Layla's Dark and Foreboding Weblog

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The Image of Women in the Mainstream Media
by Layla McCabe

Selling products through the use of the female form is nothing new in American culture. Curves, breasts and thighs have been selling everything from cars to beer to guns and ammo for years. But what is the feminine image portrayed in the media doing to women throughout the country? How has it affected teenagers, and what is now known as the “tweens”, those between the ages of 8 and 12?

The Beauty Culture
Robin Gerber, noted author, historian, professor and women’s rights advocate said in a 2001 USA Today article, "We don’t need Afghan-style burqas to disappear as women. We disappear in reverse—by revamping and revealing our bodies to meet externally imposed visions of female beauty" (Gerber, USA Today).

In the 1990’s, America became obsessed with the “Supermodel”. Women like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Elle MacPherson (all of whom, along with Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts, meet the Body Mass Index criteria for anorexia (Rader)) became household names, celebrities merely because they were thin and beautiful. A study done in the mid-1990’s showed that fashion models were, on average, 98% thinner than American women as a whole (Smolak, 1996). By the late 1990’s, MTV and their ilk were seeing a boom in the pre-packaged pop star, with a ready-made image to be easily bought at your local shopping mall. The one catch: you needed to have the body to fit into the clothes.

An article by Kimberly Phillips of the media watchdog group FAIR pointed out that magazines aimed at young girls, such as Seventeen, warps and distorts even the simplest things in a young girls life. “By assuming that skincare is the first thing on their minds, magazines like Seventeen are telling young women that their minds are unimportant. By teaching young women that the most important things in a woman's life should be her looks and her relationships to men, they only serve to reinforce the drop in self-esteem reported in Gilligan's study.” (Phillips, 1993) Phillips is referring to a 1988 study by Harvard Professor Carol Gilligan on the psychological development of teenaged girls. Only 29% of those involved in Gilligan's study said they were “happy” with who they were, as opposed to 60% of nine-year-old girls who were asked the same question.

Dying to be Thin

Glamour Magazine, who says it promotes “Fashion, Beauty, Romance & Health”, surveyed its readers asking what parts of their bodies they were ashamed of. 61% of respondents said they were ashamed of their hips, 64% were ashamed of their stomachs and 72% were ashamed of their thighs.

Rader Programs, specialists in the treatment of eating disorders, say that “79% of teenage girls who vomit and 73% of teenage girls who use diet pills are frequent readers of women’s health and fitness magazines. This is in contrast to less than 43% of teenage girls who do not participate in these purging methods.”(Rader, 2004)

While the entertainment industry is likely the most influential force in a young girls world, athletics would be a close runner up. U.S. Olympic gymnast hopeful Christy Henrich was told by a U.S. Judge at a meet in Budapest that she was too fat, and would need to lose weight if she wanted to compete in the 1988 Olympics. At one point in her battle with anorexia and bulimia, she plummeted to a shocking 47 lbs. By age 22, Henrich was overcome by organ failure and died as a result of complications due to eating disorders.

Rader estimates that as many as 62% of females who participate in “appearance sports”, such as gymnastics, ballet or figure skating, have active eating disorders, and the numbers are almost as staggering for sports like running and cycling.

The Tween Generation

Marketers have several different advertising variations. Toy manufacturers, for example, have historically marketed toys to children from birth until about 14 years old. They have recently dropped that age to 10 years old, realizing that kids have stopped being “kids” earlier than they did even ten years ago (“Media Awareness”, 2004). After school, most kids aged 10 and older watch MTV, rather than cartoons, as they would have before the days of cable-in-every-home. Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch are prime examples of “after school hours” advertisers aimed at capturing the youth generation – selling sexuality and unreal body image along with fashion.

Big Business in Beauty

In 1979, Dr. Jean Kilbourne, an educator known for her work on alcohol and tobacco advertising related to women and body image, produced a film titled “Killing Us Softly”, and followed up with two more volumes, “Still Killing Us Softly” (1987) and “Killing Us Softly III” (2000). When her first film was released, advertising budgets topped out at a $20 billion business while her last release twenty-one years later, budgets hit a staggering $180 billion.

Television in the recent past has unrelentingly clamped on to “reality television”. “Extreme Makeover”, a top-rated show on ABC takes a person who is seen by most as physically repulsive, many with little more than acne, a bump in their nose or dental issues, and surgically turns them into a “beauty”. With billions of dollars in revenue generated by this type of programming, advertisers are becoming even wiser to the fact that 78% of seventeen-year-old girls are unhappy with their body (Brumberg, 1997). Plastic surgeons from Miami to Seattle are seeing a boom in patients coming to them with “extreme” requests: breast augmentation, liposuction, nose jobs, brow lifts, eye surgery, chin augmentation, teeth whitening and straightening, lip enhancement with collagen injections, tummy tucks, upper and lower eye lifts, porcelain veneers, and neck lifts.

As of last year, the rate of breast augmentation has increased 657% from 1992, and the “buttock lift” has gone up 526%. The “upper arm lift” has increased 1332% (American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2003).

Where do we go from here?

There is nothing wrong with beauty, or the desire to seem attractive to others. However, the mainstream media and entertainment industry has turned their perception of perfection into a dangerous and losing game for millions of women and girls.

In this country, it has been made abundantly clear that we are to provide an abstinence-only environment for our youngsters. Why then, do we allow our children to be a part of the systematic dismantling of their self-esteem and intelligence, the number one combatant of teen pregnancy and drug use? It’s time to give our children back their childhood, and start becoming role models ourselves. If all they are seeing is adults with poor self-image, then that is all they’ll have to look forward to.

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Works Cited

·“Why turn a brilliant lawyer into Barbie with Brains”, USA Today, February 11, 2002.
·Smolak, L. (1996). National Eating Disorders Association/Next Door Neighbors puppet guidebook
·http://www.media-awareness.ca/ (12/02/04)
·http://www.raderprograms.com/media.htm (12/02/04)
·The Media Awareness Network, Marketing and Consumerism - Special Issues for Tweens and Teens (12/02/04) (www.media-awareness.ca/english/ parents/marketing/issues_teens_marketing.cfm)
·Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The Body project: An intimate history of American girls. NY: Random House
·The American Society of Plastic Surgeons 2003 Report on Cosmetic Surgery Trends. (http://www.plasticsurgery.org/public_education/2003statistics.cfm) (12/02/04)
·Phillips, Kimberly (1993) http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/seventeen.html