5/16/2023 0 Comments Slender womenThe widespread fear of women's fat, she argues, is a symptom of the fear of women's power. Susan Bordo's excellent study "Unbearable Weight" shows how women are besieged by images of bulgeless, flabless, ageless, muscular bodies, achievable only through great sacrifice. ![]() ![]() The obsession with the body beautiful has reduced all values, aspirations and ideals to the implacable pursuit of slenderness. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." It is chilling that these words, from "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," still ring so true today, not only for the genteel but for our whole society. IN 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft declared: "Genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sep.UNBEARABLE WEIGHT Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.By Susan Bordo.Illustrated. “We need to take the time to help youth be really smart consumers of media and give them some of the skills to have a critical eye,” she says. Heinberg also points to public health-focused interventions, like France banning the use of models under a certain age or below a certain BMI, and requiring commercial photos that have been retouched to be labeled. These findings support the use of interventions specifically addressing thin-ideal internalization and media pressures, the authors write.Įxamples of these interventions include media literacy programs that teach girls in their teenage or pre-teen years how to use critical thinking skills when they interpret messages from the media. The emergence of Instagram, Snapchat and other social channels provide more opportunities for social comparison, Dr. “There also might be something about our culture that just puts more of an emphasis on appearance and thinness.”Īcross all four countries, participants indicated that the media are the top source of body image pressure for women, which the authors say demonstrates the ubiquity and power of media messages that promote the thin ideal. “In European countries, they might go to their local college and live at home, whereas in the U.S., college students live in dorms and sororities, so peer influences are greater,” Dr. Higher levels of internalization and risk factors might be in part due to differences in the lifestyles of these women in different countries, the authors suggest. Peer pressure for thinness was highest among participants in the U.S. ![]() also generally reported the highest levels of the examined influencers (media, family and peers), while women from Italy generally reported lower levels. and Australia, and lowest among those living in Italy. In the study, internalization scores were highest among women from the U.S. “And women from Western cultures have more of this internalization as well.” Cross-cultural differences “One of the things that studies have demonstrated over the years is that women tend to have more internalization of these pressures than men,” Dr. Their study was meant to build on existing knowledge about internalization of body-related messages. The results were published in the journal Eating and Weight Disorders. The questionnaire assessed these women’s self-reported thin-ideal internalization and muscular-ideal internalization, as well as perceived appearance pressures from family, peers and media using a five-point Likert-type scale. Heinberg and a team of collaborators in four countries administered a 22-question Sociocultural Attitudes Toward Appearance Questionnaire to 2,275 university-aged women (mean age 20.08 years) in the United States (n=1,913), Italy (n=159), England (n=110) and Australia (n=93). Internalization of these pressures is a risk factor for body image dissatisfaction, eating disorders, depression and anxiety, she says. ![]() But it seems to be worse for women in the U.S. Heinberg, PhD, Vice Chair for Psychology in Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Psychiatry and Psychology. “The bad news is that, across all of these cultures, the women reported high levels of internalizing the thin ideal,” says Leslie J. We do not endorse non-Cleveland Clinic products or services Policy Advertising on our site helps support our mission. Cleveland Clinic is a non-profit academic medical center.
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