercise commercials, plastic surgery deals, I’ve even seen teeth whitening options for dentists even directed towards women. There is a pattern in all of these and they all deal directly with the superior looks of women. There is constantly someone telling us what to look like and Piercy shows us the consequences in these actions. She writes “Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:/You have a great big nose and fat legs….So she cut off her nose and her legs/and offered them up./In a casket displayed on satin she lay.” (Piercy 349) Through this she explains that when someone grows up outside of what we all think women should look like, they get rejected, almost like they aren’t a person.  The effects of not being accepted into society can be very stressful on a person. So much that they decide to take their own life which is what happened in Piercy’s piece. This takes on a very serious tone but still we can see these social norms bleed into Molyneux’s piece. She says “That is a tough one for me because I have no sense of humor because all of the funny things that are made for especially me, such as Sex in the City or yogurt commercials don’t even make me laugh.” (Molyneux 522) Again, there are things promoted toward women that shouldn’t be such as the yogurt. These things add a divider between male and female things that have no right to be there. This not only affects women but also men. People could say that men who eat yogurt are now too feminine but in reality there is no real image to men or women. We create these images to form limits on what people can do. They are imaginary boundaries we have created for some reason to judge people in the way they live their life. But this does not make them the model way to live. There shouldn’t be a model. 

These texts are very similar in theme but yet they are very different in the way they get their point across. Since Piercy’s is a poem, she has to get to her purpose quick yet still end strongly. Molyneux has room to stretch out her words and get her point in with time in the middle to bring out the satire in her story. I think that both of these texts are effective in their way of confronting problems within feminism today. Piercy’s short poem takes on a sodden reflective tone and it ends with the death of a girl who had been made fun of and stepped on while being told who she should have been and what to be. This appeals to us emotionally and it makes us want to change something in society. To stop the ignorance in people and to help prevent young girls from hurting themselves underneath the microscope of society’s judging eyes. This also appeals to a more serious audience rather than a sillier crowd.

Molyneux’s story is a satiric piece so she makes confronting the stereotypes humorous. This story is more light hearted but still strikes a blow to anti-feminists out there by calling out the people who force the stereotypes onto people and also by taking every possible one you can think of inflicting them on herself who gladly accepts them as something that’s not a big deal. She more than likely does not do these things, but accepting them as if she would diffuses the offensiveness in them and it turns the joke around on the person who created them. This sarcasm breaks down a wall that otherwise wouldn’t be broken down by just addressing these problems. While this story may not necessarily make you want to get up and destroy the patriarchy it does make you aware of the ignorance that goes on in the world. Molyneux’s piece has stereotypes of women in every single line nearly and they all depict either the “perfect” women or what we see woman as; emotional, lonely, and insane. Hopefully, we all know that women do not always fall under these generic behaviors, and Molyneux explains by inherently writing something that she says she won’t do. 

Though we all have our different views on people and our different opinions on certain things we should all agree we shouldn’t put everybody under the same category. There are billions of people on this planet and even though we are all so similar we are all different and we all have our own way to live. A lot of times in this world, we like the group things under the same umbrella such as gender and gender norms but today people are way too diverse and want to be represented fairly by who they are. So in reality there truly is no real image to who or what a woman is. There is nothing to find or to create. A woman is a woman if they say they are a woman and that must be respected. Another person has no right to say who someone else is when they have no idea who they are. We have to learn to let people be who they want to be and just let them be. 


