For Goodness Sex (19 page)

In processing the activity, some themes emerge that carry through the rest of the unit. First, students note that what makes a body part satisfying can be different for different parts. Sometimes it’s about appearance: “I’m dissatisfied with my feet because I think they look weird.” They also quickly realize that this level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction is highly correlated to how they perceive how
other people
view those parts: “I rated my eyes highly satisfying because people often tell me they’re pretty.” Other times body parts are rated in terms of the way they function: “I rated my uterus low because I get really bad menstrual cramps.” Or: “I don’t like my ankles because they’re weak and I sprain them a lot.”

Second, I’ve never had a student rate every part of his or her body as satisfying or highly satisfying. Everyone feels some level of body dissatisfaction and anxiety, although there is a great variety of ways this can be expressed. Getting to the reason
why
this is so takes more time to explore and understand, but it’s important to establish right away that no one in class is alone in feeling awkward or less than satisfied with some part of his or her body.

Third, students begin to see that body image is influenced by culture, ethnicity, class, and other nonbiological factors, and that these influences may be positive or negative.

At the end of the activity, I hand out blank index cards and invite the students to write down the part of their body that they’re
most
satisfied with. They don’t put their names on the cards. I fill out a card too. Then I collect the cards, and we hear a litany of positive comments about our bodies. With that little shot of love in the room, we’re ready to move into the topic in a deeper way.

Body Image: The Bad News

T
he tricky thing about body image is that it’s not really about how we look. It’s all about how we
think
we look. The definition of body image is the mental image we have of our physical appearance. It’s crucial that young people understand this definition, because improving body image is all about changing how we think about our bodies; it’s not about actually changing our bodies.

Poor body image is an epidemic in this country, and this is especially true among young people. Body dissatisfaction, dieting, and overexercising to lose weight or change body appearance (rather than to be healthy) begin in grammar school. More and more adolescents are undergoing cosmetic surgery before their bodies are even fully developed. Eating disorders continue to be a substantial problem in that population. The book
I’m, Like, SO Fat!
reports that more than half of teenage girls and nearly one third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight-control behaviors, such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives.
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The media and our consumer culture are the main culprits in the body dissatisfaction epidemic. We are constantly presented with images of seemingly perfect bodies and told that if we buy the right diet plan, pills, cosmetics, workout plans, or surgical procedures, we can have that perfect body as well. Body dissatisfaction is big business; people are making millions of dollars from reinforcing our body insecurities. This cycle can be broken only if we expose the lies about those images of perfect bodies in the first place.

I think it’s helpful for young people to understand that the photos presented to them everywhere—in magazines, on billboards, in movie theaters—aren’t real. Each image represents one moment frozen in time, and hundreds of photos are taken to find the one frame—the one millisecond—that looks the best. Then that photo is digitally altered to bring it to even more impossible standards of beauty. There is an amazing YouTube video I always show to my classes titled “Dove: Evolution.” It’s less than two minutes long, but it has a huge impact on the kids. Produced by the Dove Real Beauty campaign, it uses time-lapse photography to show a model from the moment she walks into the studio to the moment her image appears on a billboard. In between those two moments are hours of makeup and hair styling, hundreds of photos taken with special lighting and filtering, and then the chosen image is digitally modified. The woman’s eyes are enlarged, her neck is lengthened, her shoulders are narrowed, her skin is airbrushed. The final image that appears on the billboard is stunning, but it bears little relation to the actual woman who walked into the studio at the start of the clip, who is perfectly lovely in her own right. I follow this up with other videos that show photos of the students’ favorite celebrities and musicians before and after they have been digitally altered. There are many different versions of these videos also available on YouTube. Film and video representations are no different. They use all manner of makeup, lighting, and filters on cameras to enhance and alter people’s appearance.

My students are stunned when they see these videos. No one has ever made it so clear to them that the images they see in magazines and on TV are
based
on real people, but have been significantly changed. It’s also important to point out to them that the women who are used in fashion ads are not anywhere near average to begin with. The average American woman is five seven and weighs about 140 pounds. The average female fashion model is five eleven and weighs about 120 pounds. Research has shown that twenty years ago, the average fashion model was 8 percent thinner than the average woman. Today the average model is
23 percent
thinner. Of course this disparity is partly a result of the ever increasing waistlines of average Americans due to the increase in obesity rates in our country. A young woman in my class who works in a popular store selling women’s clothing said the mannequins they typically use in her store are a size 0. (The average American woman wears a size 14.) If those mannequins were real women, they’d have less than 10 percent body fat. Before my students start to think that’s a good thing, I remind them that a woman needs 13 to 17 percent body fat to maintain a menstrual period. Their reactions to all this information range from betrayal to anger to deep sadness. It is the rare young person who feels vindicated by this news, and the ones who do typically came into the classroom with a healthy body image.

Lest we think media images don’t have any real impact on kids, 47 percent of girls in fifth through twelfth grade reported wanting to lose weight because of the pictures they see in magazines.
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And research published in the
International Journal of Eating Disorders
reveals that 42 percent of girls in first through third grades want to be thinner than they are.
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In addition, studies have shown that people who read magazines frequently are three times more likely to exercise for the goal of weight loss rather than health, and were also three times more likely to have unrealistic body expectations.
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Another exercise we do in my class is to examine children’s toys to see what kinds of body expectations are being represented to very young children. There have been many studies about how Barbie’s body is not comparable to any human being’s, yet few parents tell their children that Barbie could exist only in a fantasy world. In fact, if a woman did have Barbie’s actual body proportions, her neck would not be strong enough to allow her to lift her head, and her ankles and feet would not be strong enough to allow her to walk upright—she would need to crawl around on her hands and feet (and Barbie’s very narrow wrists would make that difficult as well).

But it’s not just toys marketed to girls that provide problematic body images. The musculature of most male action figures today if put onto a real man would be grotesque. Harrison Pope’s study of male action figures shows that in 1964, GI Joe had a thirty-two-inch waist and twelve-inch biceps.
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The 1991 version of GI Joe had a twenty-nine-inch waist and sixteen-inch biceps. In 1995 GI Joe Extreme was introduced, with biceps that would be twenty-seven inches around in a human being, larger than those of any bodybuilder ever known. I show the students the Superman action figure I played with in the 1970s and compare it with the Superman action figures available today. My Man of Steel is positively puny when compared with the contemporary Man of Steroids. When I wanted to dress up as Superman, my costume came with an “S” to sew onto a shirt and a red fabric cape. Today, they come with molded plastic muscles, and some even inflate to give a boy a seemingly massive (and grossly distorted) body.

Body Image: The Better News

B
uilding a better body image is possible once we understand that it’s about changing our thinking rather than actually changing our bodies. Remember, what we think we look like is not what other people see when they look at us. There are three important ideas I’ve found that help with improving my students’ body images.

The first is that human bodies come in three basic types. Ectomorphs are naturally tall and skinny. They have a hard time putting on weight or muscle mass, although they easily show the muscle definition they have. Most female fashion models are ectomorphs, and our societal idea of female beauty favors ectomorphs. Mesomorphs have bodies that are of average build. They can gain or lose weight and can put on or lose muscle mass without significant difficulty. Many male fashion models, especially those with highly sculpted, muscular bodies, are mesomorphs, and our societal idea of male beauty starts with this body type. Endomorphs are naturally rounder in shape. They have a hard time losing weight and while they can gain muscle mass, they don’t typically achieve the “chiseled” look our society favors. Endomorphs are unlikely to show six-pack abs; even though they may have core strength, they usually have excess body fat covering the muscle.

The most important thing to understand about the three basic body types is that you can’t alter your body’s essential underpinnings—you are born with a body type, and all you can do is make it the healthiest and best body for you. In class I use cars as a comparison. Cars are built with distinctly different frames—compacts, sedans, SUVs, et cetera. You can put all kinds of fancy options onto an SUV, but it’s still an SUV. This was not a lesson I learned when I was a young person, but I wish I had.

I’m an endomorph, just like my dad. I’m on the short side, broad chested, and generally heavier than average. My brother, a classic ectomorph, is naturally skinny. As a kid I was always uncomfortable with my body. I wanted to be tall, skinny, and blond rather than the short, dark-haired, fleshy guy I was. When I would complain about my body, I was told that all I had to do was exercise and I could have whatever kind of body I wanted. That was a lie. I exercised as a kid and a young adult, but whenever I looked in the mirror, I was still that short, broad, dark-haired kid. Given that my ethnic background is entirely Italian, it’s exactly what I should be, but no one ever helped me see that and appreciate it. For too long I gave up on exercise and any thought of having a body I could love, all because I never learned to love and accept my body type. By the time I learned that lesson in my adulthood, I was so deep in body shame that it’s a constant struggle for me to love the body I have. I share this story with my students because if they can assimilate the message about loving their base model early enough, they, unlike me, can avoid chasing an impossible dream.

The second idea is to be clear about what it means to be fit and healthy versus what it means to follow a societal standard of beauty. Fit doesn’t have a specific weight requirement, musculature, or body hair distribution. Understanding what’s fit for one’s own particular body means knowing that, for the vast majority of us, it isn’t the body the media is trying to sell us. In addition to this, I believe it’s helpful to think about how, in so many ways, we “live in the middle,” as I like to say. No matter what physical attribute, talent, or quality we can name, there will most likely be someone better than us and someone not as good as us. As I tell the kids, “There is only one most beautiful person on the planet. There is only one best dancer.” Then I point to myself and say, “There is only one sexiest person on the planet,” and am greeted by cheers, laughter, and sometimes puzzled looks.

When it comes to our bodies, there will always be people who were dealt a better genetic hand, aesthetically or functionally, and there will always be people who would love to have a body like ours. This idea really helps to level the playing field for kids. No matter where you are on some imaginary scale of body beauty, the vast majority of people are in the middle of some pack or another. This is also why it’s so important for kids to have friends with all different kinds of body types. Kids who hang around only with people who look like them are much more likely to be competitive with each other about beauty or body type. Yes, competition can be healthy, and wanting to better ourselves is admirable, but we can’t use impossible standards as our goal to achieve our best, healthiest selves.

The third idea I present when we talk about improving body image is to ask each student to make a list of all people who matter most to them—friends, family, sweethearts, coaches, whoever. After they’ve generated the list, I ask them to review it and circle all the people who are on that list specifically because of the way they look. Rarely are any names circled. I also ask them to pay attention to the adults they know and look at whom those adults choose as sweethearts. Real couples in real relationships don’t pick each other solely because of their physical features. I ask them to think about the couple they know who are most in love with each other—not a celebrity couple but people they actually know in their lives. Sometimes they think of their grandparents, or an older sibling, or even their parents. How many of those people have bodies like those they see in magazines and on TV? Not many.

A Word About Body Hair

I
n discussing body image with young people today, the issue of body hair is one that has to be addressed. Cultural preferences for hairy versus smooth bodies wax and wane (pun intended). In the 1970s, a hairy chest was the preferred look for men, and pubic hair was considered perfectly normal and even attractive for both men and women. Today we live in a culture that doesn’t seem to like any amount of body hair. Removing all hair below the neck is the trend, whether by shaving, waxing, or any number of other painful procedures.