Strawberries and the Portrayal of Women in Media
“I don’t know if it’s just me but strawberries look like they should taste a lot better than how they actually do,” someone proclaimed, in what looks like a tweet, which has now become a meme in the form of an uploaded screenshot to Instagram, which has, like many others of its kind, made its way into my Instagram explore page. Accompanying that proclamation are pictures of large, voluptuous strawberries, vividly red in color, very much inviting to any eye who might take a look.
But should strawberries taste better? How should they even taste like, anyway? Anyone who has eaten them off their vines would know how tart and sour they can be. And yet, it’s pretty crazy how different the taste of “strawberries” would be if you asked someone who’s never had their hands on fresh, unprocessed strawberries before.
When you think about the “strawberry flavor”, what kind of taste do you have in mind? The conflicting answer would be, which kind of strawberry? The “natural” ones, or the “artificial flavor” of strawberries that manufacturers put in many of the products that we consume?
We — the people in areas of a thriving industrialization — are all arguably familiar with the latter. Strawberry flavored milk, strawberry P*ocky, strawberry jam… they are not reminiscent of tartness nor sourness at all. They are all fruity, and at times overwhelmingly sweet. Pretty much the opposite of what strawberries taste like “in the wild”. The crazier thing is how we’ve now associated fruitiness and sweetness to what we know as a “strawberry flavor”, even if it’s nothing like what an actual strawberry tastes like.
It’s uncanny how familiar this situation is in relation to my experiences as a woman. I’m not inherently against artificial enhancements of the human body, but, as we are now used to the fruity and sweet artificial flavor of strawberries, we are also very much used to the airbrushed images of women, as portrayed by our own popular media. The trends fluctuate and differ between cultures, but the status quo is that a “woman” is represented in mass media in their so-called “ideal” form. Whether that may mean an extra layer of makeup, a certain enhancement of volume in a woman’s body part, or the editing out of pores. It may be unrealistic, but it is a part of reality. It’s as real as how there are two kinds of strawberry flavors, one nothing like the other. In a similar way, when women witness their own bodies and compare them to what they see in mass media, they might feel unfamiliar with the one that they own.
The threats of this phenomenon is not unknown. A desire for an “airbrushed form” that we deem as how a woman should look like can produce many negative outcomes, both physically and mentally for women. Moreover, most of the time, the “airbrushed form” in question is not only difficult to obtain, but perhaps even impossible. Yet, the pressure to embody that idealism is still present and felt by many women today.
Of course, “in the wild”, the majority of women are not like the image of them that is portrayed in mass media. Their bodies differ in height, weight, volume, length, size, skin tone, and many other things. Perhaps some of them experience disability in its many diverse forms, or a health problem that they have might manifest certain physical differences. And yet, the reality remains: they are women — even if they look nothing like how the media portrays them.
Accepting reality is perhaps one of the bitterest pills that anyone can ever swallow. But it gives you a well-rounded perspective of what it truly is. Perhaps, just as there exists two kinds of strawberry flavors in our collective consciousness (even though one of them is artificial), we can also acknowledge the reality that is faced by women today — that there exists unrealistic portrayal of women, and on the other hand, well, women.
