This is the third of a four part series on fashion marketing and ethics. You can read my previous posts here and here.
I’d really like to know who decided to rebrand Extra Gum as a “snack substitute and weight-loss tool.” Or who gave the green light to publish the book authored by Bethenny Frankel (of The Real Housewives of New York fame) entitled Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinny Girl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting that reads as a guide for developing and rationalizing anorexia. Frankel champions numerous eating disordered behaviors; ordering dessert and eating only one spoonful; eating half a bagel, but after removing the bulk of the bread so what remains is essentially the crust. If you follow her recommended “diet,” you’ll end up eating fewer than 1,000 calories a day.
It’s been a long time since the media did much good for women’s body image, but when did they stop merely suggesting that women “slim down” and begin the point-blank recommendation of unhealthy behaviors that beget eating disorders?
The average woman sees 400-600 advertisements a day, and though only 9% contain messages directly pertaining to appearance, 50% of ads targeting women reference physical attractiveness. As I previously pointed out, the average model weighs 23% less than the typical female, yet 69% of women claim that their perception of the ideal body is influenced by images of models. We have been conditioned to idealize a body that is genetically infeasible for the overwhelming majority of us.
After the controversy caused by Ralph Lauren’s disturbing retouching of an already waif-like model, Newsweek created a photo-essay of the “decade’s biggest airbrushing scandals.” It’s interesting to see that the Hollywood beauties held in such high esteem by publications such as W and Vogue fail to meet the definition of beauty required to grace their pages.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that women’s perception of their own body was negatively affected after viewing just 30 minutes of television programming which presented an “idealized” body shape. 68% of women participating in a study at Stanford University reported feeling worse about themselves after looking through women’s magazines. In fact, after looking at magazine ads, 49% of women “were influenced by magazine pictures to want to lose weight, while only 29% were actually overweight.”
90% of women overestimate their body size, and the same percentage report being dissatisfied with their body in some way. How much of that dissatisfaction stems directly from our comparison to the increasingly unrealistic ideals propagated by mainstream media?
As easy as it is to acknowledge that such ideals are unhealthy and detrimental to our psyche, truly believing that statement (and not feeling inadequate while flipping through Elle) is a different animal. When will we step back and say “enough is enough?” Or will we settle for reminding ourselves of the powers of photomanipulation, take such advertising “with a grain of salt,” and passively accept the damaging messages spoon-fed to us?
