How the Media Gets You to Hate Your Body Part 2

Excerpt From Not Tonight Dear, I Feel Fat

It’s well documented that when women see impossibly beautiful women in magazines their body image drops faster than Marie Antoinette’s guillotine. But the most fascinating studies show that men report significant body consciousness when exposed to gorgeous women in magazines, too.

For example, in a study published in Human Communication Research (2009 ), Dr. Jennifer Aubrey at the University of Missouri found that men exposed to ads and editorial features with beautiful women suffered immediate and long-lasting body consciousness.

This confounded Dr. Aubrey because the men were mainly exposed to images of women. Why would men have such a dramatic reaction to images of beautiful women? In a later study, Dr. Aubrey answered her own question: The supermodels reminded men that they weren’t good looking enough to date such beautiful women!

In yet another study, this time in the North American Journal of Psychology (2006), male subjects were exposed to photographs of muscular men in magazines like Maxim, FHM and Men’s Health. Immediately after exposure they reported significantly lower levels of body satisfaction.

If that ain’t poetic justice, I don’t know what is.

The media’s power to make yourself feel bad about how you look is almost omnipotent. Once you submerge yourself in over two decades of body image research it’s easy to reach a startling conclusion: Reading a fashion magazine does to your body image what smoking does to your lungs.

But Isn’t The Media Just Reflecting What Guys Want?

Everybody knows that men want the kind of skinny chicks the media presents. Everybody, that is, except guys. It’s news to them. As you’ll see later in the book, attractiveness studies show that men seldom pick the below-healthy weight body types you see in the media as their ideal form of beauty.

This is a critical point to absorb because so much of your suffering is based on a demonstrably false assumption of what guys like. Yes, men judge women harshly. Yes, they base their desire almost entirely on appearances (at least at first). In fact, they emphasize it so much they’re unwilling to have any type of romantic relationship unless they are first sexually attracted.

The Male Gaze is alive and well, but what it seeks is not the unhealthy women you see on TV, magazines and movies. Men are turned on by what you rarely see in the media: Normal curves, healthy weight, and slender-to-average waist-to-hip ratios. It isn’t men insisting that you be so skinny to be desirable–it’s you. You internalized the media’s beauty ideal and projected it onto what men want.

Let’s look at one of the most fascinating body image studies done in the last ten years. Researchers at UCLA wanted to know which contributed more to women’s body dissatisfaction: the ubiquitous media standard of beauty or the desire for male attention.

Well, the only way to separate those variables is to study women who are not interested in men–lesbians. So they designed a study (“Body image satisfaction in heterosexual, gay, and lesbian adults,” Archives Of Sexual Behavior, 2009)– that recruited gay women to participate in the same kind of study typically reserved for heterosexual women. The researchers were convinced that lesbians would have much higher body esteem because they are not motivated by the reward of male attention. If they didn’t want, welcome or seek male attention, it made sense that they’d score higher on body esteem assessments.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to proving that hypothesis. It was completely wrong. Lesbians were not at a lower risk for body dissatisfaction than heterosexual women. As the researchers concluded, “It is widely assumed that the desire to attract and retain a male partner contributes to body image concerns. The finding that lesbians (who desire female partners ) and heterosexual women (who seek male partners) are similar in body dissatisfaction raises questions about the relative importance of attracting a mate versus adhering to broader cultural ideals of attractiveness for women’s body satisfaction.”

Most of us would have expected a diff answer—that lesbians in gen would have been more satisfied with their bodies because they’re not seeking male attention. So why are they so dissatisfied. Why? Media influence. Women in society being bombarded by image designed to make you feel bad. no matter who they wanted to go home with.

The conclusion is fairly astounding: The media has more power to influence your body image than the desire for male attention.