As I mentioned in an earlier post, a close friend recently let me know that she has been struggling with an eating disorder. Again, I am moved to voice my opposition to our culture that worships impossible proportions for women, and then makes them feel ugly or inferior for not being able to conform.
It has been estimated that by the age of 17, a girl will have seen 250,000 commercial media messages. The vast majority of these messages perpetrate the myth of the impossibly slender ideal. According to Statistics Canada, “prevalence of the most common eating disorders is 0.3-1% for anorexia nervosa and perhaps three times that for bulimia nervosa”. I am left wondering if the reason these disorders are affecting such a large portion of young people has any correlation to the massive number of advertisements they are bombarded with daily.
That’s why I was thrilled when I heard that a Swedish store named Åhléns has been sending ripples through the world with a picture taken at one of its stores. The picture is of a mannequin with far more realistic proportions than the traditional stick thin ideal of female advertising. One leader on this is Dove, but to hear about more businesses adopting this brightens my day.
From the barbie dolls at young ages to magazines and celebrities later, this image of the “perfect” woman has to stop. Every woman is perfect to some, and vile to others. You can’t judge a person by what the mirror and measuring tape tell you. Like everything else, women are subjective and trying to objectify them is causing great harm to the girls among us who chase perfection.
I hope this new mannequin and the massive positive reaction to it signifies a change for the future. Too many girls have been made slaves to the scale; sticks are not sexy.
If anyone reading this thinks, “That’s me,” then I have a message just for you.
Relax, you’re beautiful exactly how you are.
It's true that society looks at womens in a crazy way. Expecting unrealistic things and portraying a twisted image of perfect. There is nothing i can really say other than that i agree with everything your saying in this article. A great example of a woman that breaks away from this social stigma is that main character from Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence
ReplyDeleteYeah, she rocks! I love how she refused to lose any weight for the role because she thought it would give off a bad image. Also, she said that after the oscars, the first thing she wanted to do was not change her pants for a week!
ReplyDeleteSticks are not sexy? No offense, but shouldn't girls be eating better so that they can be healthy and sexy because that's what they want for themselves, not because a man's telling them to do so? The media is directed so much towards telling women what men want, what they have to do to get a man, etc. Just look at Cosmopolitan, or any advertisement, where you'll probably find that in it, the woman is cleaning the house, or doing something in order to please her man.
ReplyDeleteYou're trying to get the point across that women shouldn't be objectified, but saying sticks are not sexy is still objectifying women. You're just focusing on women with a different build now.
I know this is a little besides the point that you were trying to make with this post, but eating disorders and the way women are represented are very intertwined.
Anyway:
It's really hard when you know people with eating disorders, especially when they truly are beautiful people and there's so much more to them that they can't appreciate.
I follow a girl on tumblr who has a severe eating disorder and isn't in recovery, and it's the most heartbreaking thing in the world to read her posts about taking laxatives, and her parents not noticing,and getting mad at herself for binging, and hating herself.
Unfortunately, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like media is enormously linked to capitalism, and as long as we have capitalism, then they will always have an influence over the media, and we will always be fighting an uphill battle against what the media is trying to make us believe.
Well, to be fair, the media does the same thing to men. We are supposed to be able to fix a car, shoot a gun, go to the gym every day, get in fights, and go home with a girl every night. Pop culture will always give us roles to fill because then we buy what they are selling, be it protein shakes or spray on pants. I guess the point I was trying to make is that the way girls are pushed by this culture is particularly unhealthy, and we ought to encourage even the slightest change.
DeleteWithe regards to the media being intertwined with capitalism, I totally agree with that and see it as both a blessing and a curse. It means that the ideal form is always trying to manipulate is into buying, but at the same time we have all the power if we change what we are willing to buy. I think that's the point I was trying to make in this post, we have the power to change this sick problem.
It's really hard though. Going into a store with your best friend who is obviously taller and slimmer than you are and watching her try on dresses, bikinis or shorts that you know you could NEVER pull off. All it really is is a female dysfunction. That part of our brain that is constantly telling us that we are the sizes of whales or that men or other people find our bodies morbidly unattractive. It's hard. It really is.
ReplyDeleteI think the overall message of this post is one of good intention, but I think the rhetoric you used at some points could have been a bit better. I don't agree with your saying that sticks aren't sexy, because I think that that implies that women should try to look sexy, or attractive to men, instead of looking like what they want to look like. It still makes woman about what she looks like. I don't necessarily think though that this is what you're trying to say. I still think that this post gives a good message though!
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