“I wondered if I could truly see myself at all. One day I found myself all-right-looking and relatively slim . . . and the next day I saw a sagging, bulbous grotesque. How could one account for the change except with the thought that self-image is unreliable at best?”
—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World
“If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business.”
—Gail Dines, professor of sociology and
women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston
One of my favorite assignments in the class I teach on body diversity comes early in the semester. I ask students to bring in media images of bodies they think are thin, fat, and “normal.” They usually press me to define those three categories, and I tell them to use their judgment.
For the thin category, they bring pictures of celebrities considered not just thin but beautiful. For “fat,” they often wind up with the kinds of unflattering pictures used to illustrate news stories about obesity—Charlotte Cooper’s “headless fatties.”
It’s the “normal” category that stumps them, and that is of course the point of the assignment. They bring images of bodies ranging from slender to solid. But the most revealing part of the class is what they say about those “normal” bodies. They nearly always feel obliged to explain, in great detail, why a particular body fits the “normal” paradigm. They get defensive, as if the rest of the class is waiting to pounce on their choice and rip it to metaphorical shreds. When I point out to them that that’s exactly what happens—metaphorically and literally—to real bodies, that the threat of being critiqued, dissed, dismissed because your physical being doesn’t meet the standards of the day is something we all fear and all experience, I can see the penny drop. And that’s usually the beginning of a lively and enlightening discussion.
When we talk about the assignment, my students steadfastly deny that their ideas about body size are affected by what they see online and around them. They tell me they’re smarter than that; they know all about advertising. They tell me they’re digital natives who grew up in this media-drenched world, and they know how to navigate it. They insist their opinions are their own, that they’re not influenced by the onslaughts of the beauty industry.
I tell them that, on average, women in North America say their ideal body weight is 13 to 19 percent below their medically ideal weight.1 I tell them about the work of German neuroscientist Dennis Hummel, who came up with an illuminating experiment a few years ago. He showed young women photographs of themselves that had been digitally manipulated to make their bodies look subtly heavier or thinner. Then he put the women through a series of visual tasks that asked them how realistic they thought their bodies looked in a series of photographs that were also subtly altered.
Hummel found that after the women were exposed to a thinner image of their bodies, they judged everything else they saw during the test as fatter, and vice versa. When they looked at images of other women’s bodies, they then judged their own differently. In other words, what they got used to seeing all around them influenced their sense of their own bodies and other people’s.2
Which explains, in part, why, if I asked you which of the two bodies below was the most attractive, we all know which one you’d choose. Which one most of us would choose.
The image on the left, which you’ve probably seen before, is a four-inch-high statue known as the Venus of Willendorf, carved about twenty-seven thousand years ago. The image on the right shows American model Marisa Miller.
© Don Hitchcock. Used with permission. http://donsmaps.com
Used with permission according to the Creative Commons License
We’d choose Miller over the Venus for two reasons: because we’re human and because we live in this time and place. What I mean is because of both our hardwiring and our environment. Nature and nurture. Our preferences grow out of both the need for the species to survive and the ideals and standards of our particular culture, which, whether we internalize or reject them, still affect us.
Let’s start with nature. In her book Survival of the Prettiest, evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff argues that beauty is a necessary element in human survival. “The obsession with human beauty is, at rock bottom, an evolutionary adaptation for evaluating others as potential producers of our child,” she writes.3 She believes specific perceptions of beauty—what we as individuals find attractive—are hardwired into the species as a kind of biological adaptation, driving both reproduction and pleasure.
The evidence supports this idea—up to a point. For instance, we tend to find symmetrical faces and bodies more attractive than asymmetrical ones, maybe because physical symmetry correlates with genetic resistance to disease and parasites.4 This “good genes” theory suggests that our looks advertise our underlying biological health. A symmetrical face, then, advertises a strong potential mate. Other physical traits—firm breasts, strong cheekbones, and wide hips for women, and height and musculature for men—are consistently seen as attractive across cultures and over time for the same reasons.5
There’s less evidence for Etcoff’s insistence that beauty has little to do with culture, especially when we’re talking about weight. Our judgments about beauty may feel like they’re hard-wired—doesn’t everyone find Marisa Miller more attractive than the Venus of Willendorf?—but in fact if you’d lived twenty-five thousand years ago, you’d likely prefer the image on the left. Its pendulous breasts, fleshy stomach, detailed genitals, and covered face signal sexuality, fertility, and health. Food could be scarce back in the Paleolithic period, and nothing said “healthy and fertile” like a fleshy body with clearly delineated feminine attributes—breasts, hips, bottom.
But to us, Miller’s flat stomach, round breasts, slender thighs, and protruding collarbones epitomize feminine beauty. We live in a culture where food is abundant, it’s easy to gain weight, and fertility isn’t a matter of immediate daily survival. Like most societies, we typically prize what’s rare and dismiss what’s commonplace. And what’s rare in twenty-first-century America is a body like Miller’s, which by some estimations is achievable by maybe 5 percent of the population. At most.
Which, of course, we know, just as we know the earth is round and revolves around the sun. We still experience the earth as flat (unless you live in the mountains), though, and it still looks like the sun rises in the morning and sets at night. And we still buy into the notion that we can, and should, sculpt our bodies to look like Miller’s.
We also seem to believe that our current cultural body ideals represent the culmination of some forward-moving process of development—an evolution of sorts toward a higher plane. That we have these ideals in the first place because, damn it, that’s how we’re supposed to look. We think our preferences around beauty and bodies are innate and inevitable, that we’re immune to outside influences. We just happen to like the way Miller’s body looks, that’s all.
But even a cursory look back suggests otherwise. Italian researcher Paolo Pozzilli studies paintings and sculptures for clues about diseases through history. For instance, he says, if you look closely at some of Michelangelo’s figures, you’ll notice that their eyes are bulging, a classic symptom of the thyroid disorder Graves’ disease. Or look at Madonnas from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who were often portrayed with goiters, a common sign of iodine deficiency.
Pozzilli has paid particular attention to the way weight is portrayed in art, looking for clues to the prevalence of type 2 diabetes over time. “The women in Renoir’s paintings were seen as beautiful, and their BMIs were about 29,” he explains. As recently as 125 years ago, what we would now call overweight and even verging on obese was considered desirable and attractive.
American beauty ideals have clearly been constricting over the last hundred years. In 1894, a medical professor named Woody Hutchinson wrote an article for Cosmopolitan magazine extolling the aesthetic virtues of plumpness, and advising readers that no matter how much they dieted or exercised they were unlikely to change their body size much.6
The winners of the earliest Miss America pageants in the 1920s, for instance, had BMIs around 22.7 By contrast, a contestant in the 2014 Miss America pageant, Indiana’s Mekayla Diehl, has been praised for having a “normal”-sized body, visibly fleshier than those of the other contestants; she wears a size 4 and her BMI is around 18, which makes her underweight on the BMI chart. But she’s positively glowing with health compared with other contestants, whose average BMI these days is a dangerously low 16.9.8
As recently as the 1950s, one of America’s most glamorous stars was Marilyn Monroe, who wore a size 10 and was at the time considered one of the sexiest women in the world. At five foot five and 140 pounds, her BMI hovered around 23—a far cry from today’s much skinnier standard.9
My Husband Tells Me I’m Beautiful, But . . .
Shannon, thirty-three, is a social worker near Raleigh, North Carolina.
I’ve had body image problems for as long as I can remember. The classic moment was when I was eleven and my grandmother made a comment about how flat my stomach was. That became a trigger point for me. I started dieting around fifteen, and it was a kind of bonding thing with my mom. She’s dieted her whole life; she thought she was fat but she was tiny. She’d be happy when I wanted to diet with her.
Now when I diet I have a fairly easy job losing weight. I did Weight Watchers two years ago and lost ten pounds, then got tired of it and gained it right back, plus a couple more. When I’m not dieting I go right back to where I started: five foot five and about 170 pounds.
My husband tells me I’m beautiful all the time. But when I’m not dieting, I have a huge sense of anxiety about the lack of control over what I’m eating. I get this “I’m fat” mind-set. I’m not happy when I am dieting, either, though I get this sense of self-righteousness, that I’m doing something good by losing weight.
The thing that terrifies me is that I don’t want my daughter to turn out like this. She’s not old enough to understand any of this yet, but I lived it, I watched my mother do this to herself, and I feel like I’m repeating that already. And I don’t know how to get away from it.
So yes, the cultural norms for women’s bodies have shrunk over the last hundred years, especially in the West. That fact alone supports the idea that body image is culturally constructed, that we learn body-size preferences, and that those preferences can change. But where do they come from in the first place? It’s not like there’s a committee in a closed room deciding what the ideal women’s dress size will be this year.*
That’s where the “nurture” part comes in; the environment we are born into, raised in, observe, and learn from.
Our daily lives are filled with hundreds, thousands, millions of images depicting the unattainable thin ideal. We see women’s bodies that look like Marisa Miller’s, and those that are much, much thinner. We also, increasingly, see images of the unattainable buff ideal for men. Bodies like, say, Channing Tatum’s are no more “normal” than Miller’s. (In fact, Channing Tatum’s body isn’t even normal for him. In 2012 he told a reporter from People magazine, “When I’m not training, I get really round and soft.”)
Frankly, it’s a little scary to realize just how much what we see shapes what we think. And it doesn’t take long: one minute of exposure to an image of a thinner-than-average woman is enough to shift our perceptions of attractiveness to a thinner ideal.10
It’s also scary to understand how changeable those thoughts and perceptions are. When my daughter was at her sickest, her gaunt face and impossibly thin body came to look normal to me. Other people’s bodies began to look too large, oddly distorted—especially my own, which came to feel grotesque. I avoided mirrors for years during and after her illness. I tried consciously reminding myself over and over that my body hadn’t changed size, and that the emaciation of anorexia was abnormal, not my own body. But I couldn’t talk myself out of my feelings any more than patients with the aptly named Alice in Wonderland syndrome* can talk themselves out of the feeling that various body parts are shrinking or growing. (Both Alice in Wonderland syndrome and body dysmorphic disorder involve a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, leading some researchers to believe the disorders are related.) We are fundamentally visual creatures; there aren’t enough words in the world to cancel out the effects of so many thousands of pictures.
Culture shapes our body image in other ways, too. Humans are social creatures, biologically designed to rely on other people to help us survive a hostile world. Early humans had to evolve mechanisms for telling friend from foe, for quick categorizations of the people around us—what Polish-born social psychologist Henri Tajfel described as in-groups and out-groups. In-groups are people we perceive as like us in fundamental ways; they share basic characteristics and identities.11 So some of my in-groups are Jews, women, people with curly hair, New Jersey natives, college professors, and people classified as mildly obese on the BMI chart. Out-groups have identities we don’t share; some of mine are heavy metal bands, California natives, and people who believe in alien abduction.
We develop our social identities—our sense of ourselves and where we belong in our families, communities, and societies—by comparing ourselves with others.12 On a fundamental level we need to fit in, to belong, to conform. Maybe that’s why parents google “Is my daughter overweight?” twice as often as “Is my son overweight?” despite the fact that in reality, more boys are overweight than girls. Maybe they know the world is harder on girls whose looks don’t measure up than on boys. Parents are also three times likelier to ask Google if their daughter is ugly than their son. (“How Google is expected to know whether a child is beautiful or ugly is hard to say,” wrote Seth Stephens-Davidowicz, an economist who covered these analytics, with great restraint, for the New York Times.)13
And research shows that the more we want to conform, the more likely we are to internalize cultural norms,14 to not just buy in to them but to defend them with the passion of the true believer. We’ve invested in them; we may have spent months or years of our lives trying to achieve those norms. They damn well have to be true.
In twenty-first-century Western society, those norms are communicated in large part by heavily manipulated images in advertisements, magazines, websites, TV, and movies. We know intellectually that no living woman actually looks like Beyoncé or Katy Perry or Kate Moss. You’ve probably watched the Dove “Evolution” video, which shows a beauty ad being created from start to finish, including extensive photoshopping. Or maybe you saw the 2012 video showing how the image of actress Sally Gifford Piper, wearing nothing but red bikini bottoms, was tweaked and transformed until the final image looked much more like a typical model than like her.
We all know images are altered. We know they embody the ideal—at least someone’s vision of the ideal—rather than the real. And like my students, we think knowing makes us immune to their effects. Which is why in recent years advocates have proposed a number of legislative fixes for the photoshopping problem. Israel was the first and, as of this writing, has been the only country to pass a bill requiring advertisers to label images that had been retouched to make models look thinner. In 2011, British MP Jo Swinson made news by forcing beauty company Lancôme to take down billboards featuring heavily photoshopped images of celebrities, including Christy Turlington and Julia Roberts.
On this side of the pond, former marketing executive Seth Matlins helped put together a bill known as the Truth in Advertising Act of 2014, which charges the Federal Trade Commission with regulating the way images are digitally manipulated in ads (though not in editorial spreads). Matlins told Fashionista.com he didn’t realize how harmful marketing could be until his three-year-old daughter asked him if he thought she was ugly. Better late than never, I guess, though I have to wonder why Matlins and so many others become alarmed about the effects of marketing only when it affects their own children. As I write, the bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress.15
Unfortunately such efforts, while good at raising awareness, are unlikely to bring about real change. Knowing that images have been retouched doesn’t diminish their power or change the way we react to those images, according to several recent studies,16 including one by Marika Tiggemann, a psychology professor at Australia’s Flinders University. Tiggemann and her colleagues found that young women who saw fashion-shoot images that were labeled as having been digitally altered reacted with the same levels of body dissatisfaction as those who saw unlabeled images.17
No wonder two out of three thirteen-year-old girls are afraid of gaining weight.18 No wonder body dissatisfaction rises exponentially (especially for girls) from childhood right on through adulthood.19 (Boys’ body dissatisfaction rises, too, but seems to level out after high school.) No wonder 90 percent of adult British women feel body-image anxiety, and many continue to feel that anxiety into their eighties.20 No wonder half of the women who took one Esquire magazine poll said they’d rather be dead than fat.21
Feminist scholar, filmmaker, and former model Jean Kilbourne has spent her career looking at the connections between images of women in advertising and issues like distorted body image, disordered eating, and violence against women. She’s one of the most media-savvy people on the planet. But she admits that even she’s vulnerable to the power of those doctored images. “I don’t know any woman who isn’t,” says Kilbourne. “It’s impossible to be in this culture and not be to some extent made to feel bad about yourself because you’re not perfect looking, you’re aging, whatever.”
After forty years of teaching media literacy—helping people understand that what they’re seeing on the screen and in magazines isn’t real—Kilbourne says the climate has not improved. “The images of women in popular culture have gotten monumentally worse,” she says with exasperation. “Marketers have even more power than they did before. They have a lot of control over what goes into media, more than they used to. Sometimes it’s subtle but it’s there.”
There’s more of it, too. A lot more. On grocery-store carts, on billboards, on websites and social media and in elevators. Sometimes it feels like everywhere you look, someone’s trying to sell you something. (Because, well, they are.) In 1964, the average American saw around seventy-six ads a day;22 today we’re exposed to over a thousand, more if we spend lots of time online. And America has no corner on the marketing market. When researchers from the International Body Project surveyed more than seven thousand people from around the world, they found an interesting pattern: in countries and regions where people had more money and higher socioeconomic status, they also had a stronger desire to be thin and were less pleased with their appearance. Which jibes with the scarce-resources theory: in wealthier societies, where it’s easier to put on weight, there’s more prestige attached to being thin. In poorer regions, heavier people are seen as having more access to scarce resources, and therefore hold more status.
That makes sense. But the International Body Project researchers suggested another possibility: people living in wealthier cultures are exposed to more marketing and advertising as well as more media in general.23 And their research also showed that the more exposure people had to Western media, the more dissatisfied they were with their bodies. So maybe the sheer volume of images that pass before our eyes—whether we think we take them in or not—affects us more deeply than we know.
A now famous study of teenage girls in Fiji examined their attitudes around eating and body image just after television was introduced to the country, and then again three years later. Psychiatrist and anthropologist Anne Becker, currently a professor at Harvard, chose Fiji for several reasons: large bodies were considered aesthetically pleasing there, dieting and disordered eating were relatively unknown (there’d been only one documented case of anorexia in Fiji, ever), and the advent of television in 1995 offered a unique chance to explore its effects.
Becker and her colleagues saw profound differences in teen girls after Western television was introduced. Before TV, no girls vomited to control their weight, and few reported dieting or body dissatisfaction. Only three years later, 11 percent of the girls said they vomited for weight loss; 69 percent acknowledged dieting at some point, and a full three-quarters of them said they felt too big or too fat at least some of the time.24 As one 1998 study subject told researchers, “The actresses and all those girls, especially those European girls, I just admire them and I want to be like them. I want their size. Because Fijians are, many of us, I can say most, we are brought up with those heavy foods, and we are getting fat. And now, we feel that it is bad to have this huge body. We have to have those thin, slim bodies [on TV].”
Becker’s study was the first, and pretty much the only one, to explore how media affects eating behaviors and body image in a population. And given the sheer ubiquity of the internet and other media, it’s unlikely there will ever be another study like this. Her findings reinforce the idea that, as media scholars say, we’re living in a media panopticon, named for the giant Panoptes from Greek mythology who had a hundred eyes, some of which were always open. A panopticon is literally a prison building where inmates can be observed any time; because they never know when someone’s watching, they assume they’re always under surveillance. The arrangement is an architectural solution to the problem of how a handful of people can control a much larger group.
The media panopticon isn’t a literal construct, of course, but more of a context—the media context we all live in. The ideals and assumptions of the culture surround us, holding us constantly to those values and beliefs. We’re more apt to conform, internally as well as externally, when the cultural norms are reinforced everywhere you turn.
And boy, are they ever. The panopticon now extends deep into our everyday lives, thanks to smartphones and social media. Everything we say and do has the potential to wind up online, forever, without our consent, for all the world to see. Facebook is for the moment the most popular social network; the average American now spends forty minutes a day on the site25—more time than we devote to checking personal e-mail.26 Then there’s Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Ello, and, no doubt, new platforms by the time you’re reading this. The way we consume and interact with social media has the power to affect the way we think and feel about ourselves as well as others. How exactly it affects us depends on age, gender, where we live, and a host of other factors we don’t understand yet. We know that for women, especially young women, time spent on social media is linked to lower self-esteem and body confidence, and higher levels of depression and loneliness.27
We also know that platforms like YouTube and especially Twitter perpetuate what Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who has studied obesity and social media, has described as “acts of toxic disinhibition.”28 She and her colleagues are referring to comments, “jokes,” rants about fat and fat people (especially women), and cyberbullying that tends to happen less often face to face or on more nuanced platforms like forums and blogs. “‘Fat’ has become this catchall word for all the various hot-button issues we as a culture are metabolizing and dealing with,” Chou told the New York Times.29
New technologies bring the panopticon closer in other ways, too. At public bus shelters in Moscow, for instance, anyone who sits down to wait for a bus will get a rude surprise: his or her weight will be displayed in large numerals for the world to see, along with nutrition information and—wait for it—advertisements for the gym that’s sponsoring these so-called weighing benches.30 Some government officials clearly thought this was a good idea, and probably a lucrative one. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen here.
Of course, media and social media aren’t the only culprits. Plenty of real-life interactions reinforce the sense of being judged, watched, critiqued. Jason Seacat, a professor of psychology at Western New England University in Springfield, Massachusetts, set out to explore how often women in particular experience these kinds of judgments. He asked fifty women, all of whom fell into the overweight or obese BMI categories, to keep a journal for seven days, recording every instance when they felt insulted, bullied, or judged for their body size. The women reported an average of three incidents a day—every day. Some of those involved inanimate objects, like turnstiles and bus seats that were too small. But many involved interactions with other people. One woman said a group of teenagers made mooing noises at her in a store; another said her boyfriend’s mother refused to feed her and commented that she was so fat because she was lazy.31
Seacat was inspired to do the study after watching a group of teens at his gym loudly harassing a fat woman, who eventually gave up and left the gym. His findings shouldn’t come as a surprise to any woman, because body surveillance affects us all, whether it’s “positive” (catcalls, innuendos, public comments from men) or more like the experiences of the women in Seacat’s study. I’ve endured my share of humiliating experiences, including being barked at by a group of young men while riding my bike. Whether we’re young, beautiful, and thin, or middle-aged and overweight, or—let’s not mince words—old and fat, our bodies are fair game for anyone who cares to comment. And a lot of people apparently do.
Obviously we’re not in prison; we’re free to turn off the TV and step away from the smartphone. But to do that is to cut ourselves off. Our need to belong, to be part of our community, makes us vulnerable to the power of our culture’s ideals. Our need to compare ourselves to others, which in turn helps us survive and thrive in a hostile world,32 makes us susceptible to anxiety about every aspect of our selves, from how we look to how much money we make to how many friends we have.
Ellen, fifty-eight, is a massage therapist in western Massachusetts.
I was my mother’s worst nightmare. Her biggest fear was that she’d become fat or have a fat child. She’s five eight and has weighed 125 pounds her whole life. She’s ninety-four now and still anytime she sees anyone who’s fat, she’ll comment.
Looking back now, I don’t think I really had a weight problem until my forties. But I always felt I had a weight problem, and one reason is I am a tall, big-boned woman. No one else was fat in my family. Weight Watchers at sixteen was my first diet experience. I lost twenty pounds, reached my goal weight, and became a life member. I dieted on and off after that, tons of different diets. I did Weight Watchers three or four times. Each time I reached goal weight and would slowly start back up again.
Around age forty I did a liquid diet through a hospital. I didn’t eat food for a year, and I loved it. When I didn’t have a relationship with food and had no choices, it was wonderful. I would have stayed on it forever if I could have. But you can’t. It’s not healthy.
I did get really skinny, down to a size 10, which is low for me because I’m five eleven and a half. But then I lost my gall bladder because it had gone to sleep and was making tons of stones. When I started eating again, there was nothing I could do to not gain weight. I ate five hundred calories a day for a year and a half and still gained weight. So when they say weight loss is about discipline and self-control, that’s baloney.
Then I got cancer and had my thyroid removed and gained sixty pounds because I was on the wrong medication. I went to an alternative health practitioner who took me off gluten, and it did work for quite a while. I lost about fifty pounds. And then, slowly, I gained it back again.
I was told often as a child that nobody would ever want me: I would never get married because I was too big. And I’ve had tons of therapy around that, and it doesn’t matter. Once you have that image of yourself it doesn’t change. Now I cannot tolerate myself being overweight. I don’t like the feeling in my body. I work with a lot of athletes, and I see these gorgeous bodies and I feel like an elephant. I don’t think that when I look at other fat people, but I think it about myself. I would do anything, basically, besides taking cocaine, to lose weight.
My mother and I used to fight all the time about my weight. It really damages you. I have a sister who’s gone into my cupboards, found a muffin, and told me I should never ever have a muffin in my house. I never asked for her help, but she felt she had the right to do that.
My latest foray is hypnosis. The hypnotist does three sessions and you’re done. I feel great. All I’m eating is protein and vegetables. No carbs—no wheats, rice, grains, none of that. No scales; you can’t weigh yourself. No reading of labels. The hypnotist wants you to stay in your subconscious mind. I hope to be able to eat this way for the rest of my life.
As Jean Kilbourne points out, advertising is based on making people feel they’re inadequate, less than, imperfect, and then offering a product or service that will “fix” what’s “wrong” with them. In the words of Don Draper, the fictional creative guru at the heart of the series Mad Men: “The advertising industry is inherently aspirational. Commercials create a fantasy that elicits both desire for a possibility and disappointment in the reality.”33 We aspire to things that are by definition out of our reach—money, fame, beauty, the perfect body.
And, more and more these days, perfect health. Or at least really, really good health. Like food and body weight, the pursuit of health has taken on a moral aspect: you’re “good” if you’re engaging in healthy behaviors (however you define them), and “bad”—weak, lazy, undisciplined, unworthy—if you’re not. University of California sociologist Julie Guthman points out that since the concept of “health” is essentially a moving target, a condition that can never be achieved once and for all, “it requires constant vigilance in monitoring and constant effort in enhancing.”34 If you’re not actively working all the time on getting healthy—which of course means different things to different people at different times—there’s something really, really wrong with you.
The unattainable goal of perfect health gives marketers yet another way to exploit our deepest anxieties and aspirations. And here my advertising and public relations colleagues would object; they would argue, instead, that they help people, that they fill real needs for real individuals. Maybe so, sometimes. But if marketers were in it for the public good, they’d be called philanthropists. Most of the time, they’re after something else.
For instance: In 2013, London-based media agency PHD questioned more than six hundred American women about when they tend to feel worst about their appearance. A write-up of the survey’s findings suggested that since most women said they felt least attractive at the beginning of the week, Monday was a good day to target “beauty consumers,” and added, “Concentrate media during prime vulnerability moments.” The survey also found that women’s confidence about their looks plummeted when they felt depressed, angry, worried, or lonely. Kim Bates, head of brand planning at the agency, commented, “The cultural and psychological implications of that response are significant, and from a marketing perspective, it could be a factor in everything from creative concept to media platforms to promotional offers.”35
Smart marketing, sure, especially for the $250 billion global beauty business.36 But not so good for the rest of us.
ONE OF THE most disturbing aspects of the thin-obsessed beauty culture is that it hits children and teens hard—maybe even harder than it hits adults.37 As the parent of two daughters, I struggled with how to protect them from those effects. Should my husband and I ban TV, Barbies, makeup, the internet? No, unless we wanted to move to a mountaintop in Idaho and raise our children entirely off the grid. Which we did not. So we had to try to find a way to teach our daughters to live with the flood of messages that they weren’t thin enough, beautiful enough, smart enough—an impossible task in a culture that routinely tells women that our main (or only) value lies in how we look.
Beauty culture takes root much earlier than you might think, as evidenced in three recent studies. The first, a 2011 Canadian investigation, found that children as young as three years old, especially those who were normal weight, were unhappy with their bodies.38 I had to think about that when I first read it; the predictable result would be that heavier children felt worse about their bodies and thinner children felt better. The researchers wondered about that, too. Looking deeper into the data, they found that overweight preschoolers consistently underestimated their size. They hypothesized that maybe the fatter children had internalized the pressure to be thin (and had already gotten some grief over their weight, at age three), and were dealing with it by avoiding or not acknowledging the issue.
That could be true, especially when you add the moral dimension of body criticism. Maybe thinner children who got praise for their physiques worried about being considered “bad” if their bodies changed. And maybe the heavier children had already given up on being considered “good.”
In the second study, researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey gave preschool-age girls a list of six positive and six negative traits, and asked them to assign those traits to one of three dolls: a thin (Barbie-size) doll, an average-size doll, and a fat doll. The preschoolers chose the fat doll least often for traits like “smart,” “happy,” “has best friend,” and, most tellingly, “pretty.” And they consistently assigned qualities like “sad,” “no friends,” “gets teased,” and “eats most” to the fat doll.39
Finally, a 2013 study done by researchers at the Leeds University School of Medicine in the United Kingdom asked four- to six-year-old girls to read a kids’ picture book whose main character was either normal weight, in a wheelchair, or fat, and then answer questions about the character. The girls overwhelmingly said the fat character was less likely to do good schoolwork, like the way s/he looked, or get invited to parties. When asked who they’d like to be friends with from the book, only three out of seventy-three girls chose the fat character. The older the girls, the more negatively they viewed the fat character.40
None of these findings surprise Katie Loth of Project EAT. She and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota have collected more than ten years of longitudinal data illuminating how weight and body image concerns affect kids and teens. Their conclusions highlight the dangers of our cultural obsession with thinness at any cost. “When a young person doesn’t feel comfortable with their body, they’re more likely to turn to dangerous means to lose weight,” says Loth.
Experts like Daniel Callahan and Walter Willett have suggested it’s OK to make kids and teens feel badly about themselves because those feelings will motivate them to change—presumably to diet, lose weight, and live healthily and happily ever after, which we know to be about as likely as finding a magic needle in a haystack. (Remember the stigmatizing Georgia hospital ads?) Actually, the opposite is true. Kids who are unhappy with their bodies are less likely to exercise or be active than kids who feel good about themselves, whatever their size.
So not only does the pressure to be thin push kids into disordered eating and weight-loss behaviors; it also keeps them from doing things that are good for them (and for all kids). The same holds true for adults. “Weight dissatisfaction may actually discourage people from engaging in healthy behaviors,” says Christine Blake, a professor of health promotion at the University of South Carolina who has studied the issue. People who are unhappy with their weight are more likely to give up on a health-positive activity before they even start, says Blake, while overweight and obese people who are reasonably satisfied with their bodies are more likely to be active in ways they enjoy.41
Internalizing the unattainable thin ideal, in other words, can only hurt young people. One of the most interesting findings from Project EAT was that teenage girls who liked their bodies, even if they were overweight or obese, gained less weight and engaged in more “healthy” behaviors after five years than the girls who didn’t like their bodies and wanted to change them.42 Which makes sense, given that body dissatisfaction leads to dieting, and dieting leads to long-term weight gain and weight cycling, which leads to serious physical and psychological effects.
So we should be worried, deeply worried, about the fact that nearly half the three- to six-year-olds in a recent study were anxious about being fat.43 We should be worried that 99 percent—99 percent—of the girls in one 2011 study said their ideal figure was smaller than their current one. (And 66 percent of the girls in that study were African American; it was one of the few that incorporated nonwhite kids and teens. Which is especially worrisome given the research showing that African American girls and women tend to be happier with their bodies than white girls and women.)44 We should be worried about the fact that body dissatisfaction increases exponentially for girls heading into adolescence (though, interestingly, it decreases for boys).45 We should be worried about the fact that for many children, the pressure to be thin leads to patterns of disordered eating that can last the rest of their lives.
I worked briefly at Redbook magazine in the early 1990s, not long after I’d given birth to my older daughter. One of my enduring memories of my time there was sitting in an editorial meeting where I was by far the largest woman in the room in my size 12 just-past-maternity wear. One of the other editors mentioned that she never let her husband see her sitting up in bed without clothes on, because (here she visibly shuddered) he might see her bulging stomach. I’m guessing this woman, like pretty much everyone else in the room but me, wore a size 2; she had no obvious fat on her. But her comment started a cascade of similar body anxieties. I was the only one in the circle of high-powered women who actually had a stomach that bulged, and also the only one foolish or honest enough to say that of course I sat up in bed naked in front of my husband and what was the point of being married if you couldn’t?
I didn’t last long at the magazine. Big surprise.
LAST SPRING, Kelley Coffey, a personal trainer in Northampton, Massachusetts, blew up a tiny corner of the internet with a blog post called “5 Things I Miss About Weighing More Than 300 Pounds.” Coffey, a petite blond with striking blue eyes and dimples, headed the post with a pair of photos: herself at three hundred pounds (longer hair, double chin, same gorgeous dimples) and a current shot. “The longer I’m thin, the more I miss the gifts of living in a body so big that people often turned away,” she wrote, and went on to list what she missed: power (physical strength), comfort (cushioning), perspective (she wrote that being stigmatized gave her “more empathy, more character, more personality” than she would have had as a lifelong thin person), friendships (it was easier to be friends with other women when she was fat), and presence, the sense of taking up space in the room and in the world.
Coffey says she got a lot of hate mail after publishing that post. One commenter wrote, “For a personal trainer this list is the most rediculous [sic], idiotic, and dubious thing to write. You are mentally NOT fit to train anyone obviously. PLEASE! Stop.”
She says she wrote the post in the first place to illuminate one of the rules of her practice: no self-criticism. “My clients are not allowed to judge themselves aesthetically or get down about their strength or stamina,” she explains. “You say good things or you say nothing.” By writing a love letter to her former self, she figured she’d show them she meant it when she told them they were beautiful. “I’m daring to suggest there are beautiful things about the one thing we in this modern era and first-world country have collectively agreed is evil—fat,” she says. “That there are beautiful things about these other bodies we’re telling people we should hate.”
So far, so good. Then Coffey followed up her original post a few weeks later with another called “Loving My 300-Pound Body Keeps Me Thin.” This time she framed her appreciation for her former body a little differently. “If I’ve learned anything in the last 11 years about weight and wellness, it’s this,” she wrote. “The secret to happy, healthy weight loss and, in my case, to maintaining a lower weight, is to LOVE YOUR FAT.” Self-love and self-acceptance, in other words, is a means to an end, and that end feels awfully familiar.
I asked Coffey, who describes herself as a “food addict,” to clarify the seemingly mixed messages. “I don’t believe they’re mutually exclusive,” she said.
I asked if she’d be OK with regaining the weight, which she lost after having gastric bypass surgery. “It’s very important to me to maintain this body I have now,” she said. “I’m comfortable in it. I’m invested in maintaining it because it’s a symptom of me maintaining a healthy mind and soul. That’s the highbrow answer. The lowbrow answer is I love to look at myself in the mirror. I think I am beautiful, and I enjoy that very much.”
The longing to be thought attractive, even beautiful, is a powerful driver. And that’s OK, really. It’s OK to appreciate beauty, to strive to achieve it; it’s human nature. And as with so many other things, knowing that beauty culture exists pretty much for the sole purpose of triggering our insecurities and anxieties doesn’t change that longing. What helps, I think, is shifting our focus just a little, asking a different question, in a way. So long as we consistently look to other people and to the culture to tell us we’re OK, we’re attractive, we belong, even those of us who are the most beautiful and self-confident will struggle. I think we have to learn not to look outward for that stamp of beauty approval. It’s not quite self-acceptance, a concept I find confusingly vague and impossible to put into practice. I can tell myself I’m beautiful all I want, but (a) that doesn’t make it true, and (b) it doesn’t make me believe it. When I look in the mirror and repeat “I’m beautiful,” I feel silly, not inspired. I definitely don’t notice any rise in confidence about my looks.
I think of it more like looking inward for that sense that we’re OK, we’re attractive enough, we fit in. Letting go of the imperative to be seen by others as beautiful lets me feel more attractive, maybe because I’m not measuring my looks by society’s standards. I’m freer to appreciate what I find pleasing about myself, whether it’s socially valued or not. My Jewish nose, for instance, is a perfect replica of my adored grandfather’s nose, and therefore looks good to me if not to the world at large.
Kelley Coffey did get one thing right, though: self-loathing leads only to more self-loathing. Some of the most interesting research I’ve seen on body image comes from two psychology researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The researchers interviewed a small group of young Swedish teens who scored high on a test of body satisfaction,46 trying to understand what made them different. How did these adolescents manage to feel good about their bodies at such a vulnerable point in their lives and in a culture that seems bent on tearing down physical self-esteem?
“Positive body image isn’t simply the opposite of negative body image,” explains Kristina Holmqvist, one of the Swedish researchers. “And promoting positive body image is not done simply by reducing negative body image.” She’s right, of course, and once she said it, it seemed perfectly clear. Yet I’d never before thought of body image in that way.
Holmqvist and her colleague, Ann Frisén, found that this admittedly small, homogenous group of teens shared certain physical and emotional characteristics. First, their appearances more or less fit within current body ideals. On the surface this seems disheartening, suggesting that you have to be tall, slender, and big-breasted (girls) or muscular (boys) to feel good about yourself. But, as the researchers pointed out, plenty of teens who fit those norms still feel unhappy with their bodies. So there’s got to be more to the story.
The teens also saw their bodies as functional, as giving them the ability to do what they wanted rather than simply look good. For instance, one girl who said she liked her legs explained she liked having muscles so she could run fast. Nearly all of them were physically active in ways they enjoyed, like dancing, sports, and jogging, and they saw exercise as something that made them feel good, not a chore to be ticked off a list. Though they reported hearing some negative comments about their bodies from friends and family members, they tended to brush off the comments rather than internalize them deeply.
Finally, and maybe most important, the Swedish teens shared the ability to think critically, especially when it came to body ideals. The reason they didn’t tend to internalize the comments from others is that they were more likely than usual to question and challenge those cultural beauty ideals. They didn’t accept them as gospel; they were able to step back and consider them more objectively.
That last quality may be the easiest to convey to kids and adolescents. I teach my students to understand beauty in the context of social trends, and to remember that both beauty and body image are culturally mediated. For example, we talk about the fact that the ideal woman’s body here in America would be seen as sickly-looking in the desert society of the Niger, where girls’ bodies are praised for their lush, voluptuous rolls of fat. And the most beautiful woman there would be considered unattractively obese by most Americans today.*
My twenty-year-old students are surprised to learn that beauty ideals in America have changed radically over time; they think things have always been the way they are. And when they start to understand the connections between women’s body ideals and women’s social status, a lightbulb goes off. “You find curvaceous women’s bodies that accentuate reproductive potential as an ideal at times like the 1950s,” says anthropologist Anne Bolin of Elon University in North Carolina. “That was an ideal that emphasized femininity.” No coincidence, then, that the Marilyn Monroe ideal dominated at a time when Americans were under pressure to breed like bunnies and grow the post–World War II economy.
Those of us who grew up with second- and third-wave feminism know this, or at least we did know this once upon a time. Writer Naomi Wolf, for one, drew attention to this link in her bestselling 1990 book The Beauty Myth. Wolf pointed out that in the 1910s, the lean, androgynous flapper look became the ideal just as women were fighting to get the vote. In the 1960s, when the birth control pill gave women the freedom to be sexual without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, the model du jour was Twiggy, who looked—well, twiglike, certainly childlike. You’d never mistake her for the Venus of Willendorf. And now that women sit on the Supreme Court, make up more than half the professional workforce,47 attend college in higher numbers than men,48 and fill medical and law schools, the body ideals have become punishingly narrow. Boobs on a stick, as one of my daughters once described them.
But we seem to have forgotten this hard-won insight, at least judging by our current levels of body angst and self-loathing. Older women feel as much body dissatisfaction as younger ones, though there are some important differences in what they experience. A 2001 study by Australian psychologist Marika Tiggemann found that while older women’s rising BMIs lead predictably to rising levels of body dissatisfaction, those feelings were mitigated at least a little by a decrease in self-objectification.49 It seems the older we get, the less likely we are to see our bodies as objects to be looked at by others, and therefore the less likely we are to feel shame and anxiety about our bodies. The two conditions balance each other out.
Here’s where feminism could really help. By acknowledging that there’s a historical context for beauty standards, and that the context is inextricably tied to social trends, feminism can remind us that we’ve taken this ride before and wound up in exactly the same place. That how attractive we judge ourselves, and are judged by others, depends in part on the changing social dynamics between women and men.
Personally, I’ve found that getting older has helped, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. A 2014 Gallup survey found that more Americans over age sixty-five reported feeling good about their appearance than those who were middle-aged. Even more interesting, the midlife dip in physical self-confidence hit whites much harder than African Americans or Latinos, maybe because advertising and media in general are aimed at and feature more white people than other races and ethnicities.50
Now that I’m not (usually) angsting over every lump, bump, and stray hair, I have a lot more mental bandwidth for what I really care about and, frankly, what really matters. And when I wake up and just know in every pore it’s going to be one of those days when I feel about as attractive as the inside of a burlap bag, I stay away from mirrors and go about my life.
Maybe comedian and actress Melissa McCarthy said it best when she told People magazine, “A recent article referred to me as ‘America’s plus-size sweetheart.’ It’s like I’m managing to achieve all this success in spite of my affliction. My weight? It is what it is. Like most people I know, it’s like, you gain a little, you lose a little. You have a good hair year, a bad hair year, you manage money well, you don’t manage it that well . . . your entire life is ebbs and flows and ups and downs. And you could be hit by a bus tomorrow. It’s about being content. And sometimes other priorities win.”51
Amen, sister.
*Well, not literally, though some people might argue that designer vanity sizing approaches that.
*People with Alice in Wonderland syndrome see things, especially body parts, as smaller or larger than they are, or as otherwise distorted. AIWS is associated with migraines, brain tumors, and hallucinogenics; some experts think Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, who suffered from migraines, had the condition himself.
*For a fascinating first-person account of this phenomenon, read “Ideal,” by Rebecca Popenoe, in Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, ed. Don Kulick and Anne Meneley (Tarcher, 2005).