Our Bodies, Ourselves (15 page)
Read Our Bodies, Ourselves Online
Authors: Boston Women's Health Book Collective
AMERICAN ABLE
Media activism takes many forms. The photographer, Holly Norris, and her friend and subject Jes Sachse, who has a rare genetic condition known as Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, created the “American Able” photo seriesâa marvelous parody of the very specific body type (thin and able-bodied) presented in American Apparel advertising and the media in general.
“This idea of who is beautiful and what's sexy that we see in the media all the time isn't necessarily what beauty is to me or to you,” notes Norris.
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What began as an assignment for an undergraduate women and popular culture class became part of a group exhibit in May 2010, appearing on more than 270 digital screens throughout the Toronto subway system.
In her statement accompanying the images, Norris says, “Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for âdisabled' bodies are largely perceived as âundesirable.' In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.”
© Holly Norris
The series is made all the more compelling by Sachse's obvious joy and boldness. Whether she's wearing a little black dress or little more than tube socks, she owns each shot.
“I look confident in the photos,” she said, adding, “I look just how I feel about the work, about the idea, about my body.”
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Visit hollynorris.ca/americanable for more images from the series. For more on young women's activism around issues of
disability and sexuality
.
MEDIA ACTIVISM
â¢
If you do not see images of beauty that resemble you, look elsewhere.
Seek out alternative publications, movies, books, and media sites. View mainstream advertising and media images with a critical eye and keep in mind the realities behind them.
â¢
Examine how your own behavior reflects or supports media tactics.
Would you buy a product if the woman in the advertisement wasn't beautiful? What messages do you internalize?
â¢
Use your purchasing power.
After popular clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch began selling thong underwear for preteen girls, protests and threats of boycotts made it rethink its plans. Refuse to buy products from companies that exploit women and girls in their ad campaigns.
â¢
Become a media critic.
Blog, tweet, and use Facebook to call out representations of girls and women that are demeaning to all of us.
When larger women are included in popular television shows and movies, they're usually portrayed in relation to weight and their efforts to be thin. Television shows such as
The Biggest Loser
follow the heroic efforts of men and women fighting to lose pounds and gain respect. The Biggest Loser draws an estimated 10 million viewers each week. But what does it say about our culture that we applaud these efforts, even if they include dangerous weight-loss techniques, including self-induced dehydration, severe caloric restriction, and up to six hours a day of strenuous exercise?
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At the same time, viewers are clamoring for more diverse and accurate representations on television. Though it was disheartening to see a
Marie Claire
columnist write of the CBS series Mike & Molly, “I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other â¦because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything,” the outcry that followed was nothing short of inspiring. Thousands of comments have been left on the post, most of which condemn the snarky critique.
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When
Glamour
magazine in 2009 published a nearly nude photo of model Lizzie Miller in a seated position with natural belly rolls, it received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback.
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The response led to Miller's appearance on
Today,
and the blogosphere buzzed about the surprising inclusion.
Glamour
even dedicated its November 2009 issue to honoring plus-size models and featured a group shot of seven plus-size models in the nude.
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But what happens the other eleven months of the year? Despite this welcomed inclusion, women above a size 2 are usually included in fashion magazines and advertisements only in special “real-women” issues or when being directly marketed toâwhich isn't often enough: Although an estimated 41 percent of U.S. women are larger than a size 14, only 10 percent of retailers cater to them.
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Television ads follow the same trend. The clothing chain Lane Bryant stirred controversy over one of its TV ads that featured a plus-size model trying on different lingerie outfits. ABC and Fox initially refused to air it on their popular shows
Dancing with the Stars
and
American Idol
, respectively, claiming it was too “racy.” The networks later relented, but only during later portions of the shows. Lane Bryant noted that both stations happily ran Victoria's Secret ads during the same time slots, but the stations denied any hypocrisy.
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After much back-and-forth, the question still remained: Why is the average American womanâwho weighs 165 pounds and wears a size 14âso invisible?
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COMMERCIALIZED CULTURE: THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ADVERTISING
Jean Kilbourne (jeankilbourne.com) is an author, speaker, and filmmaker who makes the salient connection between advertising and public health.
“Feminine odor is everyone's problem,” proclaims an ad for a feminine hygiene spray. “If your hair isn't beautiful, the rest hardly matters” (an ad for shampoo). “My boyfriend told me he loved me for my mind. I was never so insulted in my life” (cigarettes!).
These ads are some of the earliest in the collection I started in 1968, the year I began studying the image of women in advertising. The examples used in the first version of my documentary film
Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women
(made in 1979 and remade three times since)
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seem ludicrous by today's standards. One ad touts a deodorant that is “Made for a woman's extra feelings” (presumably located in her armpits). A woman in a diet ad exults, “I'd probably never be married now if I hadn't lost 49 pounds.” (In one audience, a woman shouted out, “The best advertisement for fat I've ever seen.”)
It's easy to laugh at these ads and to believe that we've made progress. If only it were true. Certainly we no longer see as many demented housewives pathologically obsessed with cleanliness (these days it's more likely to be antibacterial products), and we see in current ads many more women in the workplace and some (but not enough) men caring for children and even doing domestic chores without screwing them up.
In many ways, however, things have gotten worse. The ideal image of beauty is more tyrannical than ever. Even little children are increasingly sexualized in advertising and throughout the popular culture. Girls get the message very early on that they must be hot and sexy in addition to being flawlessly beautiful and impossibly thin. Women's bodies are still used to sell everything from shampoo to chain saws, and are often dismembered into partsâbreasts, legs, buttocks. Sometimes a woman's body morphs into the product, so she becomes the car or the shoe or the bottle of beer. An ad that ran in several upscale women's magazines featured a woman whose pubic hair had been shaved into the Gucci logo. We are encouraged to feel passion for our products rather than our partners.
As advertisers look for new ways to get our attention, they also use ever more graphic depictions of sex and of violence. Ads in the early 1960s, bad as they were, didn't feature women's battered bodies splayed out on the ground or stuffed into automobile trunks.
More important than images in specific ads is the rise in the power and impact of advertising in general. Nearly everything is about marketing these days, from journalism to entertainment to politics. Our entire culture is commercialized in a way unimaginable forty years ago.
I'm afraid there isn't much good news about changes in the world of advertising. But increasingly, people understand that, far from being trivial, advertising is actually a public-health issue that affects us all. In this sense, we
have
come a long way indeed.
SELLING INSECURITY
Advertisers understand the buying power of children, tweens, and teens, and aggressively market to them through every available channel. The combination of self-consciousness and spending power makes young people prime targets for corporations. Girls in particular represent an important and powerful revenue source, and savvy marketers make it a point to sell them on the same messages of insecurity they'll hear throughout adulthood, ensuring their lifelong role as consumers.
The beauty industry lures girls when they are youngâfor instance, by placing variations of the same ads in
Teen Vogue
that it puts in
Vogue
. During adolescence, girls gain an average of twenty-five pounds of body fat, which is necessary for proper development.
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But in a thin-obsessed culture, it's not surprising that most teenage girls experience body anxiety and go on diets.
A review of twenty-one studies that looked at the media's effect on more than six thousand girls age ten and older found that those who were exposed to the most fashion magazines were more likely to suffer from poor body image.
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But it's not just fashion magazines. The YWCA in Australia in 2010 sought a PG rating for popular tween magazines
Disney Girl, Barbie
, and
Total Girl
, saying that the publications teach young girls that their bodies need to be improved upon.
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Perhaps beyond the direct correlation question lies a simpler question: What kinds of stories are we telling young girls about what it means to be female? What ideals are we encouraging them to meet?
One of the largest marketers to children and tweens is the Walt Disney Corporation, which has crafted a $4 billion empire out of its Disney Princess marketing.
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In the world of Disney, “Sleeping Beauty” waits to be awoken (and saved) by her prince, “Beauty” falls in love with the man behind “Beast,” and Cinderella becomes transformed into a princess thanks to a makeover of hair, makeup, and clothes, despite the efforts of her “ugly” stepsisters. The recurring theme is obvious and simple: Be beautiful and have access to material possessions that help you to be beautiful.
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(for a
discussion of how
relationships are idealized in pop culture and what young adult and adult women remember from Disney stories.)
The real-world contradictions and consequences of Disney's princess marketing became clear when one of Disney's human princesses, fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus of Hannah Montana fame, posed provocatively for the June 2008 issue of
Vanity Fair
magazine. Cyrus, while initially defending the intentions of the photo shoot, eventually disowned it and claimed, “I never intended for any of this to happen.”
In the book
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
, Peggy Orenstein reflects on how Cyrus's ambivalence (whether it was a premediated media stunt or not) reflects how the more the pressure on girls changes, the more it stays the same: “The nineteenth-century Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White served as metaphors, symbols of girls' coming of age, awakening to womanhood. The contemporary princesses do as well, and though the end point may be differentâmarrying the handsome prince has been replaced by cutting a hit
singleâthe narrative arc is equally predictable. In their own way their dilemmas, too, illuminate the ones all girls of their era face, whether publicly or privately, as they grow up to be womenâand commodities.”
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HOW TO BE A BODY IMAGE MENTOR
A 2007 global study investigated the importance of mother-daughter relationships to a girl's self-esteem and self-confidence; one-third of teenage girls age fifteen to seventeen reported that “their mother is the most powerful influence on feelings about beauty and body image.”
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A strong bond with other older women (family members, teachers, etc.) can also positively affect body image.
While a certain amount of body angst is normal for all adolescents, parents, guardians, and mentors can take the following steps to nurture girls and model healthy attitudes about body image.
⢠Observe your own behavior. Our daughters often learn as much from what we do as what we and the media say. Many girls learn to hate their bodies by watching and listening to their mothers and other women diet and talk negatively about their bodies.
⢠Analyze media images with your children and help them to recognize when the camera is being used as a male fantasy lens.
⢠Teach your daughter that power is about knowing herself and about what dreams and goals she accomplishes, not about her looks. Help her define and act on her values and interests. Give her opportunities to succeed in music, sports, academic studies, or other endeavors, and praise her for those successes.
⢠Help girls focus on health rather than weight. Encourage fun physical activities, and cook and plan healthy meals together. Don't talk about dieting, and be aware that terms like “healthy” and “fit” are often experienced as code words for “thin.”