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Self-image and the societal ideas thereof (SBR)

  
  

Page: 12(3)4

 
 
Tsuga
19:56 / 21.07.07
I'm very curious as to how these "ideals" transform over time. It seems that the super-thin style really started with Twiggy, before then the "ideal" woman was more voluptuous (but maybe with an impossibly thin waistline). You look through history and see the ideals change. These versions of ideal seem to evolve within cultures almost by chance; one compelling image in the right context can influence many others, and so on. They become self-fulfilling and self-continuing, though evolving. Usually slowly evolving, but sometimes they drastically change, just like clothing and hair styles. There are comparative studies about what body-types are generally more accepted as attractive between black and white Americans. I would assume most of these differences in taste are cultural. Maybe at some point the general dominant media culture will swing back to something more realistic.
 
 
ibis the being
02:54 / 22.07.07
Ok, I guess I have to step in and be the annoying "skinny girl" who complains about skinny-bashing.

It dismays me when a discussion about body image devolves into a session of shit talking about all those horrible skinny perfect people who are perpetrating their horrible skinny perfection on all the good, normal people. In the last year I have become something of a health nut, and after I overhauled my eating habits (not dieting, just eating carefully & well) I have lost about 20 lbs. I'm now as thin as I was in high school. And just like that, it all comes back to me - all the shit I used to get as a skinny teenager I am reliving now.

I am evil and terrible enough to actually be a size 2. I don't starve myself. I am healthy. I am happy. I like food. And I like myself. If you want to talk about fucked up societal standards of self-image, try having to listen to someone who eats fast food four times a week tell YOU, the whole-grains munching vegetarian, you need to eat better. There can sometimes be a free pass to poke fun at overweight people, but I can assure you the free pass to make fun of the thin is as bad. When I was in high school, my Physical Education teacher yelled that I should "eat a sandwich or something" in front of the class, like that was ok. The other day my sister in law said pretty much the exact same thing to me, and laughed. It's humiliating.

I think there's plenty of skinny-bashing in this thread and it makes me a bit mad.I mean, why anyone has a need to point fingers at anyone else's body and pass judgement on their body mass index is really beyond me anyway. Fat or thin, why the fuck do you care? There's this weird perception that people who are thin/ner are inflicting their thinness on other people. Maybe we can move past that old saw and focus on more interesting aspects of body image, like why self-worth is tied to physicality at all, etc. etc.

I actually have a bit of an oddball theory that most unhealthy eating habits are caused more by our modern food products themselves than by body image issues, but that probably diverges too much from the topic at hand.
 
 
Tsuga
04:45 / 22.07.07
Well, I hope you didn't feel like my post was anti-thin, so much as against the overwhelming preponderance of extremely thin persons being exemplified as perfect, with effectively no others being represented. If your body, treated well, is thin— that's great. If Tuna has a cheese grater for a stomach or cottage cheese that's fine (though for health reasons, usually the former would be preferable), and if anyone is larger and healthy then fantastic. But it's sad that so many people feel so unhappy about themselves, cosmetic surgery is like an epidemic, and if you're over thirty you're old. Those things are absurd. It's also fucked-up if people are resenting you for just being you, when there's certainly nothing wrong with that, either.
 
 
HCE
06:17 / 22.07.07
Ok, I guess I have to step in and be the annoying "skinny girl" who complains about skinny-bashing.

Well, and Quantum explains his phrasing here, and Mordant/TTS makes an acknowledgment here, so hopefully we can find a way for people to express their frustrations with the pressures they feel to attain body shapes and sizes that are unnatural, unhealthy, or unwanted for them without other people who are that shape or size being made to feel attacked.

There certainly seems to be a way to feel bad about yourself no matter what you look like. Even the most attractive person on Earth will age, and somebody else will come along. I almost feel it was a sort of blessing to be horribly awkward during my formative years, as I have relatively little of my sense of self invested in my appearance, though obviously everyone is at times sensitive about it. Watching people accustomed to trading on their looks eat themselves alive as they 'lose' them (in their own opinion) is terribly sad. From the outside it seems like such needless unhappiness. That's supposedly at least some of the appeal of the internet - people can get to know your pure, fleshless soul.
 
 
Ex
13:09 / 22.07.07
Ibis, I hope the thread doesn't drop into side-taking on size, too. I don't think anyone gets any favours from the current set-up, and I think that factionalising (setting people against each other, encouraging resentment, envy, making blanket claims for the superiority of one size or another and so on) is part of its perpetuation.

I see the weird stuff that I get from being slim as a spin-off from the whole big, fucked-up system - on the whole, I get more credit than menace for the way I look, but the individual incidents are still quite unpleasant. At the last (pro-feminist queer blahblah) conference I went to I mentioned liking chocolate. Two otherwise very pleasant women then chipped in with 'How can you SAY that? Standing there! Like that! You can't SAY that!' With pointed pointing at my torso.
I felt as though I'd advocated something horrible or let someone down very badly. It was probably intended as a compliment but it felt like body-policing. I see where it comes from, but bloody hell.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
14:18 / 22.07.07
I am evil and terrible enough to actually be a size 2.

Ibis, I'm more than a little nettled by your tone. I thought the issue of bashing people for being skinny was picked up and addressed pretty quickly. I'd like to see all these posts where people are telling you that you're evil and terrible.
 
 
Papess
15:34 / 22.07.07
I'd like to see all these posts where people are telling you that you're evil and terrible.

I didn't get that from Ibis' post. In the first paragraph she aired her concern for the course of the discussion. However, I thought she went on to talk about her own current experiences in the second paragraph.
 
 
*
16:41 / 22.07.07
One thing about sizeism on all sides is its tendency to want to defend itself. Underlying sizeism is a belief that people's weight is totally under their control, and therefore it's a direct reflection of how motivated and self-disciplined they are. Well, that's just not true. While obviously one can eat more healthily and get better exercise, especially as children to prevent problems later on, how much of an impact this has on one's actual weight varies depending on genetics and body chemistry and environmental factors. Likewise, some thin people eat a lot of trash and this doesn't affect their weight (though it may be affecting them negatively in a lot of other ways). But sizeism doesn't function without this belief, so people fight desperately to preserve it—if a thin person admits to eating chocolate, it threatens to overturn the idea that weight is a direct manifestation of self-discipline, and some people's whole world/self-image might be shot to hell as a result. Likewise, many people just will not believe that a heavy person eats right and exercises. Many people who see themselves as overweight and who are already practicing a healthy diet and exercise program themselves cannot believe that they are doing the right thing; if they aren't losing weight it's because they're not sufficiently self-disciplined even if they know for a fact they are doing everything right. I imagine some people who are thin believe unjustifiably that their thinness is because of healthy practices that they don't actually adhere to—I've never heard this from someone, but I have felt pressure from other people to claim some special skill or technique for being on the thin side, and I can see how it would be easy to start believing in that.

The other day I was going over my blood profile in my doctor's office with a clinician. Talking about my glycemic index led me to mention that I'd had problems with low blood sugar in the past and it was a source of concern for me, since I eat a lot of simple sugars on an irregular basis, which in combination with hypoglycemia, I've been told, can lead to late-onset diabetes later in life. My clinician told me dismissively that I didn't have to worry about that; I'm a healthy weight so I must be doing everything right. That's manifestly untrue; I eat a lot of fats and sugars and even though I walk a few blocks every day my lifestyle is basically sedentary. I can't jog more than a couple of blocks before I get winded. I've just inherited my mother's body type instead of my dad's—that doesn't necessarily mean I haven't inherited his blood sugar and cholesterol problems too.

The way I understand the situation with sizeism on both sides is that blaming (often manifesting as praising and envying) people for being thin can be just as damaging as blaming people for being heavy, as can drawing a line around thin people and suggesting that they aren't affected by sizeism. It's all a part of the same underlying belief—that people's weight is a direct manifestation of blameworthy or praiseworthy practices on their part.

People of median weight don't get away from it either—they're likely to get subtle blame AND praise, depending on who they're talking to or standing next to!

Ibis, your theory that terrible processed food does more harm than body image is not an oddball one—I wouldn't want to compare and quantify the two types of harm, really, because it's such a different kind of impact, but the corn-based diet most of the US lives on is absolutely awful and entirely driven by profit.
 
 
ibis the being
18:09 / 22.07.07
I am happy to explain my last post in more detail. I would like to say at the outset, in case I appear to be picking on anyone, I've gone through the thread and found the statements that bothered me without regard to who wrote them. I'll also acknowledge straight away that I can see how, in my reaction to this thread, to some extent I'm emotionally conflating specific comments in this thread, common attitudes depicted by the media (ie, real men prefer curvy women) that have been referred to in this thread, and specific real world personal experiences I have had that were called to mind by some posts here.

I loathe that being sickly and being thin is the aesthetic women and gay men aspire to.

I rail against the idea that all sizes in stores these days are apparently designed for fetuses

gaunt celebrity women trying to look sexy, and all the lads mags are full of topless gaunt celebrity women trying to look sexy.

Not everyone can be the thinner clothes horse that society seems to want us all to desire to be

if enough straight men react negatively to the notion that starved=sexy

gym-starved women


The above are, to me, examples of some of the more generic language that's thrown around in reference to thin women. These are the catch-all derogatory terms that typically equate thinness in women with starvation, sickliness, ill health, misery, shallowness, and 'emptiness.'

if, and if so why, heterosexual men really do feel attracted to thinner (even unhealthy) women. Stumped if I know the answer to that one - it's probably not very pleasant.

Although, I must say, I don't find rail-thin women attractive, curves are amazing!

gaunt celebrity women trying to look sexy, and all the lads mags are full of topless gaunt celebrity women trying to look sexy.

"Does my bum look big in this?" Why would you not want a big bum? I want to say 'Big and lovely!'

For the record, there is very little as sexy as a woman with cake and a pint.

you take enough malnourished women and label them as among the 'sexiest' and, I dunno, straight men will believe it?

if enough straight men react negatively to the notion that starved=sexy

gym-starved women is to declaim that you know they're not real, you prefer real women, skinny supermodels aren't sexy, etc. It doesn't matter: the superskinny continue to get more attention

My confusion came about from not buying into the idea that these images are what men are actually attracted to and so couldn't understand the logic behind presenting them as such to an audience who would rather not starve themseves for an audience that would rather they didn't either.

if every guy you know says they think models are too thin, but all the media you see presents them as desirable and those tiny skinny girls get rich and famous

I had one guy tell me that he didn't understand why women insisted on being skinny because men liked women with curves. I met his girlfriend. I have to tell you, if that was his idea of curvy, then something was horribly horribly off.


These are examples of the message that real men, smart men, good men and the kind of guys we'd all want to date, are not attracted to skinny/thin women. The implication (or sometimes outright statement) being that skinniness is a fashion statement but not truly sexually or aesthetically attractive. There is an equation here, usually one that's presented as inherently positive, that curves, shapliness, and the 'right' amount of fat, are the real way to be womanly. And that skinniness sells clothing but is asexual, and in fact sexually repellent in many cases. That being thin and not having boobs, hips, and a big butt make a woman unwomanly or not womanly 'enough'... particularly enough to snag a man.

I rail against the idea that all sizes in stores these days are apparently designed for fetuses

Real-sized women in those fashion spreads???? Oh yes, because I forget everyone is a size 0.

gym-starved women is to declaim that you know they're not real, you prefer real women,

I would assume most of these differences in taste are cultural. Maybe at some point the general dominant media culture will swing back to something more realistic.

The last one being the most mild manifestation... these are examples of the way being not-thin is equated with being "real" or a "real woman." By extension, thin women are not real and perhaps do not exist. Being told that you are not real, unrealistic, or do not exist is not much better than being told that the way you exist is somehow flawed.

presenting them as such to an audience who would rather not starve themseves for an audience that would rather they didn't either.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only young guy trying to forcefeed everybody, needling grandparenty-style. Not that I'm shooting for an obese world, but I hate to see people restrain themselves unnecessarily or out of somehow transfiguring a social-expectation to morality-status. And, in the case of food/weight, 'people' really does mostly mean 'women,' sadly. It's not like wanting pie is being addicted to heroin, but the guilt seen in some faces eyeing a menu?

now that she's allowed herself to just enjoy things, she's - not fat, necessarily, but - sturdier, and happier and calmer

there's no way I'd encourage her to cut back on the porkchops and cheesecake so long as she's not suffering ill-health and she's all smiley and cheerful.

These to me illustrate the way thinness is equated with self-denial and lack of pleasure or happiness. This can also be extrapolated to include the view that thin women do not experience sensual or sexual pleasure, and once again, are asexual and sexually undesirable. It also connotes that thin people again are miserable, starved killjoys.

I see Zippy's point about this kind of discussion triggering defensiveness in people. I am being defensive. Hopefully I am also opening up the discussion and pointing out, in a constructive and useful way, how negative attitudes toward body image (particularly wrt women's bodies) do not come in one flavor only.

I identified with Apt Plutology's remark that I have become aware of a deeply rooted sense of apology for existing in myself. I also felt that Haus and XK were very accurate in pointing to the basic message of media body image issues as being a directive to consume - whether it's food or diet pills or magazines or boob jobs doesn't ultimately matter much. And like others have said, Ex was right on in calling the media message a scatter-gunning effect. I feel that scattergun is much more about consumerism and an all-inclusive misogyny than it is about sizeism of one sort or another.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:22 / 22.07.07
These are examples of the message that real men, smart men, good men and the kind of guys we'd all want to date, are not attracted to skinny/thin women.

I think there's a lot of truth in this - that dissing the "unreal" women in magazines is a useful way to communicate that one is not like the people who are attracted to them - that one is different, special, smarter and more discerning, and so on.

The word "real" is quite interesting here. What is a "real woman"? If one follows one track, the real woman is the woman with cake, pint, with big bum and so on - and, by exclusion, the thin woman is "unreal" - her existence is a phantasm there to torment the "real" woman. Which, for my money, rather misses the point. The woman in the photoshoot is not "unreal" because she is thinner around the waste. The image is unreal, because it has been airbrushed, photoshopped, digitally thinned, stretched and so on. If you want to extend it a bit more, you can look at the base material, and the way that magazines only show a very limited number of body shapes, certainly. You can also look at the expectations that women who have lives which preclude daily gym sessions and facials - those for whom their face is not their fortune, in essence - we have, in fact, touched on these issues in a thread about BMI checking for models. This is very, very different, however.
 
 
This Sunday
20:28 / 22.07.07
Ibis, as far as my quoted remarks go, I will remind, they're from a post where I point out I, myself, am ridiculously thin and do not deny myself greatly on the food front. My concern is with people who want to eat certain things but are afraid too, because of a social stigma, people who deny themselves things in general - not because of actual health issues, or because they don't like them, but - due to social stigmas. I'm just not big on unnecessary denial, and am specifically not trying to fatten everybody up.

I think both ends of the spectrum often are driven to feel some sort of guilt for their physical state, and that a lot of the time it's not something that they are in any way actually at fault for.

One of the biggest guys I know - six nine or so, and quite wide - used to eat approximately the same type and amount of food as me, but while I burnt it off, apparently during the process of eating it, he was consistently overweight. Even after moving to a healthier diet and excercising far more than I do, he remained, consistently overweight. I still ate atrociously - still do, judging by the four corndogs and pot of coffee I had for breakfast - and still no flab.

I do appreciate your displeasure with some of the comments and the general atmosphere around thinness, especially in a dehumanizing light, but I think most people posting in this thread are trying to be clear that it's the unhealthy desperation of trying for an impossible form - impossible for the individual, because they've got another form - and not that any healthy form, or state wherein someone is happy with their body, is wrong or bad. In the great big, really real world, yes, thin women can get some of the worst treatment, especially because the marketing is often geared to make other people think they need to fit the thin mold, so when someone is thin, there's a tendency on some fronts to insult or belittle them.
 
 
crimson
23:22 / 22.07.07
I would hope that people with a naturally low BMI wouldnt feel victimised for being thin. I think there is a world of difference between people who are naturally thin and people who systematically deny themselves the calories they need.

I think most people wouldnt say anything about anything so personal as weight unless they were acting upon something they knew as fact...like the person only ate when they were with people and even then didnt eat a lot or were displaying behaviour which correlated with some kind of eating problem.

I think its distressing when people have eating problems and it can be really tough to turn the situation around. The most mild-mannered person can become enraged and refuse contact, relationships can be SO damaged due to eating disorders and people with eating disorders nurse, nurture and rationalise their disorders like theyre addicted to crack or something.

Im sorry that thin people can feel as though others routinely make assumptions about them sometimes. I guess that its kind of reassuring that everyone tries to distance themself from thinking about their own weight or anyone elses too much. I think that by nurturing a more distanced, healthy attitude noone will really care all that much and, from this thread, I think that we all try and do this which is amazing.

Id also like to add that the picture of the airbrushed vs unairbrushed magazine cover-lady was amazzing and not a little shocking. grr those fluffy magazines..!
 
 
*
01:25 / 23.07.07
Ibis, I really see your posts not as defensive but as a helpful way to remind us to go deeper into this matter than the initial impulse to counterattack society's programming by declaring Big is Beautiful—of course it is, and so is Thin and Medium and Of Color and Trans and Butch and Disabled and Short and Tall and so forth. I think Haus and others have gone on the right track by trying to bring up why certain kinds of beauty are elevated in the media while others are disdained. There are class issues at work in the history, I think. At least since the 18th c., if I recall correctly, people have been swallowing tapeworms to become thin, a look that was I believe valued then because it implied that one was too fragile to do physical labor, and so it heightened the contrast between the wealthy members of society and those who were not wealthy. From those tapeworm pills and arsenic to make the face pale and other such patent remedies, a whole industry has sprung up, one that seeks to perpetuate itself at any cost. If being heavy were more valued, an industry would have sprung up around that instead, to just as detrimental an effect. Setting thin people against heavy people and both ends against the middle can only serve as a distraction from the crucial issue—the industry of glamour will victimize people of every body type in the pursuit of the bottom line.

That's the problem with uncomplicated Big is Beautiful advocacy—it serves a great purpose for now, with so much to struggle against, but if it succeeded entirely we would be left in much the same position, at the mercy of a weight-gaining industry of similar proportions. The advocacy I would rather see is one against all manner of prejudice based on people's bodies. Everyone's body is utterly a marvel, a beauty, a thing of wonder. Let us never forget the distinction between supporting and wishing for good health and shunning those whose conditions remind us that good health is fragile.

What I'd like to learn is how, when societal ideals of beauty are perpetuated by the beauty salesmen for the benefit of the beauty salesmen, we can subvert those ideals to be more liberating for people of every kind of embodiment without playing right into the hands of the profit motive once again. I mean, we can't very well market the idea that everyone is beautiful. There's just no money in it.

Someone help me out with this, huh?
 
 
*
01:28 / 23.07.07
Rereading my post I'm realizing that I deleted an aside about ableism and left this: Let us never forget the distinction between supporting and wishing for good health and shunning those whose conditions remind us that good health is fragile. which sounds poetic but where it is it sounds like I'm saying that being heavy is an unhealthy condition, which isn't always true. Sorry.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
08:38 / 23.07.07
Hmm. While I think that ibis' picking out of trends within this thread making assorted spurious equations with thinness is very valuable, I also feel there is an implication in the most recent few posts to this thread that "people naturally come in all sizes", almost as though there are three states: thin, medium or fat.

This was one assumption which irked me quite a lot about the sub-BMI 18 models thread that Haus touches on above: there were suggestions that the move to ban such models would be victimising some poor people who eat just fine - unusually healthily even - but just remain very thin regardless, such as ibis or, in that thread, Smoothly Weaving. And frankly, this isn't true. The norm for high fashion models and an image also increasingly often presented in the magazines everyone so wants to burn isn't a US size 2, but smaller than a US size 0 (approximately a 6 in the UK, despite the repeated THAT'S A UK SIZE 4 CAN YOU IMAGINE IT??!1 in the media) - and that at a minimum of 5'7", and more often around 5'10". The average fashion model's BMI is below 17, and some of the more popular ones - for example Snejana Onopka, of whom pictures exist that very firmly disprove her claims to eat loads and be naturally her weight - are around BMI 15. BMI 17.5 is a benchmark used in the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa, while BMI 15 is clinical emaciation.

I regularly read an eating disorders message board, and I don't think that I'm off the mark to say that anyone over 5 feet tall and 17 years old isn't going to be much smaller than ibis unless they're significantly and deliberately restricting their intake, purging in some manner, or has rare medical reasons which cause them to lose weight.

Obviously this doesn't mean that these models and some celebrities are "unreal" - it's not like they've been made up out of thin air - but it does mean that an ideal *is* being promoted which very much cannot simply be achieved by eating and exercising healthily.

(Despite this, though, I'm not sure it's necessarily accurate to describe those people in the public eye who are severely underweight as having eating disorders. If restriction of food intake makes the difference between poverty and fame and money - as in the case of many models - or is sufficient to rocket a relative unknown to the front page of every magazine, or if merely being a public figure of Lily Allen's size - unambiguously *thin* - is sufficient to draw criticism from many corners, engaging in typically disordered behaviours may not equate to actually being disordered.)
 
 
Evil Scientist
08:52 / 23.07.07
Reading the thread with interest. I think I've got some stuff to contribute but will need to lay it all out in my head first.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:18 / 23.07.07
So, on this, attitudes, art, beauty, etc.

The first thing that worries me is with what would you fill the gap if you throw away the contemporary, given, ideological idea of beauty? If you say "No, I reject Vogue's idea of beauty", what then do you find beautiful? Do you try and push beauty out of your life full stop, as I've seen some people do to their detriment, or do you go to other places to look for it?

I don't know if this is too much of a tangent, but we've talked about how much of the media is rather dubious in its presentations, tickling people's weaknesses because it's trying to sell something to them and needs them to feel inferior, and so on.

So might that be an argument for moving away from an interest in magazines and taking more interest, in, say, the wide range of "high" sculptures and paintings from different periods, Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance and so on, because they are intended only to speak to or about themselves (i.e. to be an art which is separate from life)?

Or are there problems there as well?

Well, of course there are, I mean nobody looks like David - but then no-one's supposed to, it's supposed to be a beautiful object almost outside of reality. Isn't it true that something like a Goya portrait tries less to exploit your weakness than a Vogue cover?

Or might one be able to discipline one's self into seeing Vogue magazine as a purely cultural product, like grotesque gargoyles and so on, which need not reference one's own body at all - in effect treating them anthropologically?

I find this quite natural, but then I'm not everyone, and despite all those muscley men in films and adverts, I'm much less of a target than I would be if female. Plus I get to use/get used by the Male Gaze, so.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:51 / 23.07.07
So might that be an argument for moving away from an interest in magazines and taking more interest, in, say, the wide range of "high" sculptures and paintings from different periods, Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance and so on, because they are intended only to speak to or about themselves (i.e. to be an art which is separate from life)?

Or are there problems there as well?

Well, I think my major problem would be a degree of incomprehension at the idea that "high" sculpture is in any way separate from life. Essentially, what?

Where it does come in handy is in acknowledging that standards of beauty are to an extent subjective but also highly socialised - there is no defaul standard of BEAUTY IN Western culture, but a different set of signifiers which shift with circumstances. At the moment, it's very easy to put on weight in the insustrialised west and quite hard to lose it - lots of sedentary jobs, lots of high-calorie and heavily processed foods available for very little money. So, a physique that suggests that you have access to considerable spare time, a gym membership, a personal trainer and £200 seaweed wraps every weekend acts as a powerful signifier of success.

Other cultures function differently. Famously, Tom Cruise films, when released in India, have posters in which the Cruiser is fattened up a bit around the chops, because, as I understand it, the taut skin and chiselled jawline that evokes wealth in the US (expensively controlled diet, nutritionists, cosmeticians, skincare, time available for exercise) evokes poverty in India. The same messages are being conveyed, though - (x) means (y), and if you want to communicate (y) you need to look (x).
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:02 / 23.07.07
Well, I think my major problem would be a degree of incomprehension at the idea that "high" sculpture is in any way separate from life. Essentially, what?

I mean, as in Oscar Wilde's preface to Dorian Gray, where he says "art is useless".

The theory of sculpture that classical sculptors used, as I understand it, evolved from statues-as-part-of-ritual and came to stipulate that the statue's job was to be a thing of beauty in itself - not, like Vogue, some form of "beauty" in the service of the desire to sell anything.

And I know we can't possibly beleive that as a natural reality, because we're post-Marx and we know how the economy influences/creates everything and we know, as you said, that "beauty" is just a bunch of signifiers, but can't we also say that of these two things, this sculpture of Cupid and Psyche:



...is much less insidious and manipulative than, well, the image search results for "FHM/Vogue/Cosmopolitan cover", which I won't actually post to this thread?

Or am I wrong?
 
 
Pingle!Pop
10:05 / 23.07.07
(To Regina; going back a little as two posts have appeared in the time taken to write this.)

Well, there's a problem there in that *you*, personally, can say, "No, I reject Vogue's idea of beauty," (though I'd suggest that to have one's aesthetic preferences entirely unaffected by it would be impossible) but that doesn't stop said image being an all-pervasive cultural norm, and doesn't stop you from being judged by those same standards yourself.

As someone said above, it's uncomfortable and doesn't fit nicely with the current "everything is your choice" culture to think that what you find attractive is neither innate nor within your control. However, it's also very clear that what is taken for granted to be attractive by most of a population is very firmly culturally situated; there have been and are societies (though not modern western ones, with the pervasiveness of media common here) where the ideal, as in id's hypothetical above, is to be large. Often things like this have been indicators of wealth - whether being large is considered to mean being rich enough to consume lots, or if it is culturally connected to a diet associated with being poor - as with other to some extent controllable physical attributes, e.g. tanned skin in the UK once meaning someone was out in the sun performing manual labour all day, and now being associated with having the wealth to fly off on sunny holidays.

I'm always quite shocked when I'm reminded that the assumption that thin = good has not always been with us. For example, in Crime and Punishment I think, Dostoeyevsky describes a female character as being very beautiful and very thin, but not equating the two, while in a short story he talks about another character as being very large and very beautiful, and again not equating the two beyond perhaps marking the character's size as an interesting feature.

So, ideally I'd like a cultural acknowledgement of the potential for beauty within all sizes, much as people can be considered beautiful with blonde, black or pink hair, and there is no pressure to declare one better than another. It's not going to happen, of course, but it's an ideal.

(And beyond this, it's obviously extremely problematic that the assumption is that all discourse around this subject must refer to women's beauty. You note that you do not feel the same kind of pressure from the tendency for men in the media to be presented as extremely toned and so forth. However, I feel there is very much an expectation that women should trade on, and be judged on, their looks, in a way that is not generally encouraged to an even vaguely similar extent for men. And this pressure is not solely located in the media; the pressure I feel comes from society in a more general sense; I experience it as taken for granted that I *should* be nurturing my looks and taking care of my shape, and this expectation is occasionally vocalised - recently, "not having to worry about those naughty, naughty fats", and, "ooh, a guilty secret?" No, it's not guilty and it's not a secret, you patronising beasthead, it's a Milky Way wrapper, and there's not a chance you'd have said that to a man.)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:57 / 23.07.07
ideally I'd like a cultural acknowledgement of the potential for beauty within all sizes, much as people can be considered beautiful with blonde, black or pink hair, and there is no pressure to declare one better than another. It's not going to happen, of course, but it's an ideal.

Well that's not true is it. That cultural acknowledgement happens everyday in newspapers, on our television screens, in all forms of media. Aren't we falling into a peculiar trap here, where we acknowledge magazines that comment on size as the primary cultural media?
 
 
Pingle!Pop
11:09 / 23.07.07
Not at all. Of course there are people stating that beautiful is not synonymous with thin in plenty of places, but that's certainly not the dominant impression I receive from any form of media, nor from the assumptions behind what people say. A few people saying something like, "Hey, big can be beautiful!" does not by a long way cancel out the overwhelming message constantly given to the contrary. For example, you mention television; what percentage of people presented as being beautiful on television are anywhere near an average weight?
 
 
Ron Stoppable
11:09 / 23.07.07
Wow, this thread has really ticked over over the weekend.

It's a bit upthread now but apologies to Ibis, Gourami and others for content that might be perceived as anti-skinny: not my intent but perhaps thoughtlessly expressed.
 
 
Quantum
11:55 / 23.07.07
Hopefully I am also opening up the discussion and pointing out, in a constructive and useful way, how negative attitudes toward body image (particularly wrt women's bodies) do not come in one flavor only. Ibis

True, and thank you for that- but I think the fat=bad thing is more commonly encountered than the thin=bad thing. Kids don't get teased in playgrounds for being thin very often, teenagers don't often laugh at each other for being thin, people dont jump to insults based on weight for skinny people in the same way.
Not to say these things don't happen, of course, but in my experience larger people get more grief about their weight. I'm a skinny guy, and if someone saw an empty chocolate wrapper on my desk they probably wouldn't comment.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:30 / 23.07.07
This may seem unhelpful but I really want to know what people are thinking here because I'm reading the thread and what I'm reading is a selection of ideas based on mainstream magazines and the subjects they cover. Specific quotes include:

magazine covers exhort about what celebrity has lost the most weight and how you can too

if every guy you know says they think models are too thin, but all the media you see presents them as desirable and those tiny skinny girls get rich and famous, you're more likely to believe the men you know are a minority

There's a lot of deliberate linking of control and celebrity body shape

Agree with much of the discussion above about paparazzi and media depictions of celebrity women

Those all relate to a specific part of our culture and the idea of beauty, not to all of our media, what I'm reading is that celebrity magazines and Hollywood give us our perception of beauty and that all of the counter-images and articles that are published every day do not respond adequately enough to emphasise the fact that beauty does not work in this kind of context.

A few people saying something like, "Hey, big can be beautiful!" does not by a long way cancel out the overwhelming message constantly given to the contrary. For example, you mention television; what percentage of people presented as being beautiful on television are anywhere near an average weight?

That's not what I'm talking about though, it's as accepted that size 0 is odd and off-putting as it is that it's beautiful, which means that it's not our cultural perception. I'm not talking about people saying big is beautiful, the cultural ideal is far beyond that, more about facial structures than being terribly thin. Who is presenting anyone on television as beautiful? Is it the TV that's doing that or the media that props up the television industry?

I'm questioning the fact that this is a thread about cultural pressure to be thin and when do we start questioning where that notion is actually coming from.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
12:54 / 23.07.07
it's as accepted that size 0 is odd and off-putting as it is that it's beautiful, which means that it's not our cultural perception.

I'm really not sure that this is true, though. There's a tendency to talk about shock-horror-size-zero, but I don't think it's lived out in the way that women are presented within our culture or in the way that people react to women of particular sizes. I mentioned earlier that I regularly read an eating disorders message board. Well, the most common reaction reported there to people losing weight - to emaciation level and often even beyond - is that they receive huge amounts of positive reinforcement. Those who are underweight and report negative reactions to this are generally at least emaciated, and still generally receive more positive comments. Conversely, people "recovering" - gaining to a closer to normal weight - are generally met with silence, or comments so wrongheaded they make me want to bang my head against a wall. (Things like people's mothers saying, "Oh, why did you have to go into hospital and gain weight? You looked so much prettier before!" Argharghargh!)

Really, I read the magazines as being just one small part of an all-encompassing and self-reinforcing set of cultural demands. I consume relatively little media - I don't generally watch TV and I only see the magazines lying around at w*rk and in waiting rooms - but I feel the assumption that being thin is among the best qualities one can have (possibly the best, and certainly the most important in terms of appearance) strongly all around me. If I hear people talking about anything to do with appearance, it's almost guaranteed that this assumption will be in there somewhere, usually explicitly. I don't think that this comes from magazines, or from Hollywood, or from the TV, or from newspapers, or adverts, or anything specifically, but I do think that all these things are both informed by and reinforce this assumption constantly.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:18 / 23.07.07
Hmmm - there's also something about what beauty is _for_, or in what capacity beauty is being used. Your average catwalk model is not beautiful in the way that (for the sake of argument) Drew Barrymore is beautiful - rather, they are very good at wearing clothes and walking, and in doing so making the clothes look good.

Of course, if you feel that you ought both to look like Drew Barrymore and a catwalk model, you're in trouble.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
13:38 / 23.07.07
I find the idea that "that's just how you make clothes look good" a bit of a myth, though: why is being severely underweight a way to make clothes look good? Is it inherent, or is it because you're expecting to see them on very underweight people?

And if it's the former, then why did it take so long for the fashion industry to reach this conclusion, and why is it currently pushing said conclusion further than ever? For illustration, I'm sure I can dig out some old catwalk pictures I recall seeing of Kate Moss - who once caused such horror for being blatantly underweight - looking positively huge by today's fashion standards, if anyone would like to see them.

Similarly, I was somewhat taken aback the other day when the book I'm reading (from 1989) described punks as "not just pretty people making themselves ugly but truly ugly: they were fat, they were anorexic, they had terrible acne" etc. (paraphrased, as it's not to hand). I think it very unlikely that the word "anorexic" could be so completely equated with "ugly" these days without being done so consciously to make a point.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:40 / 23.07.07
Not everyone agrees that Drew Barrymore is beautiful. You and I might think her very easy on the eye, but I've encountered a great deal of comment in the print media and by private individuals to the effect that she's a hiefer. Women of Drew Barrymore's body-type draw a rather alarming amount of criticism, in fact, which is less the case for women with slender body-types (until the media declare their annual round of hypocritical skinny-bashing, of course).
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:51 / 23.07.07
Ibis:

I guess I have to step in and be the annoying "skinny girl" who complains about skinny-bashing.

I read this as stating "I expect to be made unwelcome in this thread because of my bodytype; I am here to take issue with something I feel to be important but am forced to brace myself to deal with your prejudices." This seemed to be borne out by the phrase I am evil and terrible enough to actually be a size 2.

Your second post, clarifying the problematic elements of what others had written, was reasonable and useful, pointing up as it did the dangerous hypocrisy inherent in certain kinds of dialogue around the thin = beautiful convention (the icky "real women" thing). I don't think, though, that anyone in-thread needed to be told that they were labelling size 2 women as "evil and terrible."
 
 
Pingle!Pop
13:54 / 23.07.07
(And that despite the fact that Ms Barrymore's never been as far as I'm aware above average size, and usually has been - like Lily Allen, as I mentioned above - undeniably thin... just not thin enough to prevent her from being larger than the average Hollywood actress.)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:20 / 23.07.07
I find the idea that "that's just how you make clothes look good" a bit of a myth, though: why is being severely underweight a way to make clothes look good? Is it inherent, or is it because you're expecting to see them on very underweight people?

Yes, that's a very good question - I don't know if it's about expectations of who should be wearing the clothes, though, so much as how the clothes are cut. Ultimately, thought, it is a vicious circle: the clothes are cut to look good with a minimum of input from the body of the wearer, so those who want to be wearers have to plane away the potentially distracting features of their bodies. And then, going on from that, the impresson is given that the way to look good in clothes (not just couture) is to try to thin down and down - and the "naturally thin" idea, as you say, is used as a defence to suggest that one can be healthily that thin, which may be true but is certainly not universally true, and one might go further and say is not true even enough to supply the fairly small labour pool of fashion models, since documentary evidence appears to suggest the fairly widespread use of various techniques to give nature a fairly firm nudge.

Oddly, that reminds me of "tendon strength". This was a term that was quite often used in professional wrestling commentaries of wrestlers who for whatever reason did not have the same muscular development and definition as some - the idea being that, despite looking like paunchy men in trunks, they were still strong, but that strength was in their tendons, not their muscles. Looking back, of course, in most cases I imagine that these wrestlers, often older men, were not taking the same dietary supplements that the more cut and ripped competitors were. I don't follow the business these days very much, but "tendon strength" seemed to be on the way out, as body shapes standardised to the bodybuilder look - which I imagine was about the use of dietary supplements (you know, guarana, ginsneg, that sort of thing) being standardised as a thing you had to be prepared to take if you wanted to operate at a decent level in the business.
 
 
Ticker
14:26 / 23.07.07
I also think in a topic like this people need elbow room to vent - out into space - not at other posters. What I mean by this are statements about how the world makes me feel angry, hurt, confused and so on need to be separated from the distinct people we are posting along side of. It is less common for *you* to make me feel that way and I need to be clear about who I am talking about.

we are all experts on our selves sharing our experiences with others that may not have similar ones. while we need to be considerate we also have the right (and I pick this word intentionally) to voice our own experiences. In posting them here we invite response and so reap the benefit of mutual learning.

I have experienced first hand the increased societal privilege of being more mainstream attractive through body shape, dress, and use of make up. I cannot comment on other people's access to this privilege I can only say I have witnessed it and particpated in it. It is incredibly painful for people who are rountinely denied privileges they witness others accessing especially when there's no machine handy to make them 'stars upon thars' compliant. there is insidious self loathing as fallout of this process as we are lead to believe this privilege is accessible to us if only we tried harder. Much like Sneetches we chase through various money consumming processes in pursuit of acceptance, both self and societal, no matter what we look like. Very few people completely escape the profit driven exploitation.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
15:54 / 23.07.07
Haus: but again, that leaves the second part of the equation I gave above. Namely, the "standard" shape for catwalk models was, while still often underweight, much less so than now. To me, this suggests that the claim it's all to do with distracting from the clothes as little as possible is a justification made ex post facto.

On this:

the "naturally thin" idea, as you say, is used as a defence to suggest that one can be healthily that thin, which may be true but is certainly not universally true

I stand by my assertion above that someone ibis' size is the bottom end of what is possible for anyone without signficant restriction*, purging or medical reasons (e.g. thyroid, tapeworms etc.).

It's de rigeur in high fashion to deny unhealthy eating or anything of the sort. Because, basically, if someone admits to eating disordered behaviours, it makes them utterly unemployable. I've never come across any evidence that someone can be "naturally" the size of your average catwalk model, while I've come across plenty to the contrary.

Part of the reason I mentioned Snejana Onopka above is because she's a perfect example of this.

This is Snejana (the first picture showing her body I came across, and not unrepresentative).

This is Snejana answering the inevitable question: "I am not anorexic. I am naturally thin. Maybe it's a problem right now, but I'm just like this. I'm always like this. My bum is like this. I'm healthy. I eat a lot".

And thi - er, I cant link to that, it's pornographic and almost certainly underage. Suffice to say, there are pictures out there of her a few years younger, very clearly natural, and not a bone in sight.

* Significant restriction: significantly below one's individual recommended daily caloric intake. For example, while 1,400 calories - 600 below the average recommended daily intake (although I'd suggest the 2,000 calories estimate for an average woman leading an averagely active life is rather conservative) - may not seem particularly low, it may be worth Googling the Ansel Keys study and seeing the drasticness of the effects a similar caloric deficit over a prolonged period of time had on his subjects.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:06 / 23.07.07
Haus: but again, that leaves the second part of the equation I gave above. Namely, the "standard" shape for catwalk models was, while still often underweight, much less so than now. To me, this suggests that the claim it's all to do with distracting from the clothes as little as possible is a justification made ex post facto.

Indeed. It would probably be best, at this point, for us to go back to my post and look at the question raised of why the clothes are being cut to be worn by progressively thinner models, thus avoiding such an awkward claim, and perhaps look at what is going on in the industry - or indeed, in the technologies of size reduction. Possibly fashion models were shaped differently in the past because the technology to make them yet thinner was not sufficiently advanced - it's quite hard to get people to swallow tapeworms these days, I suspect. Possibly the industry's expectations or practices have changed, in which case it might be worth looking at why, and how it might be undone - legislation being one possible approach to that.
 
  

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