Striving|Starving|Perfection?

It’s everywhere, yet we turn a blind eye…

She’s watching tv, holding the only roll of skin on her tummy, seeing imperfection and rejection.

STARVING HURTS

She’s shopping, but the triple 0 pants won’t pull over her already sharpening hips. She won’t eat for two days as punishment.

STARVING REALLY HURTS

She’s weighing herself at eight years old, crying. She’ll starve herself into her teens and potentially into her grave, fighting for impossible perfection.

STARVING REALLY FUCKING HURTS

So why don’t we care?

Media pushes perfection to an unobtainable degree, and women bear the brunt of it. Unrealistic depictions of what society has deemed as beautiful are splashed throughout magazines, over billboards and all over social media and television. Photoshop has become the ultimate enemy, creating impossible bodies with the stroke of a brush and click of a key, while natural “imperfections” are wiped out of existence and our little girls bear witness.

The effects of the media portraying thin bodies of varying degrees is not only incredibly dangerous and harmful for the models themselves, but even more so for the girls and women the media targets. The impact of these representations can be fatal.

Eating disorders are complex, and while being thin is not often the goal or the motivation, it is often how they develop. 22.8 million Americans will suffer from an eating disorder in their lifetime, and approximately 10,200 deaths per year are a direct result of such (ANAD). Is seeing your favorite sweater draped over desirably skinny thighs worth a death every 52 seconds?

Chances are, the answer is no. Yet google “model skinny” and millions of images of what women are told is the desired body is at your impossibly convenient disposal. This overwhelming show of “beauty” is the daily fight most women face.

When images appear on TV for example, an effect known as social comparison can occur. Most girls and women will compare themselves to the model/actor/individual in the media, particularly their body. These idealized bodies are often what the media chooses to consistently display, and therefore become the desired “look” and possess the power to lead young girls and women to disordered thinking, calorie counting, restricting, binging, vomiting and complete starvation.

A study conducted by Eric Stice and Heather Shaw examined the response of randomly assigned female college students viewing pictures in magazines featuring thin models, average models and no models. Students that had viewed the thin models were more likely to report that they suffered from a variety of negative emotions such as depression, guilt, insecurity, shame and stress. They also indicated a higher level of body dissatisfaction and overall, regardless of the models they viewed, reported they had suffered from Bulimia symptoms (Sparks, 2014).

Similar studies have also shown that for female students, “higher media consumption was related to higher body dissatisfaction, a drive for thinness and reports of symptoms that suggest eating disorders” (Sparks, 2014).

Many countries like France, Italy and Spain have started taking steps towards addressing this issue by banning anorexic models and those that appear too thin in general, often requiring them to prove their BMI is within the healthy range for their body type. However, this war being waged on the media’s portrayal of beauty is far from over.

Exposure to these ultra-thin models has become chronically unavoidable with the ever-growing reach of the media, and it’s affecting children younger and younger. The question is, where will it stop? Will it ever stop?

Why is this our children’s current legacy of beautiful?