Meet Feral Cheryl! Here she is, the anti-Barbie, fresh from the rainforests of Australia. This 34 cm vinyl doll runs barefoot, dreadlocks her hair with coloured braids and beads, wears simple rainbow clothes, has piercings and a range of tattoos, and even a bit of natural body hair.
‘I think most women look in the mirror for reassurance that they look nice. I tend to look in the mirror for confirmation that I look as bad as I think I look.’
Anonymous interviewee ‘C’
‘I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world’ explained Lene Nystrøm, the lead singer of Danish-Norwegian pop group Aqua, in their 1997 UK number-one single. She spoke of a ‘life in plastic’, considered it ‘fantastic’, exhorting the listener to brush her hair, and undress her everywhere. It was also noted that she was versatile enough to simultaneously ‘act like a star’ and ‘beg on [her] knees’. Despite the enthusiastic, breezy nature of the song, the creators of the Barbie doll, Mattel, filed a lawsuit against Aqua because they believed that elements of the lyrics did not chime with the ethos of their product. Eventually the acrimonious suit was dismissed, and the presiding judge suggested, ‘The parties are advised to chill.’
Although the shape of Barbie has varied since she was launched in 1959, her waist–hip ratio has usually been approximately 0.59 – an exaggerated version of the feminine shape, rarely seen in nature. In contrast, according to my detailed measurements of images of Lene Nystrøm, she possesses a ratio of approximately 0.75. While this brings her extremely close to the value considered optimal by both men and women, it suggests that she is not, as she claimed, a Barbie girl.
At the time of writing, it is thought that one billion Barbie dolls have been sold, and ‘Barbie Girl’ is the thirteenth biggest-selling single in UK chart history.
Despite Barbie’s grip on us, there is no authoritative definition of society’s ideal female body shape. Instead, it is an agglomeration of the ideas we all hold in our heads and in the printed and electronic images our society so reveres. Although it can be hard to pin down, we each have a fair idea of what the current ideal body shape is, and that ideal is extremely powerful. Many women want to look like it, or at least they want to look more like it, and many heterosexual men assume they should consider it when deciding whom they desire.
At present, the Western societal ideal for a woman’s shape is slim – slimmer than most women are, certainly. Something in our environment keeps telling us that slimness is healthy, normal, attractive and achievable if women are prepared to put in a bit of effort. Of course there is a societal ideal for men’s shapes too, but there does not seem to be as much pressure on them to attain it. This could be because there are fewer pictures of men around us, or maybe men are partially psychologically exempt from this pressure – for reasons to which I will return in the last chapter. Certainly, the extent to which a woman matches the female ideal is often assumed to reflect her social and economic status, her psychological self-control, and her moral goodness.
Yet where does this ‘ideal shape’ come from, and what imposes it on us? As we will see, it changes over the decades, and it varies around the world, so how can something so fickle, so parochial, so here-today-gone-tomorrow, be so very important?
It is often claimed that the prehistoric norm was for ideal female shapes to be curvaceous, even obese. Indeed, there are several examples of prehistoric art from around the world in which women are depicted in just such a way – with huge breasts, bellies, buttocks and thighs. A famous example is the 25,000-year-old ‘Venus of Willendorf’ statuette from Austria (see figure below), but similarly curvaceous artefacts have been discovered elsewhere.
However, these depictions do not necessarily represent an archetypal ideal for the female form. There is no evidence that women this shape existed at the time they were created, and it is possible that the shapes were exaggerated for some particular reason – to make it clear that they were indeed female, or possibly as a depiction of pregnancy. After all, there are certainly ancient statues of female bodies in which the aesthetic aim is exaggeration rather than accuracy – the statue of Artemis from Ephesus has eighteen breasts and this probably signified something important, but I doubt it shows that Ephesian men desired multi-breasted women. Calling any ancient curvaceous depiction a ‘Venus’ also involves a big assumption about what those curves were for. They might have been a man’s ideal, but they could just as easily have been a woman’s self-portrait.
Ancient figurines of slim women also exist. For example, the Cycladic civilisation of the Aegean was doggedly churning out huge numbers of flat, almost geometric representations of slim female bodies between five and four thousand years ago (see figure above). These figurines are obviously female, because they possess a vulva and small, conical breasts. They also usually have their forearms crossed across their bellies, perhaps to cover a pregnant bump (which is visible in some of them), or as a representation of period pains, perhaps. There is often, but not always, a narrowing at the waist, which gives the thighs a slight curve, but that is as curvy as these figures get. Some even have an ‘inverted triangular’ torso with broad shoulders, not unlike the current Western male ideal body shape. No one has ever called these figurines ‘Venuses’, and yet they were far more abundant and ubiquitous than most of the curvy statues.
From the Western classical period to the start of the nineteenth century, women represented in art were, almost without exception, quite pear-shaped in comparison to today’s actresses and models. They usually had curvaceous buttocks, thighs and a clear indication that their bellies were curvy too. Indeed, sometimes the artistic urge to make the female abdomen appear fertile made it difficult to tell whether women in Western art were meant to be pregnant or not. Eve, especially, as the mother of humanity was often permitted an equivocal bump. Breasts in art were, at this stage, relatively small – large enough to depict maturity and femaleness, but no larger than that. An exception to all of the above trends was the Virgin Mary because she, by her very nature, was conflicted. She was an ideal woman, obviously, but not that sort of ideal woman. She was sometimes quite pear-shaped, and the occasional breast was visible explicitly only for serious, non-sexual Lord-suckling purposes. In other images, she was depicted earlier on in her story, at the Annunciation, as a virginal waif-like character. Then again, everyone looked gaunt and frail in Byzantine icons.
Sometimes, post-renaissance artists would focus on curvier examples of the female form – the early seventeenth-century Flemish painter Rubens being the most famous example – but rarely were women depicted as being slim, unless as an indication of poverty. Indeed, even in the mid-nineteenth century some of Edouard Manet’s paintings of women were considered to be unerotic or even obscene because they were considered too thin, although the fact that they blurred the boundaries between holy and lascivious, and were obvious depictions of young contemporary women, probably did not help.
Things became extremely complicated in the twentieth century. We are often told that the Western ideal of female shape has become progressively thinner over the last century or so, but things are not as simple as that. Other researchers have suggested that the ideal started slim, became curvier mid-century, and has slimmed down again in recent decades, but even that is perhaps an over-simplification.
In the 1920s economic times were good in much of the Western world, social restrictions on women were decreasing and in some countries, they were even allowed to vote. This period saw the demise of the physical constraints of the corset, and their replacement by the dietary constraints of a newly slim, almost boyish ideal. And, after centuries of concealment, women’s legs also re-emerged, at least to below the knee. Women may have consumed a similar number of calories to today, but they expended more of them in physical activity, so they were slighter – one estimate puts the UK and US average ‘vital statistics’ for young women at 31-20-32. Women were also smaller in stature, due to childhood diseases and a less copious supply of calcium-rich foods. Despite this, many women still resorted to flattening their breasts with bindings to attain the prevailing ideal.
Between the 1930s and 1950s, from the depression onwards, curvaceousness slowly reappeared, aided by improvements in health and nutrition – and this trend even continued during the Second World War in countries which were not invaded. It has also been suggested that women opted for a more curvy look as sex and relationships changed in response to men’s increasingly protracted and perilous absences during the war. Eventually, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield came to epitomise this trend. Some even saw this change as a business opportunity, specifically marketing products to women who wanted to put on some pounds to reach their ideal curvy weight. ‘Men wouldn’t look at me when I was skinny. But since I gained ten pounds this new, easy way, I have all the dates I want’, cajoled one advert by the Ironized Yeast Company of Atlanta, Georgia.
Then, in the 1960s, something changed. Along with an economic boom, the contraceptive pill and a claimed improvement in women’s social status came a slimming-down of the ideal, exemplified by Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy and Twiggy, and prefigured by Alfred Hitchcock’s blonde leading ladies. And the slim ideal has persisted to the present day, but with variations – a more assertive, muscular shape appeared in the 1980s, for example, along with the male-mimicking shoulder pads so characteristic of that era. In the 1990s, although many top actresses and models were not as slight as in the sixties, there was a brief fashion for extremely thin, frail and even ill-looking models, sometimes called ‘heroin chic’. In spite of these variations, the body mass index of Playboy centrefold models did not change between 1980 and 2000, yet by that year, the average Western vital statistics had increased to perhaps 36-28-38.
Trends like these are often best viewed in retrospect, but I suspect that the early years of the twenty-first century may be seen as a reversal of the trend for thinness, with many famous actresses and singers being noticeably and self-confidently curvaceous. It seems likely that fluctuations over time are the result of a combination of economic and social factors, as well as a legacy of the individual women who happen to catch the public’s eye. Certainly, the message from the last hundred years is that the societal ideal of female shape is anything but fixed.
Variation in female body ideals is also evident in different ethnic and social groups – and this is as true of ethnic groups living within the same country as it is of different groups around the world.
Most comparative research has investigated differences in body-shape ideals between black and white ethnic groups in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Although African-American women are more prone to obesity than white Americans, they have higher levels of body-satisfaction. This is true at any size – underweight, slim, average, heavier, overweight or obese African-American women are all more content with their shape than white women in the same weight-ranges. Intriguingly, their actual perception of their body differs, and they are more likely to think of themselves as smaller than they really are. And of course, this could partly explain why eating disorders are rarer in African-Americans too.
It has been suggested that these differences may partly be explained by African-American girls being more influenced by the opinions of their close family than by the media. Certainly, it is the case that most thin-ideals presented in the media are white – in fact, there are very few positive images of black girls on Western television – so perhaps the slightly curvier black ideal is a benign effect of this media neglect. Indeed, one study has shown that the curvy ideal persists even though black girls are no less likely than white girls to endure childhood teasing for being perceived to be overweight – so there must be something which is making them more resilient. Some black women have suggested that for them, grooming, style and confidence are more important than body shape and size, although research so far has not backed up this suggestion.
Another possibility is that black women may be responding to the preferences of black men. Studies do suggest that black men prefer women with slightly lower waist–hip ratios – narrower waists and larger buttocks – than white men, but the data regarding men’s weight preferences are conflicting. Experiments in which men were asked to rate images of women’s bodies did not suggest that black men have a preference for women with higher body mass indices, nor that they showed greater ‘flexibility’ – a wider range between the lightest and the heaviest women they would like to date. Yet another study suggests that black men are more likely to express a preference for heavier women in dating ads, and that they are less likely than white men to secretly want their current partner to lose weight.
Thus the effect of black men’s preferences remains uncertain, and it is also unclear to what extent those preferences have been altered by living in a white-dominated society. In some black African societies, there is an explicit preference for overweight women, and waist–hip ratios as low as 0.5. In Mauritania, for example, the desire for larger women is so great that there are ‘wife-fattening farms’, where women and girls, some as young as seven, are fed high-calorie foods such as dates and couscous, sometimes against their will.
The Hispanic population of the US is usually perceived to have a relatively large body-ideal; indeed, Hispanic women are less likely to feel overweight at any given level of body mass index than non-Hispanic white women. There also seems to be a distinctive peak of body-satisfaction during middle age in this group. In addition, attitudes to women’s body shapes show clear inter-generational differences, with older Hispanic people preferring curvier women than younger ones. However, there are also paradoxical trends too – Hispanic women are more likely to be obese, but also more likely to exhibit symptoms of eating disorders, suggesting that they may face even more conflicting pressures than other women.
In East Asian countries, prior to industrialisation, the societal ideal was often relatively heavy, but women in those countries and Asian emigrants to Europe and North America seem to have assimilated the skinnier ideal relatively quickly. Asian-American women’s levels of body-dissatisfaction are now at similar levels to those of white women, and one study suggested that Asian men’s ideal waist–hip ratio could be as low as 0.6. There remain distinct differences, however. For example, family pressure to reduce weight seems to be a particularly important cause of body-dissatisfaction in East Asian women. Also, it was in this group that a completely new form of eating disorder was discovered – ‘non-fat-phobic’ anorexia nervosa, in which women under-eat not to become thin, but in response to family or religious pressures, or to prevent perceived symptoms such as nausea and bloating. In fact, non-fat-phobic anorexia has turned out to be a widespread problem in other parts of the world too, including South Asia and the Middle East, as well as the European and North American ‘heartlands’ of fat-phobic anorexia.
Many sociologists are concerned that the spread of Western media will ‘infect’ other countries with unhealthily thin female body ideals, and there is indeed evidence to support this tendency. Access to Western television seems to be particularly important in this process – for example, there has been a huge increase in female gym attendance in the Sudan in recent years. Many young gym-going Sudanese women say that one of their main motivations for exercising is a desire to look like Rihanna or Beyoncé, and that they no longer accept the traditions of a country where plumper brides attract plumper dowries.
In contrast, there are some societies which seem relatively immune to the skinny body ideal, even after the arrival of Western media, and some cultures have taken deliberate steps to expunge it. Beauty contests are seen as particularly effective in globalising the Western body ideal, because any woman who wins a small local beauty pageant is then automatically able to ‘compete’ at ever higher levels up to the global. A government sponsored group in Burkina Faso actively opposed this creeping onslaught of thinness by running their own beauty contest at the same time as the Miss World pageant. And ‘Miss Large Lady’ was a great success, eventually won by Carine Rirgendanwa, weighing 117kg, who paraded with other contestants in traditional clothing and bathing suits to win dresses, jewellery and a motorbike.
A few studies have attempted to discern some general rules underlying all this cultural variation, by investigating attitudes to body shape and size across a range of countries. This research suggests that although societies may differ in their preference for women of different body sizes, there is remarkably little difference in their preferences for certain female body proportions. This could explain why, for example, the perceived attractiveness of relative measures such as waist–hip ratio is fairly consistent around the world, with just a few minor variations.
A second discovery is that people seem to automatically calibrate their ideas of fatness and thinness to the people around them – for example, someone from Germany will consider the heaviest 20 per cent of Germans to be roughly as overweight as someone from Samoa would consider the heaviest 20 per cent of Samoans, even if one group is actually much heavier than the other.
The third and perhaps most fascinating finding relates to socio-economic status. Studies show that, around the world, people of high socio-economic status tend to express a preference for a slimmer ideal female body shape. People lower down the social hierarchy may prefer either slim or heavier women, depending on the population being surveyed, but the people at the top of the social heap consistently prefer slimness. We will return to this observation in the final chapter.
All this leads to the question of why the ‘ideal’ female body shape varies across the globe and over time. In the preceding chapters we have already seen how female body shape is a crucial factor in human biology and psychology – indeed, it is essential for our survival – so why is something as apparently important as our female body ideal permitted to vary so much?
One simple but often ignored reason for this is that the human species is very physically varied anyway. We are a genetically diverse bunch, living in a wider range of environments than most species, and because of this, different ethnic groups possess different physical traits. Pacific islanders are extremely efficient at storing energy in fat, for instance. East and West Africans have different body shapes and muscle types, and some groups store larger female reserves of buttock and thigh fat. An extreme example of this is steatopygia, a tendency toward extremely large female buttocks and thighs, which has probably evolved multiple times in unrelated human populations – such as the Khoisan and Bantu of Africa, and the Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean. These regional variations presumably represent helpful adaptations to the local environment, so a local liking for these characteristics may explain many ethnic preferences for certain body shapes.
Food availability is a second possible cause of geographical variation and could also explain changes in body ideals over time. In a society which undergoes occasional periods of food scarcity, it makes good sense for people to consider larger women attractive – because they stand a better chance of surviving when times are hard. Conversely, by this logic, thin women should be shunned. Indeed, until the twentieth century, slimness was often seen as evidence of parasitism, tuberculosis or other chronic afflictions, and it was only once those diseases had become rare that the current trend for people to be ‘skinny, pale and interesting’ started.
Yet it still remains difficult to explain why increases in nations’ economic development and individuals’ socio-economic status seem to lead inexorably to thin body ideals for women. If these links exist, they could explain the shifts towards skinniness in the 1920s, 1960s and perhaps 1990s. On the other side of the economic coin, one study showed that during economic downturns Playboy playmates tend to be heavier, taller, older, have higher waist–hip ratios and have smaller breasts. Although changes in social, religious and gender attitudes may play a role, I still suspect that economics is the key.
Our limited data suggest that the female body ideal is ‘counter-cyclical’ with the economy – when the economy is lean, we like women to be bounteous, and when the economy is bounteous, we like women to be lean. Some have suggested that we each have an inbuilt preference for women who exhibit ‘self-control’ – who buck the trend and are slim when it is easy to get fat, and who are curvaceous when it is all too easy to become thin. I think there is some truth to this idea, but not that we have a moral preference for women with ‘self-control’.
Instead, if we consider the economy to be the modern equivalent of food availability, then it makes sense to prefer women who apparently ‘buck the trend’. When times are tough, it seems logical for men to prefer larger women who look like they could bear and support children – and those men’s parents should also prefer such women as potential ‘daughters-in-law’, so this is not all about lust. Conversely, when times are good, it could be argued that men should seek women who can channel all available resources into their offspring, because it does not benefit a father if his co-parent diverts those resources into herself. Thus a good-time girl should be skinny – and in the West times have been relatively good for several decades now.
Whatever the primal causes of the current cult for slimness, there is one aspect of modern life that is often claimed to have been more important than any other in the rapid perpetuation of the skinny ideal: the media. Indeed, some people believe that the media are solely responsible for that ideal and blame them for peddling body myths which exacerbate women’s body dissatisfaction, stifle gender equality and initiate eating disorders. But what is the evidence?
The artificial visual representation of women began tens of thousands of years ago, if not before. As we have seen, although we know little about the context in which those ancient depictions were created, they certainly vary a great deal in shape and size. The second phase of body-representation did not come until the advent of mass-printing of images in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Europe and North America, when for the first time pictures of individual women could be shown to millions of people, sometimes with the implicit message that those women were visually ‘superior’. The third phase, and perhaps the pivotal one, was the early twentieth century, which saw the advent of both mass-production-based consumer culture and cinema (and we have already seen that a moving body has a greater impact on the brain than a still one). For the first time in history, women were offered clothes manufactured in ‘standard’ sizes, and displayed on moving human models. Slim models thus became human coat hangers from which new fabrics and designs could hang artily. The fourth phase came after the Second World War, as television spearheaded the new culture of leisure, lifestyle and self-improvement – and that self-improvement inculcated an urge to match society’s ideal body shape. Since then, the media innovations have come thick and fast – a greater focus on women’s sport, the cult of celebrity for its own sake, large-scale shameless airbrushing and Photoshopping of still and moving images, social media and the ‘selfie’, and perhaps most perniciously of all, makeover shows which explicitly claim to improve women by making them conform to the ever-elusive ideal.
Of those eight-or-so phases of media representation of the female body ideal, all except one took place in the last century and a half. This is an astounding acceleration of the rate of change, and we usually assume that this is what created the modern cult of slimness. But do the data stack up to support this claim?
First of all, we need evidence that the media, by their nature, do actually distort female body ideals. Certainly, in television and films made for children, teenagers and adults, studies show that the ‘goodies’ are usually depicted as slim and beautiful, and the ‘baddies’ are more likely to be fat and ugly – although some male baddies are permitted to be skeletally thin, just for variety. Women are portrayed as thin more often than men, although this convention may occasionally be subverted so that plot twists can confront us with the horror that a slim beautiful woman may actually turn out to be a baddie after all! Another common media motif is that women with large breasts are presented as being sexually promiscuous, and experimental studies indeed show that people do assume that large-bosomed women are more willing to have sex.
The technicalities of the medium of television are themselves often said to ‘add pounds’, and actresses and female presenters often comment that they feel they must lose weight before appearing on camera for just this reason. Modern television formats can also be extremely unforgiving – high-definition widescreen television exposes every irregularity of skin tone and texture, while many television viewers do not know how to adjust the aspect ratio on their television, so watch their protagonists either stretched wide or squashed thin.
Printed media and their gawky youthful cousin, the internet, also tend to present a certain image of women’s bodies. Studies show that newspapers contain fewer pictures of women than men, and when they do appear women are more often described in terms of their body shape, clothes, state of undress, or who their romantic partner is – and this bias is as true in the sports pages as it is in the headlines. Over the years, women represented in the media have become progressively thinner, and the importance of women controlling their body shape by controlling their eating has been emphasised more and more. This is particularly true of gossip magazines, whose stock in trade seems to be highlighting and commenting on the vagaries of body-shape changes in famous and not-so-famous women – most of the ‘newsstand’ quotes I listed at the start of this book came from these publications. Fashion magazines also seem to be particularly potent in skewing women’s body satisfaction, body ideals and eating behaviour, and no doubt the array of flawless, thin bodies they present is partly responsible for this. I will discuss clothes and fashion in the next chapter, but magazines are where many women encounter underweight, almost boyish fashion models, usually in the context of high-status, high-cost clothes, cosmetics and other miscellaneous products.
Pornography, I suspect, has little adverse effect on the cult of thinness, even though it could certainly exert other negative social effects. Most users of pornography depicting women are still men, although women often have a good idea of the body shapes men secretly ogle. Pornography presents a relatively wide range of female body shapes when compared with other media, and this includes mainstream porn formats – the range of waist–hip ratios of women in Playboy, for example, is actually quite wide. Most women are aware that male-directed pornography contains a range of heavier, lighter, taller, shorter, big- and small-breasted, artificially enhanced and as-nature-intended female bodies, and that some of it deliberately focuses on overweight, underweight, pregnant, younger and older women. Whatever the threats of pornography, enforcing the skinny ideal is probably not one of them.
The second line of evidence which links the media to the perpetuation of the skinny ideal is women’s anecdotal reports of how media representations of female body shape make them feel. For example, surveys show that teenage girls believe that pictures in magazines affect their perception of their own ideal shape, and usually make them want to lose weight. In one study, half admitted that they wished they looked like the models in cosmetic adverts, and a quarter admitted to regularly comparing themselves with magazine images. Interestingly, young women often say that they wish to mimic the magazine-bodies not so much because they want to look beautiful, but more because of the lifestyle that beauty seems to bring – the implied success, glamour, social life, affluence and romantic partners. They say this plants within them the idea that it is important for a woman to ‘work’ on her appearance to achieve all these things.
Anecdotal evidence like this has its limitations. When women say they believe that an element of the media affects their attitude to their body shape, they may just be plain wrong – they could be giving the answers they think are expected of them, or which they have been ‘conditioned’ to believe. However, I think it is unlikely that such clear trends could result entirely from error, or ‘conditioning’ by those who promote an ‘anti-media’ agenda.
The third line of evidence against the media comes from measurable correlations between media exposure and women’s body-shape beliefs. Across the world, exposure to Western, but not local, media correlates strongly with thin-body ideals and women’s body-dissatisfaction. For girls and women in the West, although there seems to be no clear correlation between the total amount of media exposure and body-dissatisfaction, there are clear links between exposure to ‘appearance-based’ media and both dissatisfaction and the tendency to accept a thin ideal body shape. Girls with eating disorders watch more body-related television, especially channels which show continuous music videos. Girls also tend to watch more soap operas than boys, a format which increasingly seems to draw its storylines from sunnier parts of the world where slim young girls often do not seem to wear very much.
Fashion, glamour and ‘chat’ magazines may show an even greater correlation than television. Women who read these magazines tend to have greater body-dissatisfaction, want to lose weight, and are more likely to have tried to lose weight after reading particular articles. Media habits are changing, however, and women in their twenties spend more time accessing this sort of material online than in print, but here too, time spent viewing appearance-related material online correlates with body-dissatisfaction and disordered eating.
The fourth and final type of evidence comes from studies which attempt to directly link media exposure to women’s feelings and behaviour – in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. In this context, dolls may be considered a wing of the media – certainly most mainstream brands of doll come with television and print advertising campaigns, and sometimes there are entire magazines specifically focused on them. A self-contained little doll-world is contrived, a world in which the ideal female shape is almost unattainable. Whereas 2 per cent of men have body shapes which are approximately similar to Ken’s (and that, of course, includes me), only 0.001 per cent of women have a body similar to Barbie’s – although an internet search for Ukrainian model Valeria Lukyanova shows how a woman can diet, constrain and variously modify her body to become a member of that 0.001 per cent. In one study girls aged between five and eight, especially the younger ones, exhibited a greater discrepancy between their ideal body shape and their perception of their own body after playing with Barbies than after playing with less-skinny dolls, or no dolls at all. In another study, girls ate fewer sweets immediately after playing with Barbies. A Barbie set from the 1960s even included a tiny ‘How to Lose Weight’ booklet, with the words ‘don’t eat’ written sternly on the back.
Although they may not play with dolls any more, teenage girls’ responses to depictions of the female body are not very different. Research shows that viewing fashion websites makes girls feel less positive about their own bodies. More worrying is that other experimental studies suggest that viewing pro-anorexia websites has been shown to make girls who do not themselves suffer from an eating disorder feel worse about their bodies than fashion websites do – one might have hoped that they would resolutely reject the images presented on those sites, and possibly even feel better about themselves. Further studies showed that viewing images of extremely fit thin women increases teenage girls’ body dissatisfaction, whereas viewing extremely fit average-weight women does not.
In general, young adult women exposed to still or video media images of slim women show increased body-dissatisfaction, reduced self-esteem, and more anger and depression – even if those images are computer-generated (Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft seems to be a particularly strong stimulus, and casting Angelina Jolie to play her on film probably did not help matters much). However, it is noticeable that the negative effects of these images are not universal. For example, women who start these experiments with high levels of body-satisfaction do not seem to take the same hit to their self-esteem. Indeed, some are more body-satisfied after viewing the images, perhaps because they feel that their own bodies compare favourably. Yet still, on average, media images of women’s bodies make women feel worse about themselves. One-third of women are less happy about their appearance after reading fashion magazines, and women who read fashion magazines while eating are more likely to stop eating before they have finished their meal.
In recent years, we have seen increasing evidence that makeover programmes are especially potent stimuli. One study showed that women who watched an appearance makeover programme had lower self-esteem and higher awareness of media pressures to be thin than a control group of women who watched a house makeover programme – and that this difference was still detectable two weeks after the media exposure. And because we live during the only time in human history when most humans understand the adverse effects of obesity, media vehicles can now disguise a drive to conform to the societal skinny ideal as a laudable striving to become healthy.
In short, the descriptive, anecdotal, correlation-based and experimental data all strongly suggest that the media are a powerful force in inducing and maintaining a belief that thinness is inherently good, and causing body-dissatisfaction in women who do not feel they have achieved the skinny ideal. As a scientist, I would of course prefer this evidence to be topped off with objective experiments showing exactly which brain regions flare into activity during this media indoctrination process (these experiments are currently underway), as well as studies into whether the tendency to accept externally imposed body ideals is to some extent genetic (these studies are also underway, and the answer seems to be ‘yes’). But the evidence we already possess seems very strong.
Yet before we form a mob and burn down the television, magazine and internet companies, perhaps we should consider who the media actually are. The media are created by human beings not too dissimilar to ourselves, who may inhabit an unusual world, but their aim is to make money – and occasionally to inform and entertain too. A good way to make money is to give people what they want (even if they may not yet have realised they want it), so perhaps seeing the media-creators as the evil ‘them’ and the media-users as the innocent ‘us’ is simply a way of shirking our responsibility for the monster we have all created. It is tempting – very tempting – to loathe the magazines who have desperately backpedalled from their previous headlines of ‘so-and-so shows off her fabulous slim bikini body’ to replace them with ‘so-and-so shows off her fabulous curves’, but people buy those magazines, and they buy them even when they suspect their damaging role in the cult of thinness.
Body ideals vary around the world and over time, but the one we have here in the Western world is currently a skinny one, albeit one filling out some of its curves in recent years. The desire to fit in with that ideal is always strong – to want to be slim, to want a slim partner, slim children and slim friends. Although the ideal may change, there are powerful evolutionary and economic urges to achieve whatever the ideal happens to be at a given time, and it is up to us to resist those urges and to teach our daughters to resist them too.