Category Archives: body image
Beauty and Self-Esteem
For women, beauty and self-worth can seem like the same thing. So do women at the top of the hierarchy have the highest self-esteem in the world? That’s one question that “About Face” explored in an HBO documentary on supermodels that aired over the summer.
Some supermodels did think their beauty made them better than others. Kim Alexis admitted she felt that way for while – but got over it. And Beverly Johnson explained:
You do live in a bubble where everyone is telling you you’re beautiful all the time, and get you coffee or whatever you want.
But I was also struck by how many of the world’s most beautiful women had thought they were unattractive in some way or at some point in their lives. Usually because someone had told them so.
While looking at a lovely shot of Carmen Dell’Orefice skipping in the street I was surprised that she didn’t like the photo because of her feet.
I don’t like my feet. I don’t have sexy feet. My mom used to tell me I had feet like coffins and ears like sedan doors. Then I internalized that.
First of all, her feet are perfectly fine. But you have to wonder about the self-criticism that fills women’s heads to make them find phantom flaws were they don’t exist.
Marisa Berenson had not thought she was beautiful, either:
People called me Olive Oil because I was long and lanky. I used to cut out pictures of actresses of the time, Audrey Hepburn and Rita Hayworth, and wish I looked like that.
Jerry Hall – Mick Jagger’s ex — felt she was unattractive, too, because society said so:
I used to be really upset about not having a boyfriend. I’d say, “I feel like a failure. What am I going to do?” And my mom would say, “Well, look at Twiggy. She’s a model and she is even skinnier and flatter than you.”
She got over it and went to St. Tropez to be discovered. A story in itself:
I wore a crocheted metallic bikini and platform shoes that made me 6’4. And I was expecting to be discovered. And I was, within about an hour this guy came up to me and asked if I’d like to be a model.
Most people see themselves through a positive bias according to psychological research. I assume that includes our assessment of our looks. If so, it seems strange that models so often go the opposite way. Maybe it’s a matter of age, going through the self-doubt of adolescence. Maybe it’s feeling unworthy of being at “the top.” Lisa Taylor got into cocaine because:
I was so insecure that I needed to do it. It made me feel like I had something to say, that I was worthy of being photographed, that I was somebody.
But the modeling industry, with its exacting standards — and lack of Photoshop in the early days — could be hard on self-esteem, too.
Paulina Porizkova got the double-whammy. As an immigrant child she was relentlessly teased, only to land as a supermodel and be torn apart once more:
My parents escaped to Sweden from the Czech Republic, and I was called a dirty communist bastard for years. And so when I had the chance to escape and be called beautiful – I don’t think there is any 15-year-old girl who would give up the chance to be called beautiful.
You don’t realize at that point that you will also be called ugly.
They would open my portfolio and start discussing me, start cutting me apart. “Good mouth, but what are we going to do about those teeth? Don’t let her open her mouth. And I don’t like the color of her hair. That can be fixed, but what about those thighs!”
Paulina goes on to explain that looks are not a very good platform on which to base self-esteem:
Beauty is about being self-confident and modeling has nothing to do with self-confidence. Working off your looks makes you the opposite of self-confident. So maybe I became beautiful once I stopped modeling.
Advice we should all heed.
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Spoon-Fed Barbie
Spoon Fed Barbie
Surface appearances can be deceiving, says artist, Yvonne Escalante.
“From the day we are born, our behavior and tastes are controlled by the social status quo. Little girls are fed an idealized image. Barbie has been deconstructed and reassembled for even easier consumption.”
As a first generation American, Escalante’s father had stressed American identity over cultural ties. Today, her work explores the conflict she feels, caught in the kaleidoscope of identity, gender roles, and societal norms.
Here’s what her art says to me.
Like most little girls, I grew up spoon-fed on Barbie. But not just Barbie. She was an emblem of all that mass media, friends and schoolmates, told me to be. A good shopper. Paired with Ken. Skinny and curvy all at once. The emblem of perfect womanhood, where body defines us.
Oddly, all this spoon feeding can lead to a dearth of feeding of any sort. I’ve gone through phases of not eating like I should, hoping to look like what turn out to be phony photoshopped images that don’t even resemble the starving models who posed for the pics.
What did I know?
Of course, skinny isn’t enough. We must be buxom, too. Which leads to unnecessary, and sometimes life-threatening, surgeries in pursuit of Barbie breasts. At least that’s what happens when boobs define us, creating our worth. For too many women and men, surface is all.
When women are told they must acquire surreal measurements, and when obtaining them is the source of self-worth, the pursuit takes unending time and energy.
Obsessed with diet and exercise, women can become distracted from the rest of life; so much so that (as Naomi Wolf can tell you) advances of the women’s movement wane. Frantic pursuit of the perfect body removes agitation for power of greater substance.
Hence, the pacifier. Here, called “Sucker.”
For more on Yvonne Escalante’s work go to ARTslant.
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Tangled Up in Femininity
If femininity came naturally, women wouldn’t need to tie themselves up in knots.
Some can barely walk in spiked heels that hurt. Some relentlessly guard against short skirts offering a quick flash. Some shift their weight around in corset-like contraptions. Others rearrange their faces, breasts and thighs under the knife.
Many squirm into a one-size-fits-all prescription that a husband and children will be 100% fulfilling.
Or, how about twisting yourself into Howcast’s rules for free drinks at a bar?
- Dress sexy, but not slutty, or you’re asking for it. How do you know if you’ve crossed the line? Well, if any men act inappropriately toward you, you must have shown too much boob. Better luck next time!
- Buy yourself one drink right off the bat, so it looks like you’re an independent-minded woman who isn’t trying to get free shit in return for being pretty. I mean, you are doing that, but you don’t want to make it obvious. Men might be turned off if the gendered exchange were made explicit.
In other words, don’t be who you are, be as you are expected, and walk a fine line on top of egg shells.
It all reminds me of a scene from “Brave,” as Natalie Wilson over at Ms. describes it:
Brave also offers a funny take on gender as performance when the very prim and proper Elinor is transformed into a hulking bear with a decidedly non-feminine body. Despite her new furry form, Elinor still “performs” femininity, prancing and posing and doing her best to have “good manners” with her unwieldy claws as she eats berries and fish.
So many of us jam ourselves into straightjackets. But why?
This is the “patriarchal bargain” that Lisa Wade, over at Sociological Images, calls a choice to accept roles that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power they can wrest from the system. They gain advantages but leave the system intact.
And in fact, Howcast (mockingly?) instructs women to do just that:
Don’t ever stop to question a system that tells women that trading on our appearance, faking interest in people, excluding friends from social outings because they might be annoying to random men you’ve never met, and being manipulative are all totally empowering and socially-acceptable ways to behave as long as ladies get a fairly low-cost item for free in return for our efforts.
Yes. Never question the system.
Because the free drinks are so worth it.
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Is Beauty A Worthy Goal?
Last week I wrote about 14-year-old Nadia Ilse, who had gotten plastic surgery to stop kids from bullying her. Her ears were pinned back and her nose and chin shortened.
Over at The Nation Jessica Valenti wondered whether beauty is a worthy goal in the first place. At best, beauty is a short-term solution. And not much of a solution at that, if the sole focus is a one-dimensionality that keeps us shallow.
Plus, Valenti says,
We create a trap where anything that makes a girl feel better about her appearance, no matter how harmful, is a reasonable solution. (How many times has plastic surgery been preceded by an “I’m doing it for me!” explanation?)
Throughout history women have been convinced they must have various physical characteristics or accessories that harm their health: tiny waists, small feet, high heels, girdles, corsets, boob jobs…
All at the expense of extreme discomfort, scrunched vital organs, pulmonary disease, varicose veins, a lack of vital nutrients, crippled feet and knees, deadened erotic sensation, a block to cancer detection, death…
It’s all made worse by calling variation from beauty norms a “deformity” – just to make a buck. Doctors have told some of my students that they needed corrective surgery for their breasts. And that’s how Nadia’s doctor described her “need” for an operation:
She wasn’t picked to have her surgery because she was bullied. She was picked because of her deformities.
No wonder Valenti groaned,
This is our culture now: teen girls thinking that the slightest perceived imperfection—any deviation from what they see in magazines—is tantamount to deformity and in need of surgical correction.
… We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens.
And in fact, being called ugly can be useful. Jessica was teased before she grew into her face, as she put it. But,
In a lot of ways I’m glad I was considered unattractive as a kid—there is an upside to ugly. I developed a sharp sense of humor, a defense against the taunts. I thought more deeply about how good and bad people can be. I started writing. I found feminism.
Some who commented on my first Nadia post had similar experiences:
I was teased relentlessly when I was her age for my big ears, flat chest, and the amount of body hair that I had. Today I am grateful for a mother who didn’t care that I was being bullied for such superficial things and did not allow me to make permanent changes to my body to escape bullying. Eventually I grew into my body and in the meantime, while it was painful, I found people who didn’t give a shit about those things, and now most days I feel completely comfortable in my body and my own unique beauty.
Some come to understand that the tauting isn’t about them but about the taunter.
I suffered bullying when I was a kid, and I discovered that people who do this kind of thing usually are trying to move attention from them; they usually have self-esteem problems.
Instead of agreeing that beauty is worth having, Valenti suggests we should be warning that a culture that demands as much is toxic.
Or, as another commenter suggested, maybe we can expand our notions:
I used to have a pretty narrow definition of beauty until at age 15 I started drawing the faces of the people I saw around me, often on the city bus on the way home from school. That is when I began to see a new world of beauty everywhere I looked.
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Getting Plastic Surgery to Stop Bullying
Fourteen-year-old Nadia Ilse got plastic surgery on her ears, nose and chin so kids would stop bullying her. She told Good Morning America:
I felt horrible. I felt like I was like dirt. They said that I have the biggest ears that they’ve ever seen. They called me ‘Dumbo,’ ‘elephant ears.’
Over time the bullying escalated. School became a nightmare, and she got so she couldn’t bear to look at herself in a mirror as she began to believe the slurs.
All this raises questions.
Like how the world seems to think that beauty – a plastic, superficial part of us — means something real. Like how moving a few millimeters of skin, bone and cartilage here and there makes all the difference. A few tweaks and kids go from bullying to accepting. And Nadia goes from crying herself to sleep and having suicidal thoughts to just going about her day.
Why do so many of us see the world in such superficialities?
I would like to ask the bullies if they would judge a person unworthy on such flimsy grounds if they were the ones whose ears were a bit large.
What if there is a God who purposefully creates people who go against beauty norms? What are we supposed to get out of that? Are we to develop empathy and compassion? Are we supposed to move away from the surface and superficial to see what really matters? Should we learn about what is real and what is ridiculous?
And should we really care what ridiculous people think?
Gore Vidal once said:
Don’t care about what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them.
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Give Those Girls A Donut…Please!
Taken alone, the VS models seem almost normal.
In comparison, like scarecrows.Oddly, they look like two different species, almost :}
Those are my friends’ verdicts on the “Victoria’s Secret: Love My Body” campaign as it faced off against its nemesis, “Dove: Real Beauty.”
Real beauty wins in my book.
In fact, I’ve long thought that VS models look a bit like aliens. The ones from “Close Encounters,” as the beings first come into skinny focus. (Hmm, close encounters — almost like a Freudian slip with the demand: look like this and have a close encounter!)
But skeletal is an acquired taste. If acquired at all. Unfortunately many do, complete with the glamorized “anorexic chic” look. Some girls do all they can to avoid eating in hopes of becoming “beautiful.”
Scary, when nourishment becomes the enemy.
Shows how far we can stray from evolutionary psych notions that we are attracted to healthy people.
Some choose not to promote the problem. Kylie Bisutti had beaten out 10,000 hopefuls in a Victoria’s Secret Model Search, and then quit. In part out of her Christian beliefs and in part because of a conversation she had with her 8-year-old cousin.
I was doing my makeup in the mirror one day and she was watching me. She looked at me and was like, ‘You know, I think I want to stop eating so I can look like you.’
It just broke my heart because she looks up to me and I didn’t want to be that type of person that she thought she had to be to be beautiful. Thousands of girls think that being beautiful is an outer issue and really it’s a heart issue.
Luckily, many men actually prefer women who are well-nourished. One man commented on the VS/Dove face-off, saying:
The women below look much prettier. I am skeptical as to whether the women in the first picture actually love their bodies, or themselves.
And I have to agree with another friend who said, “Give those girls a donut…please!”
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Men Find Fewer Women “Porn-Worthy”
Feminist, Andrea Dworkin, had feared that easy access to internet porn would turbocharge women’s objectification and turn men into wild, raping beasts. But it looks like internet porn too often has the opposite effect, deadening male libido in relation to real women, with men who over-consume finding fewer women “porn-worthy.”
This is what author, Naomi Wolf, noticed when students talked about their sex lives during her speaking tours of college campuses.
Others have made similar findings.
Pamela Paul interviewed over one hundred people, mostly men, in her research for Pornified, and found that porn-worthiness was a common concern among those who over-indulged.
One young man talked of his change in perspective.
My standards changed. Women who are otherwise good looking but aren’t as overtly sexy as the women in porn don’t appeal to me as much anymore. I find that I look more for women who have the attributes I see in porn. I want bigger breasts, longer hair, curvier bodies in general.
I find that when I’m out at a party or bar I catch myself sizing up women. I would say to myself, wait a second. This isn’t a supermarket. You shouldn’t treat her like she’s some piece of meat. Don’t pass her up just because her boobs aren’t that big.
Paul went on to cite a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll which found that one in 10 men admitted he had become more critical of his partner’s body with exposure to porn.
Meanwhile, 51% of Americans believe that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look.
Many of the college women Wolf spoke to complained that they couldn’t compete, and they knew it.
Men, she said, learn about sex from porn but find that it is not helpful in teaching them how to relate to real women. She ended with this observation:
Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.
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What If Women Went Topless?
Unprecedented East Coast heat has prompted Moira Johnston to go topless in New York. Why drown in a hot, puddley bra when you can rip off your top, as so many men do when temperatures rise?
Moira also wants to raise awareness that, “It’s legal for woman to be topless anywhere a guy can be without a shirt since 1992 here in New York State.”
Jamie Peck gave it a try and found the only objectors were those worried about children, which she ponders:
Personally, I think that viewing a bare breast as inherently sexual and hence corrupting of innocence is silly; I’d much rather my hypothetical kid see women of all shapes enjoying the outdoors and being comfortable with their bodies than, say, two fully clothed people dry humping on a bench.
Plenty of men would love this, and judging from the crowd Moira attracts, many do.
But what would happen if women did go topless? All of them, in mass, for a long time?
Men would probably be disappointed as the breast fetish faded away. After all, it doesn’t exist in places where women walk around topless all the time, like tribal societies. And it withered in Europe and Australia in the 80s when breasts were bared in magazine and TV ads, and on billboards, and where women went topless on the beach.
The woman who reported this piece for Stuff appears to be Australian, and she can relate:
Why do we still treat bare breasts as such objects of scandal?
I must admit it’s always puzzled me. Growing up, as I did, in the ’80s, my template for adult womanhood was that it was perfectly natural – nay, expected – to whip ’em out in summer.
We’d turn up to the beach, three or four families or so, stake out a spot, and then the mums and aunts and friends would roll their one-pieces down and pour on the Reef. Consequently my approach to beachgoing is similarly au naturel.
So freeing. And some feminists recommend this breast baring to de-objectify them.
On the downside, women would probably still be judged, and some might feel pressured to uncover when they’d rather not — the inverse of some Arab women who feel pressured to cover when they’d rather not.
Still, women from once-topless societies aren’t expected to have such huge breasts today, saving money and potentially dangerous, unnecessary surgeries. As an ex-pat now living Portugal reveals:
My wife, who teaches at a local university, had an interesting conversation with one of her students. He’s a cosmetic surgeon, one of the very few in southern Portugal who does breast augmentations.
“I’m curious,” said my wife. “What size do most women ask for when they have an augmentation?”
“In Portugal? A B-cup,” he replied.
“A B-cup? That’s all? I’d have thought women who were paying for larger breasts would want something a little more…sizeable.”
“No, a B-cup is the average here, and in Europe. But if you go to the United States, it’s a different story.”
“What do American women ask for?”
“A D-cup,” he said. “The difference between Europe and the US is two cup sizes.”
Interesting to see the law of unintended (or intended) consequences in action.
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Women Gazing At Men
Lately I’ve been asking why women don’t get so excited by naked men, why women are often uncomfortable with male nudity on stage and screen or in print, and why these nude men can seem “gay” to the women who gaze at them.
Elizabeth Hall Magill has been asking the same questions over at Yo Mama. And she’s wondering how women can better appreciate the male form, without objectifying them. Here’s an excerpt from one of her posts.
So—where does that leave a woman’s gaze?
Neither here nor there.
And yet, we have eyes. We gaze. And we like what we see.
As I pondered this issue, I realized something: perhaps men posing sexually seem homosexual not only because we are used to the male gaze. Perhaps it is also because we are used to the female pose. And here we encounter a difference between media (artful or otherwise) and life: real sexiness is rarely posed. It just happens. But in “sexy” pictures of women, the women are aware of the gaze and arranging themselves for it. So, when a man does the same thing, we read him as feminized. And when a man strips for a woman, he can be seen as “performing” something generally feminine, and therefore we define it as insincere, the object of a joke. Not true eroticism.
In one of my favorite essays of all time, Looking at Women, Scott Russell Sanders says:
When I return to the street with the ancient legacy of longing coiled in my DNA, and the residues from a thousand generations of patriarchs silting my brain, I encounter women whose presence strikes me like a slap of wind in the face. I must prepare a gaze that is worthy of their splendor.
This is how I feel about men. And I bet I’m not the only one.
We’re all conditioned to ignore the fact that women feel this way about men. How many times a week do you think a man checks out his wife as she reaches into the refrigerator to get something from that bottom drawer, or reaches high above her head for a rarely-used dish? How many times a week does he check out the women walking by him on the sidewalk, riding a bike in the gym, or sitting in the next office? Magazines love to make little pie charts telling us about how often the male brain does these things. I’ve never seen a pie chart telling me how often the female brain does similar things.
And yet.
Men get things from the refrigerator or the top shelf, and often look damn good doing it. They walk on the sidewalk, ride bikes, and work right next to us, looking good all the while. And women notice.
What we need is more women noticing themselves as they notice men. Thinking about how they feel when the tide of desire leaves and returns, leaves and returns. And owning that tide.
And then we need women talking about it—not giggling, not blushing, not encouraging men to mock the idea of their own desirability. Somebody ought to talk about it so often and so loudly that a pie chart becomes inevitable, cause we just know women are thinking about sex so dang much that we better measure it.
After that, we need female photographers and directors, tons of them, taking pictures of and telling stories about men being men. Holding babies in the middle of the night, shirtless and vulnerable and full of fatherly love and strength. Squatting in the middle of a road, looking at a rock (clothed, as squatting naked in the middle of the road is unnatural and possibly unsafe). Running on treadmills, making copies in the office while wearing snazzy ties, washing the dirt off their hands after a day working outside, laughing with their friends, kicking a tire and making dinner and coming home at the end of a long day. We need to see men being men through the eyes of women, not men posing as the objects of female desire. And we should see them in all their shapes and colors—in all their splendor.
You know what I think?
I think men would totally get being sexy in this way, and I think they would love it. They wouldn’t feel like objects, they wouldn’t feel feminized, they wouldn’t pose or feel goofy. They’d be themselves, and they’d be damn glad that the women they’ve been checking out all this time are checking them right back.
Which means the female gaze would no longer be marginalized, masculinized, or mocked. It would be honest, and it would be powerful—as powerful as desire itself.
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Real Photos for Real Girls in Seventeen Magazine
17 magazine real girl cover girl
Few young women have good body image. The trouble starts early, thanks to Photoshopped pics in magazines like Seventeen — or even grown-up fare like Cosmo, or your typical billboard — all creating impossible standards that even models cannot achieve.
This is especially a problem for young women who are just beginning to develop a sense of themselves, and whose self-esteem is too often based on their looks.
Even Penelope Cruz knows the agony, having felt insecure as a young woman. Angry now, she says:
I would close down all those teenage magazines that encourage young girls to diet. Who says that to be pretty you have to be thin? Some people look better thin and some don’t. There is almost a standard being created where only thin is acceptable. The influence of those magazines on girls as young as 13 is horrific.
Consequently, too many young women starve or go under the knife in anxious attempts to feel good about themselves. But you can’t compete with Photoshop.
Fourteen-year-old Julie Bluhm knows this. She knows that girls her age are not all slim with glowing skin and shiny hair. And she tired of her friends’ endless rants about their “imperfections.”
And so she began an online petition on Change.org asking Seventeen to use at least one unretouched spread in each issue.
In her “David meets Goliath” moment Julie won – at least a few points. After collecting more than 84,000 signatures, Seventeen published an eight-point “Body Peace Treaty” promising to “celebrate every kind of beauty,” and pledging not to retouch girls’ bodies or faces, instead showing “real girls as they really are.”
Julie won a battle, but necessarily the war. As Ms. points out:
The letter overtly confirms that Seventeen will continue to retouch photos. And (the editor) still claims that Seventeen “never has never will” alter its models’ bodies–a statement that contradicts the very accusation Bluhm (and her 85,000 supporters) made with her petition.
At the least, Julie has gotten a conversation going that has clued many young women into knowing that things are not always what they seem, and learning that they need not strive to meet the nutty body ideals sent down by the gods of media — and the money to be made by offering helpful “fixes” after making women feel bad about themselves.
Goal one has been achieved: be empowered, don’t just take it.
Now we must work on goal two: critiquing looks as the major source of self-esteem.
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