Behind Beauty Standards and Their Effects on Women - Camille Richard

When I was in high school, I struggled with an eating disorder. Since then, I have developed a passion for understanding the psychology behind beauty standards and their effects on women. I have encountered many different people but their struggles all have common themes, there is indeed a correlation between what we are shown in the media and how we perceive ourselves.

One of the things that truly helped me recover was when I discovered Body Positivity, a social movement that is meant to dismantle fatphobia and help people living in marginalized bodies to be more represented. Another thing that helped me was to learn more about intuitive eating, its first principle being to reject the diet mentality. It is crucial to understand that a "healthy" weight is not a universal number or size. Through the years, I gained more knowledge of what diet culture is, how prevalent it is in society and how harmful it can be.

Mental illnesses are on the rise: there’s undeniably a silent epidemic of mental illness among teenagers. (Friedman 2006) In fact, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illnesses. (NEDIC 2019) One of the leading causes of eating disorders is the media since the image of womens’ body that are portrayed can intice them to want to be thin. This pressure can develop into an eating disorder, because of the internalization of thin-ideal, the objectification and the appearance schematicity (someone who believes that appearance is a key factor in one’s life).

To begin with, body dissatisfaction is a major factor in eating disorders and can occur by the internalization of the thin-ideal that is presented across the media in television programs and magazines. (Harrison and Fredrickson 2003) In fact, the rise in eating disorders is happening at the same time as the number of articles and advertisements promoting weight-loss diets in women’s magazines increases. (Stice et al., 1994) Eating disorders have risen steadily over the past 30 years. Furthermore, in the 1920s and 1980s, there was an epidemic of disordered eating pathology, two eras in which the “ideal woman” was at her thinnest in the U.S. history and where females’ bodies were slim and this was equal to beauty. (Cantor and Harrison 1997) Womens’ images presented in the media are thinner than the average women. We can see across movies, magazines and television programs that thin television characters are over-represented and thinness is consistently emphasized and rewarded for women. (Grabe, Hyde and Ward 2008)

A shocking number of women nowadays struggle with eating disorders. (Cantor and Harrison 1997) Girls are starting to diet younger than ever before and children as young as 7 years old can start being dissatisfied with their bodies. This problem touches women of different body size and race and 1 out of 10 will eventually develop an eating disorder. (Canadian Women’s Health Network ; Grabe, Hyde and Ward 2008)

In addition, recurrent presentation of thin and attractive women that will usually be combined with beauty and success, can affect viewers to have unrealistic expectations of what a women should look like. (Hargreaves and Tiggemann 2003) Exposure to slides of thin women in a study showed that their self-esteem and weight satisfaction went down compared to exposure to average or “heavy” models. (Stice et al., 1994) As our personal body size diverges from the stereotype that society expects us to look like, self-satisfaction decreases. (Gardner et al., 1980)

Self-objectification is the tendency to perceive and describe one’s body according only to how it appears, women nowadays strive for a false ideal presented by the media that can later result in disordered eating behaviours. When women’s bodies appear in sports media, the accent is put more on what the body can do rather than how it appears, therefore the outcome is positive and the perception of their body is healthy. People who tend to self-objectify tend to define themselves by their physical attributes instead of non-observable qualities. They base their self-worth on what people perceive of them. (Harrison and Fredrickson, 2003) Eating disorders are not the only major risk factors when self-objectification occurs, so are depression and body shame.

Also, media tends to show women with “perfect” bodies, which contributes to self-objectification in girls and women. The models have their bodies always distorted, with the practice of ‘airbrushing’ photographs, making their skin lighter or their waist smaller, for example. To look like actors on television, the viewers may also eat less; as women actors aren’t shown eating on a regular basis compared to men. Slim body shape standards in television is more present for women than for men. In the pageant world, participants’ weight decreased significantly every year, and the winners are, most of the time, thinner than the others. When female adolescents are exposed to beauty advertisements rather than neutral ads, they develop high standards towards sex appeal and beauty. (Cantor and Harrison, 1997) Media through the fashion ideals that are shown across movies, magazines and television programs, lead to believe that weight control is equal to self-control and will lead to beauty and success. (Gardner et al., 1980)

Women are taught to internalize people’s perspective of them as the way they see themselves. They self-evaluate and compare themselves to the social body image that is portrayed by media. The unrealistic beauty standard that is presented throughout the media leads not only women and girls, but also men and boys to have unrealistic expectations. (Hargreaves and Tiggemann 2003 ; Harrison and Fredrickson 2003) Furthermore, it was shown that people with anorexia nervosa (AN) tend to highly endorse gender roles. (Murnen and Smolak, 1997) Over the past 20 to 30 years, the definition of gender roles, particularly for females, has changed dramatically. High school girls describe the “ideal” woman as a “superwoman”, which means being feminine and masculine at the same time ; taking care of others, while being attractive, have a career, money and confidence. It was proven that the girls who endorsed this ideal are more at risk to develop an eating disorder. (Murnen and Smolak, 1997) These women are perfectionists, they want to “have it all”. And when they are over overwhelmed by it, that’s when the “superwoman complex” happens and disordered eating pathology manifests itself. (Mensinger et al., 2007)

In conclusion, women are not only directly pressured by the media to be thin, but also through the expectations of others that have been exposed to these messages. Gender-role endorsement is also encouraged, and this creates a social environment of ideal-body stereotype internalization, which is associated with body dissatisfaction and disordered eating symptoms. (Stice et al., 1994 ; Cantor and Harrison 1997) Raising awareness around media literacy is important, as well as pressuring brands to ban Photoshop, and encourage TV shows to cast a wider range of body types.