Justice

These Cartoons Brilliantly Expose What It's Like Being a Modern Woman

March 8th 2016

Open up any magazine and you'll find countless images of airbrushed women scattered throughout the pages. Or take a look at your Instagram feed and you're sure to find dozens of perfectly edited selfies. In a world where images and narratives of women are constantly distorted, one woman is unveiling what it is really is like to be a woman in the 21st century.

French illustrator Cécile Dormeau has created a series of hilarious cartoons and GIFs that reveal the secret struggles of women today. From online dating to body acceptance, Dormeau covers it all. She has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram and dozens of fans on Tumblr.

"I want to celebrate imperfection," French illustrator and graphic designer Cécile Dormeau said via email with ATTN:.

In addition, Dormeau hopes her drawings can spark conversation about things women feel too ashamed to publicly talk about, such as sexual harassment, insecurity and self-acceptance.

Take the GIF below about sexual harassment.

According to an ABC poll, 64 percent of Americans see sexual harassment as a problem, and rightfully so. Sixty-five percent of women have experienced sexual harassment on the street, and 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual harassment at work, according to the Huffington Post. Despite the damaging effects of sexual harassment, most cases are not reported.

"We just start to really speak more about sexual harassment since a few years," Dormeau told ATTN:. "This is unfortunately something which happens to all girls. I wanted to speak about the violence of this act by humor. Many women feel ashamed when they’re harassed, and this is not normal. Our bodies don’t belong to any one, and no one has the right to touch a woman without her consent. This GIF is just a way to say to girls that they should not be scared to react to their aggressor, and make everyone conscious about this problem."

And what woman hasn't felt insecure about her looks. There are so many images of perfectly manicured and hairless women, that it's hard not to criticize yourself if you happen to be the one with a happy trail and an unwaxed bikini line.


"I just saw that hair is a major complex for many girls," Dormeau told ATTN: in an emailed statement. "This is something we never show in the media, all the girls we see are always perfectly smooth. Porn culture also doesn’t help with that. I even saw some teenagers boys who thought that girls cannot have pubic hair, it cannot exist."

It's happening everywhere, she explained:

"Girls will say, 'I feel like a man when I do not shave,' or 'I am so gross with my hair,' or feeling abnormal because they have hair on legs, pussy, arms, belly, breasts, peachfuzz, or whatever part of the body. But guess what, having hair is completely normal. We always feel bad in our bodies because society will never show realistic bodies, that’s why it’s our responsibilities as artist to represent what is not enough represented."

As ATTN: previously reported, an Indiana University study found that shaving one's body hair is a beauty standard that 95 percent of men and women uphold. And in a 2015 survey by AskMen.com, 41 percent of men prefer a woman no pubic hair on a woman, whereas 38 percent of men said that a woman's pubic hair should at least be "trimmed." Only 5 percent of men believed that a women should go all natural down there.

"I think this is really important to try to find humor in all these complex themes to help girls to de-dramatize about their image, to question themselves about what society expects from you to be acceptable," Dormeau told ATTN:.

"If my followers can recognize themselves in my illustrations and laugh at them and with them, I hope it can help them to move forward towards self-acceptance. How many times as a teenager (or even older) you will think, 'I am not normal,' because you will not feel identified to what media is showing you. I really want to say this by my illustrations, 'Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I have flaws too. I am fucked up too sometimes, you are completely normal.'"

Yassss. You can see some of Dormeau's other drawings from below.

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