The Bluest Eye & Listick Jihad-Self-Identity

One's self-identity comes largely from the society that they are in. For most, they see themselves in a way that others see them. Men and woman both experience this, men should be strong, and muscular. In this society, girls are more under the influence of this, if you are not fit like the girls in magazines, commercials, movies, and just about anything else the mass media produces, your fat. You should lose weight, you should be more like these girls-that's the message we are sending to our society. Other societies send different messages to women, and to men.

In "The Bluest Eye" everybody told Pecola Breedlove that she was ugly. She knew she was black, and black people were treated badly in 1941. She knew she was poor, and she didn't really have any opportunities to make herself better. She was basically the first step in a staircase. Everybody looked at her, and felt better about themselves. Like the saying goes "there's always somebody that has it worse than you" and that was Pecola. All of her flaws, ugliness, poverty-stricken, and being black worked against her. It didn't literally hurt her, it was society constantly looking down on her, and using her to "climb up the ladder." She began to see herself the way everybody else saw her. Eventually, she developed a coping mechanism to relieve her, and bring her some hope in her life. The coping mechanism was an imaginary friend who told her that she was beautiful, and that she needed blue eyes, and she was to get these blue eyes, she would be beautiful and basically, she would be accepted by society.

In "Lipstick Jihad" it wasn't society looking down on one person with many flaws like in "The Bluest Eye." It was the government of Iran looking down on woman as a whole. This caused many problems is their society. The girls felt the urge to be as beautiful and desired as possible. Without being able to interact in public with men, without being able to show you hair, and with having so many young people in the country it was a "jihad" or struggle for them. The women became very interested in plastic surgery. There was a huge craze in Iran, with only being able to show your face, they wanted perfection. This shows how the women thought they had to be perfect for men, because the government had made it obvious to women that they were so much lesser than the men in the country were. There was an extreme amount of tension and frustration over not being able to interact with the other sex, that they threw underground parties so they could meet and talk. Once the men and women arrived they had no idea how to act around each other. Women are not the only people repressed, it is human nature to want to interact with the opposite sex, which nobody is really allowed through, unless an arranged marriage is present. How do you act around men, the one repressing you? How do you act around women who is so much beneath you?