Tags: body image, campus life, class stratification, culture arts, Health, media, plastic surgery, social norms, weight, women
Beth Ditto, singer-songwriter and body positivity advocate
One of the blogs I check out most consistently is Sociological Images, a site with a sociological but accessible take on everything from pop culture to high politics. One of its strengths lies in the way it confronts the ways culture imagines and pictures gender and bodies, and last week’s post on women’s body images is no exception.
The post dealt with the ways plastic surgery changes the conversation on women’s bodies and body images (see, too, my colleague Lexie’s recent post on this topic). A frequent complaint about the “Barbie” body image is that it is unrealistic– all women are encouraged (forced, coerced, etc.) to achieve a certain type of body (very thin, tiny waist, curvaceous bust and hips, etc.) but most simply are physically unable to do so. Their bodies don’t look like that, and attempting in vain to force them into those constraints tends to result in constant stress, anxiety and, in the worst cases, eating disorders.
This blog post points out that plastic surgery change the game a bit. To some extent, plastic surgery does allow women to alter their bodies in ways that let them conform more closely to the Barbie stereotype. This partially gets rid of the “unrealistic” critique. With plastic surgery, one might argue, such bodies are within reach. As the writer puts it, “the Barbie physique may be possible if you have enough cash.”
If you have enough cash being the key phrase, of course. Even if plastic surgery could shape our bodies exactly how we want it to (which isn’t the case), only those with the financial means can afford to pull off this transformation. If radical body modification became a privilege of the rich, body image issues would become even more of a class issue than they already are, with the upper classes distinguishing themselves from others through their actual physical bodies. But I also don’t think that the unrealistic nature of the Barbie physique is the only problem with it, or even the main problem. The way that we associate morals and personality traits with different physiques is really dangerous, as the writer notes:
“The important question to ask is why do we do this to our bodies? Increasingly, we have gone from being judged on our ‘good works’ to our ‘good looks.’ We place a high premium on the look and shape of our bodies, as it is the visible sign of our moral status and class position.”
We often assume that fat people are lazy and stupid while the skinny are disciplined and smart. Perhaps the worst aspect of these body image dynamics is the fact that women (and men, though probably to a lesser extent in general) are faced with constant scrutiny and evaluation–by men, by other women, and ultimately, by themselves. This is a huge and totally unfair burden; it’s exhausting, anxiety-provoking, and violent.
What do we do about all this? Lexie’s suggestion that media represent a greater diversity of body types is a great one. Another interesting idea came up in a conversation with my girlfriend, who thought one solution might be to stop talking about women and beauty altogether! That would be next to impossible, of course, at least in the short run, but perhaps the best way to exit the maze of body image anxieties and violence is not to find the “right” way to talk about beauty but to remove it from some of our conversations altogether.
By: Aaron Bekemeyer
(Photo by Sydigill under a Creative Commons license)
| Share This: | Tweet |
You must be logged in to leave a comment.
3 Comments
How come Consider does so many female oriented issues? What about men? What about male body issues? It’s a real issue and this publication ignores them. Every female driven piece Consider has done has also placed some blame on the male perception without any acknolegment that men have issues too. Stop giving the wheel greese every time it squeeks.
I definitely agree with you that there are male body image issues, and while my post mostly deals with female body image issues, I do try to gesture to the male side of things in my second-to-last paragraph. You can also find some treatment of male body image in comments for the post of Lexie’s that I mentioned (http://consideronline.org/2011/11/18/warning-dangerous-body-image-ideals/).
It’s certainly not my (or anyone on staff’s) intention to minimize male body image issues. But the details of body image issues do differ by sex and gender, of course, and there are ways in which women’s bodies are subject to the “male gaze.” So I think it’s possible to “place the blame” on men (or, rather, on gender dynamics that privilege men) while at the same time acknowledging that men have body image issues, too.