While flipping through channels on television or paging through a magazine you see a perfectly poised, flawless model, staring at you with her wide eyes outlined in dark, long eyelashes. Her lips are parted slightly and stained red. Her long blonde hair is perfectly cut to make her neck look long and thin and to frame her ageless face. The clothes on her body are without wrinkles or creases. She has the tiniest waist you’ve ever seen with slender arms wrapped around her pixie thin legs. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. And she doesn’t even exist.
After looking at a picture like this for just three minutes, a 2007 study at the University of Missouri found that a woman’s body image would be negatively affected; no matter what her body looks like, she will feel inferior to the woman in the magazine (Chadwick, 99). Images in the media reinforce the “thin ideal” that women must look a certain way in order to be beautiful. The thin ideal is what our culture portrays in magazines and on television of what the media thinks is beautiful and what we should do in order to achieve that beauty. It has become something to strive for by dieting or using methods such as cosmetic surgery and liposuction in order to feel more attractive. Because of the use of Photoshop, we don’t know what true beauty is anymore. Is it that almost-anorexic girl on your television screen or is true beauty found within? Is beauty lost underneath the make-up and behind the deceptive eyes of a photograph?
In the late 1890s, artist Charles Dana Gibson created his ideal beauty, the Gibson Girl, who became known as the American icon of the era. She became what both men and women looked to for ideal beauty. Women began modeling their hair, clothes, and attitude after this pen and ink drawing (Henretta, Brody, and Dumenil, 564). First seen in Life magazine, Gibson described her as “the American girl to all the world.” Gibson had multiple models pose for his illustrations and believed that each drawing represented the beauty of all American women. He said, “I’ll tell you how I got what you have called the ‘Gibson Girl.’ I saw her on the streets, I saw her at the theatres, I saw her in the churches. I saw her everywhere and doing everything. I saw her idling on Fifth Avenue and working behind the counters of the stores . . . There isn’t any ‘Gibson Girl,’ but there are many thousands of American girls, and for that let us all thank God.” Even though the Gibson Girl was seen as ideally beautiful, the man who created her saw her as just one beauty out of thousands of women. Gibson’s idea of the ideal woman revolved around the women he saw in his daily life: strong, independent and altogether beautiful.
I think of Barbie as the Gibson Girl of today. Confident, strong, beautiful, and maybe a bit unrealistic. The original Barbie was created in 1959 and instantly became the number one doll for children all across America. In March of 2009, Jeff Eldridge from Lincoln, County, West Virginia, proposed a ban on Barbie in his state in 2009 (The Associated Press, “Ditch the doll?”). His stance was that Barbie had too much of a negative impact on young girls because of the pressure of physical beauty that Barbie represents. Eldridge asserts, “I hate the image that we give our kids that if you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful and you don’t have to be smart” (The Associated Press, “Ditch the doll?”).
Why look like Barbie when you could look like you, and you are beautiful. This is the message Lindsay and Lexie Kite are striving for all women to understand. Two sisters working on their PhDs in communication and studying representations of female bodies in popular media at the University of Utah, are on a mission to take back beauty for girls and women everywhere through continuing the discussion about body image, women’s potential, and media influence. In their blog, Beauty Redefined, they have four key ideas that revolve around the idea that you are so much more beautiful than what you see in the mirror (Kite, “Beauty Redefined”). The media is trying to sell us this perfect, unattainable body image and we buy into it by spending hours applying make-up and ruining our hair with straighteners and curling irons. We go to extremes to try to lose weight in order to look like an actress in a magazine that has not only been Photoshopped, but who also has a whole crew of people dedicated to making her look the best she can be. And when we are unable to obtain what we see as a perfect body, we participate in “fat talk.”
In Caitlin Boyle’s book, Operation Beautiful, she describes fat talk as an expected behavior for women to participate in to “earn” compliments, express emotions, seek social reassurance, and excuse eating behaviors (38). Fat talk can be anything from saying, “Look how chubby my legs are” to “Look how ugly her face is.” Boyle runs a website called Operation Beautiful. Operation Beautiful is on a mission to end fat talk by posting post-it notes with uplifting messages in public areas. Boyle is attempting to remove fat talk, which instead of making you feel better, triggers unhealthy behaviors that will subconsciously motivate you to overeat or skip a workout. Dr. Susan Albers, a psychologist who specializes in relationship and weight issues, said, “When you say, ‘I feel fat,’ many people will nod sympathetically. In this context, it is used as a shorthand way of communicating how you feel. It’s interesting that we pin insecure and uncomfortable feelings onto our bodies instead of identifying the real reasons underlying the discomfort” (Boyle, 39). Fat talk reinforces the thinness ideals that our society revolves around and lowers our self-esteem and self-worth. If we feel that we need to look like the girl in the magazine in order to be accepted, this could lead to eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder.
Anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating revolve around the idea that “I’m not good enough.” These are serious illnesses that need to be treated with respect. Ph.D., Lori Smoplin, and M.S., R.D., Mary B. Grosvenor explore the cause of eating disorders in their book Healthy Eating. The first widespread attention brought to eating disorders was in 1983, when singer Karen Carpenter died from anorexia (Smolin and Grosvenor, 78). Anorexia is an eating disorder that revolves around the desire to be thin and to lose weight. It is most commonly found in women and develops during middle to late adolescence. Bulimia also stems from the desire to be thinner. It is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating followed by purging of the food through laxatives or vomiting. Binge eating disorder occurs when an individual eats, perhaps uncontrollably, and does not purge. Binge eaters are often overweight and are distressed over the amount of food consumed.
With all of the body image messages we see in the media today, it’s easy to get hung up over how much you weigh. Once women choose to be their happy weight, they will find that it directly coincides with their healthy weight. Our society has to realize that ideal beauty, the images that you see in the media, is an unrealistic standard.
Another view of beauty is that we shouldn’t let our quest for inner beauty hinder our attempt to achieve the physical ideal of beauty. In a letter addressed to Beauty Redefined, titled “Inner Beauty is Not Enough, it was written: “If you don’t take the time to care for yourself, that doesn’t exactly encourage anyone else to care for you, either.” While I think it’s good to make cleanliness a priority, I believe that if we spend too much time looking at ourselves we will either grow vain or hateful of our appearance. Instead of taking half an hour to straighten your hair or put on make-up, leave it natural for one day a week and use this time to do something you normally wouldn’t have time for otherwise.
Remember: you are so much more than your reflection. You can’t live up to your full potential if you don’t stop hating who you are. So stop the negative fat talk. The more you appreciate yourself now, the better you’ll take care of your body in the future. Embrace who you are instead of finding what you hate about yourself; if we’re happy with our bodies won’t we want to take better care of them? If you have something that you love, something you treasure, you aren’t going to throw it around like garbage. Treasure your body, take care of it, and keep it beautiful.
Boyle, Caitlin. Operation Beautiful. New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2010. Print.
Boyle, Caitlin. Operation Beautiful. Zesty Blog Consulting, 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2012.
Chadwick, Dara. You’d Be So Pretty If. Pennsylvania: Da Capo Press, 2009. Print.
“Ditch the doll? Lawmaker out to outlaw Barbie”. Today Style, 4 Mar. 2009. Web. 2 Feb. 2012. <http://today.msnbc.msn.com>.
Henretta, James A., Brody, David, and Dumenil, Lynn. America’s History. New York: St. Martin’s Bedford, 2008. Print.
Kite, Lindsay, and Lexie. Beauty Redefined. Kite Media, 2011. Web. 28 Jan. 2012.
Smolin, Lori A., and Grosvenor, Mary B. Healthy Eating. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Print.
