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Body Image |
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A Pep Talk
There has been so much said in recent years about body
image and the media.
About how it makes girls feel to see super slim super models
gracing the pages of every fashion magazine, and how guys feel
when they see the Adonis like physiques of the men on TV and in
print ads. The "expert" opinions have not been good -
the pressure to be perfect is so great that it is destroying the
self esteem of an entire generation! Is this really true? Is an
entire generation being made insecure by the images of the "ideal
body" that plague our TV screens, magazine pages and
billboards?
The "pressure of perfection" on girls has long been
a hot topic of debate in feminist circles. It is a long held
feminist belief that societal images of beauty are destroying the
self esteem of girls before they even reach their teens. Naomi Wolfe's 1992
book "The
Beauty Myth" fronted the feminist "backlash"
revolution that declared standards of beauty to be weapons used
to "keep
women in their place". Her book ruffled a lot of
feathers and put the idea of "beauty as bondage" on the
fast track of social issues. "The
Beauty Myth" made a lot of people stop and
think and many women declared that they would no longer accept
the standards of beauty placed on them by society, not for
themselves or their daughters. But at the end of the day, eating
disorder rates in girls and young women increased as the size
of Miss America's waist line decreased*.
Then there are the boys, so often forgotten in any discussion
of this type. Ironically, at the time "The
Beauty Myth" was written, boys and men
were being introduced to a new concept of the "perfect male
form". For decades men were measured in terms of career
success, power and financial security. The feminist revolution
changed all that. As women started to build killer careers of
their own, males started to feel the pressure to attract women
with "rugged good looks", "buff bods" and
"chiselled features". Today, boys feel the same pressures
to be physically attractive as girls do, even if this
pressure manifests in different forms. The desire to have a great
body so great that many young men are turning to anabolic
steroids and growth hormones in an attempt to build the
"better" body. And guess what - boys
suffer from eating disorders too!
The pressure to be perfect has even made plastic surgery
an issue for teens. In 1999 teen pop star Britney
Spears had to fight off accusations that she had breast
surgery to make her breasts larger. No body even once stopped to
think that, being a teenager at the end of puberty, her breasts
may have blossomed from girlish to womanly all by themselves.
What is even more disturbing is that, real or not, her breasts
opened a dialogue among teenagers that exposed a frightening
truth. The "Great Britney
Boob Debate" revealed that a large
number of teenagers (19%)** would jump at the chance to have
plastic surgery while still teens, and that another 45% would
consider it after they had finished growing. And those jumping on
the surgery band wagon were not all girls. Boys talked of "pec
implants", "nose jobs" and even liposuction (to
get rid of the harmless "baby fat" that so many teens
have and need).
BODY IMAGE & BEAUTY LINKS
* Since 1959 the average weight of Miss America
has decreased by 25 pounds, while the average height has
increased by only 3 inches. 40 years ago the average Miss America
wore a size 10 dress, today the average size is 2. (SOURCE:
MODE Magazine, June 2000)
** SOURCE - Joint poll by Seventeen Magazine and WFTV in Orlando,
Florida. See complete results for more
information.
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