Body Practices and Bordo?

I don’t know about you but I’ve wondered why everything has to be connected to sex, drugs, or (rock and roll! Ick!) just anything in your life that isn’t good for you, smoking for example. It seems our docile bodies are subjected to anything…and we retain it (whatever culture is throwing at us).There’s always drama going on somewhere whether it’s on the Jersey Shore (people are always being dramatic, smoking, and drinkin so they can ‘have a good time’), whether it’s advertisements out there (clothes, perfume, cologne, make up, etc)…everything has to do with our body and what can be done to it.

Our bodies are more than just a vessel on this planet, we can do a lot with our bodies. We can exploit them, ink them, pierce them, but wait culture is teaching us that it’s okay to do this? Yes, it is. Both metaphorically and not so metaphorically. Our body practices prove that. The body image that causes controversy and what not is one that’s crazy sexful. Like this picture:

Bunch of guys and one girl, that’s crazy. But maybe this picture does more than just make people think “oh boy”. I’ve learned in Human Evolution that all we mammals want to do in our lives is reproduce and pass on our alleles, and make our offspring ‘better’ than us so they can keep passing on our alleles. So throughout our life, we’re worried about making babies UNCONSCIOUSLY! So by crazy advertisements for simple things like clothes, it’s ringing a bell in our unconscious mind saying “buy me and you have a better chance of reproducing compared to the person that doesn’t buy me’…my professor says after all humans aren’t hard to figure out. In class we talked about our unconscious minds being affected by advertisements and these are one of the ways I guess. I didn’t think advertisements would sort of put up an image that reaches us on a subliminal level.

Our docile bodies retain anything via texts and practices. Bordo's article sort of explains this ad, maybe men will get the 'gaze' that women look for? Maybe, maybe not. Anything that makes us more ideal is a body practice, apparently buying Calvin Klein jeans will make all the guys come after you, maybe maybe not.