Interesting Fact

TENDENCIES

A poll conducted by a popular women's magazine found that 75% of women thought they were "too fat" (Glamour, 1984). A large scale survey conducted by Garner found body dissatisfaction to be "increasing at a faster rate than ever before" among both men and women. He found that 89% of the 3,452 female respondents wanted to lose weight.

Many women suffer from body dissatisfaction and as­siduous dieting and the relentless pursuit of thinness has become a normative behavior among women in Western society.

Women and girls are also consistently taught from an early age that their self-worth is largely dependent on how they look. The fact that women earn more money than men in only two job categories, those of modeling and prostitu­tion serves to illustrate this point.

Parental messages about body image and teasing by others (e.g. peers and/or family) have been correlated with body image dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms. Thus parental and peer messages about one's body shape or weight seem to influence body image dissatisfaction. Thinness has not only come to represent attractiveness, but also has come to symbolize success, self-control and higher socioeconomic status.

Sixty-nine percent of female television characters are thin, only 5% are overweight. Another study found that 68% of a sample of Stanford undergraduate and graduate students felt worse about their own looks after reading women's magazines.

Irving found that subjects exposed to slides of thin models consequently presented with lower self-evalu­ations than subjects who had been exposed to average and oversize models. The results also showed that all subjects experienced the greatest pressure to be thin from the media, followed by peers and then family.

Richins found that exposure to idealized images lowered subjects' satisfaction with their own attractiveness. Stice and Show studied subjects' reactions to pictures of thin models in magazines. Their results indicated that exposure to the thin ideal produced depression, shame, guilt, body dissatisfaction, and stress. Stice found a direct relationship between media exposure and eating disorders symptoms.

In the last five years there has been a significant amount of dieting and body shaping among African American celebrities/role models. Performers such as Janet Jackson, Toni Braxton, as well Oprah Winfrey have become thin. Pumariega found that Black female stars in the film, music and fashion industry are now just as thin as their White counterparts. The thin ideal for women seems to be spreading across all color lines.

Matsuura report that in Japan the desire to be thinner has increased within the last 20 years, accompa­nied by an increase in body size dissatisfaction among the Japanese.

One study asked 1,044 Hong Kong-born bi­lingual University students to complete the English ver­sion of the EAT (Eating Attitudes Test). The results indi­cated that young Chinese women were much in agreement with their Western counterparts where desire to be slim was concerned with 36% reporting preoccupation with a desire to be thin.

CONSEQUENCES

Smoking is a common method of weight loss being used by today's youth, according to Frances Berg, editor/pub­lisher of the Healthy Weight Journal. For the first time in history the smoking rate of girls now surpasses that of boys, with the compelling motivation for this behavior being weight control. Forty percent to 50% of women smokers smoke be­cause they see it as a primary mean to control their weight. Of these women, 25% will die of a disease caused by smoking.

Another common method to lose weight is dieting. Di­eting is more common than not dieting, with 95% of the female population having dieted at some time. Dieting has been as a powerful contributor to dysphoria because of the failure often associated with this type of weight loss method, 95-98% of all dieters regain their weight. Caloric deprivation experiments have shown to produce de­pression, anxiety and irritability.

Discussion Questions:

1.Do you think girls and women are taught they must look good?

2.How have women's magazines and films promoted body image dissatisfaction?

3.What does the article say about African-American, Japanese and Chinese women?

4.Are smoking or dieting effective means of weight control?

5.Are girls and women under more pressure to loose weight than men?