Celebrating positive body image

4th September 2007

Celebrating positive body image

posted in Arts and Music, Body Image, Eating Disorders, Fat Acceptance, Feminist Topics, Pop Culture |

This week is Body Image and Eating Disorders Awareness Week in Australia. Because I think just one reaffirming week out of an entire year saturated with thin-frenzied and conflicting messages is the equivalent of taking Aleve for cancer, I’m appropriating Australia’s week and celebrating it here in the U.S., also.

As the pinnacle of the anti-obesity hysteria reaches new heights, it should come as no irony that the numbers of eating disorder cases are also rising – related story here. And even adult women aren’t immune. According to science journalist Trisha Gura, whose book Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women was released in May, the number of women older than 30 seeking treatment for eating disorders has tripled in North America over the past 15 years.

What do we do? What can be done? Here are a few people and organizations who are taking action, with positive results.

The Eating Disorders Foundation of Victoria has begun a podcast archive of recovery stories. Each story runs about 9 – 10 minutes in length and is read by volunteers.

The Renfrew Center Foundation has developed a sticker campaign to praise magazine ads and Renfrew Sticker Campaign articles featuring healthy body image messages and to criticize those that send a negative message about food and weight.

The center encourages concerned folks to slap either the “This Promotes Eating Disorders!” or the “This Promotes Healthy Body Image:)” sticker on ads and articles and mail them to magazine editors. The stickers are available for $5 a sheet (20 stickers). Order form available here here.

The witty and rebellious About Face site exposes the impact of mass media on the health and self-esteem of women and girls. The site’s Archive of Offenders highlights images depicting women as junkies, stick figures, mannequins, bimbos and inanimate objects, while a Making Changes section offers activist-oriented tools to help hold advertisers responsible for the images they create.

The organization also gives credit where credit is due, with its Gallery of Winners, lauding such corporate champions like Dove, Keds, Asics and Oil of Olay (P & G).

In a recent study of nearly 10,000 girls aged 8-12, 17 percent induced vomiting or used laxatives or diet pills to lose weight. By the time girls reach adolescence, eating disorders are the third most common chronic illness afflicting them. Frustrated by these statistics and waif-thin media images of women, the women and girls of New Moon - If the definition of beautiful gets any thinner, no one will fit New Moon Magazine are fighting to reclaim beauty. The magazine celebrates girls and women by who they are and what they do, not by their looks. Each spring the magazine rivals People Magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful people” with its own special issue, “25 Beautiful Girls,” featuring girls who shine in different arenas, from athletics to academics to activism.

The organization also offers an awesome t-shirt, reading “If the definition of beautiful gets any thinner, no one will fit.” I purchased this shirt about four years ago and it’s been a real conversation starter with random strangers.

Journalist Harriet Brown is countering the demeaning, self-loathing talk so many women (and men) inflict upon their bodies with her “I Love My Body” pledge. An excerpt: “I will remind myself that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and that no matter what shape and size my body is, it’s worthy of kindness, compassion, and love.”

Download a .pdf version at www.harrietbrown.com or read Harriet’s blog at http://harrietbrown.blogspot.com for more positive self-affirmations.

Touting itself as a “girl-powered rebellion to free girls and women from the bonds of media-imposed standards of beauty,” the Dressing Room Project seeks to change the vision many women behold in dressing room mirrors. Teenage girls create and post colorful little cards that say things like “Beauty is Within” and “Worry about the size of your heart, not the size of your body” and post them in girls’ and women’s dressing rooms.

The project has since spread to other communities. Download cards and get resources and support for budding body image activists from the organization’s website.

Remember Dove’s Evolution video, which takes us from human being to billboard in under 60 seconds? The video deconstructs the beauty myth by revealing everything from the impact of lighting through the application of hair and make-up to retouching, to the photoshop-stretching of neck and impossible widening of eyes, ending with the comment, “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.”

Meet the creative genuises behind the ad, Janet Krestin and Nancy Vonk, in an interview here on canada.com.

Girls on the Run is a non-profit prevention program that encourages preteen girls to develop self-respect and healthy lifestyles through running. The program combines training for a 3.1 mile running event with a curricula that addresses all aspects of development – physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual well-being. The program’s goal is to promote fewer adolescent pregnancies and eating disorders, less depression and suicide attempts, as well as fewer substance/alcohol abuse problems and confrontations with the juvenile justice system.

For a council near you, visit the organization’s website.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Arts and Music, Body Image, Eating Disorders, Fat Acceptance, Feminist Topics, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On September 4th, 2007, littlem said:

I have GOT to have one of those shirts.

posted on September 4th, 2007 at 10:42 pm

2 On September 5th, 2007, Joseph Dunphy said:

The url I put down in the line for “website” is not for a site of my own, but for an entry on somebody else’s blog that touches on some of the issues you write about in your post, but not in a good way. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. In an earlier post about the author’s jury duty,

http://davidmaister.com/blog/337

somebody had posted this incredible remark.

“I really enjoyed this post. I am fascinated by what works with a jury and what doesn’t. For example, one thing I learned is that fat women don’t have a lot of empathy and defendants usually try to strike those jurors.”

which earns definite “huh?”. The attitude couldn’t have been any more out in the open – somebody saying that being a size ten meant that one was a cold, uncaring person. Where on earth could anybody get such an idea? But what followed in the next post, as the owner of the blog replied to a simple protest of that remark, was if anything, even more incredible. Here’s the url, which I linked to above

http://davidmaister.com/blog/474

“For example, last week I was conducting a workshop for a global corporation that had concentrated a number of its in-house services into one “shared services” unit. One service line in particular received much higher client satisfaction ratings than the others. We discussed why, and focused on the traditional client service topics.

During one of the coffee breaks, one of the participants came up to me and said, “The real reason that unit does so well is that it explicitly sets out to hire attractive young women. No-one likes to admit it, but that makes a huge difference.” (The unit was in a South American country, if that makes a difference to your reaction to the story.)

Of course it does. I know of more than one top-flight professional firm that takes appearance into account in its hiring of both males and females and gives its young people lessons in how to dress well and how to behave with sophistication.

Should appearance, youth and manners matter? Maybe not, but they do – a lot. To pretend they do not is just unrealistic.

Yet in many countries this is called discrimination and is legally barred.

All of this raises some interesting questions:

Should more firms continue to include physical appearnace in their hiring, even to the point of preferring some ages and genders?”

more or less hinting that it’s rude, just simply rude for those one of those “fat girls” to not be a good sport about the whole thing and magically transform herself into Barbie. Considering the business Jenny Craig does, I rather suspect that more than a few of those “fat girls” would be more than glad to comply, if only their physiology would let them, but my G-d: this is where we are? “Honey, we don’t care about all of that egghead stuff, just let’s see how you look in a bikini”?!

If you have time, I’d appreciate it if you could share a few enlightened thoughts on that blog. The person posting the initial hatemongering remark, the one which an entire post was then written in defense of, is a syndicated columnist, so this is not just another random netloon who can safely be ignored. This is a netloon with a substantial audience.

Left uncontested, she is going to mold opinions, and the opinions that result are going to be pretty disturbing ones. I know one blog post probably doesn’t seem like it matters much, and a few blog comments don’t see like much of a remedy, but every contribution counts, for better or worse. Just having people see more than one poster saying “this is not OK” would make a difference.