The average teenage girl spends a combined
10 hours & 45 minutes per day on media consumption: on a weekly basis this
translates to 31 hours watching television, 17 hours listening to music, 3
hours watching movies, 4 hours reading magazines and 10 hours online. By the
time a girl celebrates her 17th birthday, she will have been exposed
to a whopping 250,000 commercial messages, many of them damaging to her self-image
and sense of self-worth. The images and messages that teenage girls are exposed
to that glamorize thinness and glorify the “bikini-ready body,” create an
impossible ideal for girls, and in turn, fuel low self-esteem as well as
unhealthy and sometimes dangerous behaviors to achieve this ideal. Low self-esteem, depression and eating
disorders are the leading mental health problems facing girls today, and it can
be said that it is being fueled not entirely but to a large extent by the
messaging that girls are exposed to through the media. The media’s ability to
shape our societal views and opinions and its’ influence on female self-esteem
is not a new phenomenon, however, its’ pervasiveness is becoming unparalleled. Today’s
prevalence of social media websites and the diversity of platforms, such as
Tumblr, Facebook and Instragram mean that media messaging is impacting teenage
girls 24/7. How do we teach teenage girls to love their
bodies and see their own beauty and self-worth in a mine-field of media
messaging that is damaging to their spirit, psyche and body image?
Thinspiration
Trending now on social media websites such
as Tumblr,
Instragram & Facebook are images and messaging that
offer
"Thinspiration," also referred to as “Thinspro,” to girls seeking
inspiration to look more like the images that they want to emulate from television
and magazine advertising. Often initiated by anorexic (“pro-ana”) and bulimic
girls looking for online community, these sites seek to “inspire” their
followers to be thin and espouse that self-worth is measured by the space
between your thighs. Messages that tout, “because the pain of looking in the
mirror hurts more than starving,” and images that worship the “thigh gap,” a
measurable space between a girl’s thighs when her knees are touching, are
insidiously commonplace and are fueling extreme body fixation in young women. In
truth, whether a woman’s inner thighs touch is largely dependent on bone
structure, the shape of her pelvic girdle and how far apart her hipbones are.
Aside from a small minority of body types, you have to be severely underweight
for the thighs to separate, and since thigh gap is not a normal body shape for
most women, achieving it often means severely altering behaviour.
The
dividing line between internet searches for motivation to get fit versus a
search to get skinny is grey indeed, meaning a teenager seeking fitness
inspiration will invariably stumble upon damaging and often seductive images of
attractive, slim and often sexy young women. Endless artistic
photos of skinny girls can be hypnotizing and is luring our daughters to aspire
to an unhealthy body image that is excessively thin and is encouraging damaging
behaviors to achieve this impossibly perfect ideal. What’s frightening about
this trend in social media is that it is girls who are creating the content and
sabotaging the self-esteem of other girls, of their peers.
Glamorizing
Skinny
Last
year, the “thigh gap” flooded social media; this year it’s the “bikini bridge.”
Started initially as an online hoax, the “bikini bridge,” has, as intended,
snowballed into a body fixation and warped measure of beauty for teenage girls.
Urban Dictionary describes the
“bikini bridge” as 'when bikini bottoms are suspended between the two hip
bones, causing a space between the bikini and the lower abdomen.’ More
disturbingly, bikinibridge.tumblr.com refers to its home page as “a collection
of photos dedicated to the graceful space created by a woman's hip bones
suspending bikini bottoms from their abdomens,’ in essence glamorizing skinny
to a target market of impressionable young women seeking a sense of belonging
and acceptance.
In the 1960’s,
well-known Canadian philosopher of communication, Marshall McLuhan coined the
term “global village,” in reference to how electronic media has contracted the
globe into a village. At no time has this been truer, with messages impacting
us 24/7 and influencing our views and beliefs at an alarming rate. Blogger Kate
L. shares her story on www.proud2beme, an online support network for girls created by NEDA, The
National Eating Disorders Association. “Like thousands of other young girls
today, I grew up in an environment that was constantly putting emphasis on the
illusion that thinness was everything, that I would be much happier if only I
could focus on losing weight. Technology’s influence multiplied this pressure
tenfold, and I found myself spending more and more hours on social media
websites like Tumblr and Pinterest, scrolling through “thinspiration”: images
and “pro-ana” (pro anorexia) blogs, which encourage young girls to pursue
disordered eating behaviours. I became oblivious to any other way of living,
and within months found myself deep in an eating disorder that was constantly
being reinforced by support on the Internet.”
Jean Kilbourne, author, speaker, and filmmaker who is internationally recognized for
her work on the image of women in advertising, says that statistically only 5%
of women are born with a model’s body type. “You can’t diet yourself into it
any more than you can make yourself taller,” she says in her 1995 film called Slim
Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession with Thinness.
It’s a body type that excludes 95% of the
American population, and yet she argues that it is the only body type that we
ever see in the media that is deemed acceptable.
The media delivers the same destructive
messaging over and over again making women believe that in order to be
acceptable, they need to be painfully, unnaturally thin. It’s not surprising
then that eleven percent of college women have bulimia nervosa and one in ten
women in America have a serious eating disorder. In fact, alarming figures for hospital admissions for
eating disorders rose by 16% in
2012. The most disturbing aspect of the statistics, released by the Health and
Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), were the ages of those being admitted. The biggest increase was
amongst girls aged 10-15, up 69% from
2011 to 2012. One
in 10 of all admissions were girls aged 15. Forty-seven percent of admissions
were children aged five to nine.
This is not to say that talking about “thigh gap” or being interested in it is
in and of itself an eating disorder, but it does insidiously creep into
dialogue that sets girls up to be unhappy with their bodies.
The
Perfect Storm
The
teenage years are an age where girls are trying so hard to figure out who they
are, whom they like and what they like. Acceptance and “fitting in” become
paramount to all else. Combine that with raging teenage hormones and mood fluctuations
and you have the perfect storm for girls to fall off the rails. In an effort to
be accepted by their peers, girls will often loose their sense of identity and
direction. Enter a “thinspro” website that feeds into teenage insecurities with
messages that state “nobody wants a fatty,” and that “nobody will drop you when
you crowd surf” if you’re skinny. Girls easily fall prey to this kind of
messaging because being skinny is about control when your inner confidence and
stability are crumbling.
Seeking
Leadership
Girls
are getting messaging early on that they need to be impossibly beautiful in
order to be accepted and that the thing that’s most important is how they look.
Their value and self-worth depend on that and in turn boys get the message that
that’s what’s important about girls. It is profitable for advertisers to make
women feel terrible about themselves, so as a culture women are brought up to
be fundamentally insecure. Every form of media- advertising, films, music videos,
TV shows, video games and social media-propagates images of impossibly thin,
beautiful women. And it follows, that no matter what a woman does, no matter
what her achievements; her value still depends on her appearance.
In
her film Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women, Jean Kilbourne notes
that there is a hunger among girls and young women for leadership. In search of
a sense of identity, young women and girls need more positive role modeling.
They need a shift in the emphasis being solely on looks to being about their
character, intellect and accomplishments. One such role model is Hunger Games
actress, Jennifer Lawrence, who has stated unabashedly that she will never
loose weight for Hollywood role. "…I think when it comes to the
media, the media needs to take responsibility for the effect that it has on our
younger generation, on these girls who are watching these television shows, and
picking up how to talk and how to be cool..,” she says.
This
summer we have also seen positive messaging from advertisers such as Aerie, who
now feature girls in their print campaigns who are not models and who are not
retouched. Always’s recent Throw Like a Girl campaign seeks to empower girls by
shifting the insulting school yard connotation of “throwing like a girl” to suggesting inner
strength and confidence.
Girls
need to feel good about themselves again and we need to help them get there. What
is absolutely critical is that as parents and educators, we are aware of the
influences of the media and social media and that we begin discussion on many
of these issues. Mothers need to dial into and become aware of these trends and
issues and open dialogue with their daughters about healthy behaviour and
positive messaging. According the Dove Self Esteem Program for Girls, mothers
and other female mentors (aunts, grandmothers, female educators) have the
biggest impact on our daughters’ self-esteem, above models, actors, and sports
figures.. Susan Ringwood, Chief Executive of Eating Disorders Charity Beat,
says, “It’s a long-term goal, but we need to nourish a generation of young
people equipped to be resilient to these pressures and critical of the society
that promoted them.” The only diet teenagers need to be on is a media diet.
They should turn off their devices and instead nourish their bodies with
exercise, healthy eating and a huge dose of self-love.
