Young women face so many challenges in their lifetime, and the book Audios, Barbie displays several of the trials and tribulations that each individual young lady might encounter. The bulk of the stories deal with body image and self-identity, and I chose to focus on a particular story titled, “Appraising God’s Property”, by Keesa Schreane. She works out in her essay a backward situation of being part of the “in” crowd or the “out” crowd. To emphasize a problem in this area I also located an article to contrast and compare to Keesa’s essay, which was written by Fiona Stewart, of Deakin University, concerning the “Implications of Reputation for Young Women’s Sexual Health and Well-Being (pg.373)”. In the essay that Keesa writes, she reflects and works out the confidence in herself. It contains her struggle of staying strong within herself and dealing with the coolness (or better yet non-coolness) of her chosen lifestyle, abstinence. She was raised with old-fashion morals and values. These are important to her, yet contradict all the “action” that takes place in most young women’s high school and college years. She remembers “wondering what it would be like to get a little ‘groove’” on of her own (pg.159). She found that she had to work hard to keep temptation in the background. Keesa found sexuality “as pure evil” whether she was thinking of it herself, showing it in her body movements, or seeing the look of desire in males who sought her out (pg. 159-60). She was an individual, out of the ordinary. She found herself very involved in traveling places and teaching others what abstinence was all about and how important it was to uphold. She felt that “if I was going to be a virgin, at least I could be an enlightened one (pg.160)”. This, and her strong will, gave her advantage over the normal p...
