One of my classes at Herstmonceux is known as “the mirror class”. Essentially, we track the symbol of the mirror in art, literature, film, psychology and philosophy. It’s incredibly interesting and we’ve covered several different aspects of the mirror, but one thing that has been sticking in my mind is the obvious question about body image.
And now I’m going to diverge from my class to the classic Wikipedia:
Within the media industry there have recently been popular debates focusing on how Size Zero models can negatively influence young people into feeling insecure about their own body image. It has been suggested that size zero models be banned from cat walks.
A year or two ago, I do remember reading an article in my secondary school’s Senior School Centre (the student area for the two uppermost years, think sixth and seventh years in Hogwarts) outlining banning overly thin models from appearing on Italian catwalks. However, I haven’t really followed that up so I’m not sure what it’s like now. At the time, I used to dream of a clothing company that used models of shapes and sizes and appearances to show that the most important thing is really having a healthy body, whatever that ends up looking like for the individual.
But that isn’t the image being promoted by the media. This self-same media which (according to Wikipedia) criticises the overly thin female body image is also the one responsible for showing a very particular body type, namely: tall, slim, with flawless skin, and so on and so forth.
Oh, I believe we’re fairly intelligent. We know that it’s all advertising, it’s all an image, it’s not realistic or representative of most women. Yet it is also very difficult to get past all the miracle creams for older women (what’s wrong with growing wiser?), the whitening creams, the tanning lotions, the makeup, the fashion magazines telling you “how to catch a man” when you’re trying to checkout a jug of milk at the local store — all this that contributes towards the social psychology:
“You’re so thin! I’m so jealous!”
“No I’m not, I’m so fat, look at you!”
Yeah, who hasn’t heard that exchange before? It’s so much easier just to avoid the topic entirely rather than contribute to this paradigm that is so hard to break out of.
We expect the media — or at least journalism — to be objective, and I think it’s right that we hold our journalists to some kind of standard. At the same time, we have to realise that they are not going to be objective, and we cannot blame everything on them. In Anthropology discussions last term, we went on and on about how the media shows this image or that image, and I should have asked: Why do we expect so much of our media anyway? Why don’t we take the responsibility to think critically for once, and share that responsibility of ignorance with the media, instead of blaming our ignorance on them?
But I do take issue with the media that supposedly criticises the anorexic body image and then pastes pictures of women who are still tall, still thin — only not anorexic. This is not an improvement. In fact, I’d rather have just the images and none of the hypocritical moralising — at least you can reject the “standard” outright. No one has really come up with a powerful answer to the question of how we should think of ourselves. “Beauty” as one who lives a healthy, happy lifestyle and who takes care of oneself and others does not, apparently, fire the imagination in the same way our current perceptions do.
