How the Media Gets You to Hate Your Body
Excerpt From Not Tonight Dear, I Feel Fat
The first guy I ever slept with told me I was fat. We were in college and looking back, I know now that I wasn’t. I just wasn’t super-skinny. But ever since then I felt really self-conscious in bed. Even today, I just can’t seem to let go and enjoy myself because I’m worried my body isn’t “good enough” for my boyfriend.But here’s the funny thing, I know I’m attractive and that my boyfriend is crazy about me. Yet I keep having the same thoughts: “My thighs are too big, my stomach is pooching out too much.” Even when he’s making passionate love to me I can’t help thinking that he’s fantasizing about someone thinner. I’d never admit it to him but sometimes I have stronger orgasms when I’m by myself—because I’m not worried about how I look…
— Sandra, 28, from Toledo, Ohio
There are three aspects to body image: Judgment (the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your physical attributes), the emotional impact of your judgment, and the “investment” you make–the level of self-worth you draw from your appearance and the lengths you’ll go to enhance or manage it.
Keep this definition in mind as we go forward: Judgment, impact and investment. It will help you understand the influence your body image has in the bedroom.
The Culprit Behind a Bad Self Image
There are many factors that contribute to a negative body image– growing up in a judgmental family that stressed dieting, children who made disparaging comments about the way you look, a competitive girl culture that thrives on judgment, encourages rivalries and magnifies the importance of appearances, and of course, being objectively overweight or obese. But there’s a bigger reason for your body self-consciousness–a much bigger reason: The extent to which you buy into, compare yourself to, and try to achieve the media’s ideal of feminine beauty. There is no other factor that comes close.
The main reason most women have such a poor self-image is because not only have they accepted the media’s beauty ideal, but invested heavily in trying to achieve its anatomically impossible standards. This is not some feminist polemic espoused by scholars with a political agenda. It is the conclusion of nearly every academic study ever done on the issue of body image. Let me explain how researchers discovered this.
“I don’t deserve the pleasure of sex because my thighs are too big.”
It started with academic research on eating disorders. Researchers suspected that eating disordered women were somehow affected by the relentless, ubiquitous, inescapable images of below normal-weight women on TV, magazines, movies and the internet.
After years of research a clear picture emerged: The media’s presentation of a single standard of below-healthy-weight beauty and the compulsion toward conformity it generated was the main cause in the development of eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The relationship was simple, clear and replicated across nearly every study ever done: The more you internalize the media’s below normal-weight ideal, the more you invest in trying to conform to it, the more likely you will develop a diagnosable eating disorder.
That all might be interesting, but if you’re like most women you don’t have an eating disorder. What does this have to do with you and the problems you face in the bedroom?
In the past ten years, body image research has focused more on “healthy” women, or rather, women who do not have diagnosable eating disorders. The thinking went something like this: If the media’s relentless presentation of a single standard of beauty is a leading cause of eating disorders, what else might it be a leading cause of?
So, researchers got to work on it. The next wave of body image research, conducted by experts like Dr. Thomas F. Cash in The Electronic Journal Of Human Sexuality (2004) published in XXXX, specifically excluded eating disordered women.
“I have turned down sex even though I was in the mood because I felt ashamed of my body”
As stated before, there are several contributing causes to body shame–your family of origin, the judgments of both men and women, how much you compete with other women, and how objectively overweight you are. But researchers found that the strongest predictor of body dissatisfaction in healthy women is the same as it is for eating disordered women–the extent to which you internalize the media’s standard for thinness. The more you agree with the below-healthy thin ideal, the more you compare yourself against it, the more you invest in trying to achieve that standard, the more dissatisfied you will be with your body.
Let me give you a small example of just how insidious the media’s standard of beauty is in affecting your self-esteem. Dr. Laura Choate of LSU published a fascinating study in the Journal of Counseling & Development. She had a group of women read news magazines while another group read fashion magazines. There were no differences between the groups in age, height or weight. Yet when they filled out a body image assessment immediately after reading the magazines, an amazing picture emerged: The women who read the fashion magazines reported greater body dissatisfaction and a lower ideal body weight than women who read the news magazines. They were only reading the magazines for fifteen minutes. As Dr. Choate’s study concluded, “Even brief exposure to media images portraying the sociocultural ideal directly shapes perceptions of the ideal body type expected for women.”
It would be one thing if there were just a few studies showing the media’s corrosive impact on women’s self-esteem ; it’s that I couldn’t find a single study published in the last 20 years that didn’t come to the same conclusion. For example, one study exposed a group of women to ads with thin models while the other group exposed women to the same product ads without any models. The women who viewed ads with models rated their body satisfaction lower than the women who viewed the product ads without the models.