Weighing in on Media’s Hunger Camps
Dianna Morton

Women’s bodies have been both objectified and commodified throughout the twentieth century via mass media and advertising. To weigh in on the ethics of contemporary media’s portrayal of cultural images of female beauty, body size must be heavily considered. Women have consumed images and verbiage via the mainstream media that has convinced them that their body size, among other physical attributes, is not up to par with the cultural standards of beauty. This information has not only pushed women into investing over $33 billion a year in the diet industry (Eating Disorders and the Media, 1999, ¶ 1), but has done extensive and sometimes irreversible damage to women’s mental and physical health. In addition, media manipulation of the female’s self image plays a key role as gatekeeper in the male dominated power structure. This message is now being sent to adolescent females and girls at younger and younger ages, when vulnerability to the message is at its peak. The media ideal image of the female beauty is inhuman and impossible to achieve. It is essential that our adolescent population learn to deconstruct and analyze media messages pertaining to female body image in the context of body weight in order to escape victimization of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, as well as to become equal players in the power structure of the future.

Puberty and adolescents is a stressful time for both males and females. It is a time when body and brain chemistry changes at a rapid rate; It is also a time of a social move from family and community adult role models to the larger world of peers. Although adolescents thrive on the idea of rebellion, in actuality, they suffer from the anxiety of non-recognition, as they expend their energy trying to “fit in” to their peer social group. These teenagers are not developing their values through family and community, but rather through a new fangled national peer pressure derived from mass communication. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that today our children are not brought up by parents, but by the mass media. (Kilbourne, 1999, p. 129)

In entering adolescents, girls face a series of losses. Based on the works of psychologist Mary Pipher (Reviving Ophelia) and social anthropologist Carol Gillian (In a Different Voice), girls between the ages of eight and ten, who had previously radiated confidence in their own mental and physical powers, become silent, insecure, and often times withdrawn as they enter puberty. These pubescent females are ripe for messages that confirm and validate how they feel about themselves and their bodies, as they have previously been media trained to identify with their outer, physical selves. And the messages bombard them. In a mixed gender high school classroom of teenagers, when asked what messages the media has sent to girls, all agreed that the messages were consistently contradictory: They should be sexy, yet innocent. They should repress their power and be “nice”. They should be in charge. They should attract boys; as a matter of fact, this should be their primary goal. They should do this by wearing make up. They should do so by looking natural. All but one of the messages were contradictory: attractive girls must be thin. In seeking to achieve this goal, a type of self immolation takes place in which the adolescent girl voluntarily sacrifices herself for an ideal of beauty created by the media. In the “Media and Risky Behavior” category of the website Girls, Incorporated, “a 1999 study found that one-third of central female characters in situation comedies (sitcoms) were below average weight. The study also found that the thinner the character was, the more positive comments she received from male characters throughout the show.” (Burggraf, Kimberly and Fouts, Gregory, 1999, ¶ 1) These embedded values of entertainment media equating female thinness with approval, acceptance, and love is easily digested by the impressionable adolescent audience.

Although advertisers do not do so “intentionally”, research has shown that raising anxiety is a sure fire way to hook the consumer. And for the targeted female adolescent media consumer, much of this anxiety is created around weight, as the diet industry is such a profitable market. In 1999, the covers of more than seventy eight percent of popular teen magazines focused on messages about diet and exercise. (Malkin et al., 1999 ¶ 10) This anxiety pertaining to body image and the ideal of thinness has then been translated into what Carl Jung has called our societal “collective unconscious”.

It may be unlikely to be able to prove that advertising creates eating disorders. Yet, according to a study done by health researchers to assess the influence of the media on girls’ weight concerns, it was concluded that “pictures in magazines had a strong impact on girls' perceptions of their weight and shape. Of the girls, 69% reported that magazine pictures influence their idea of the perfect body shape, and 47% reported wanting to lose weight”. In addition, a study of adolescent girls in the Boston area concluded that those who read women’s fashion magazines have been compelled to diet as a result. (Field, Alison, et al., 1999 ¶7). According to studies done in 1990 by Gray, Mosimann, & Ahrens,(as cited in Harrison, 2000), more than half of female television personalities meet the weight criteria for anorexia nervosa. This led to further research by Strice (as cited in Harrison, 2000),

In studying the effects of exposure to a severely thin body ideal on the eating behaviors of viewers, Stice conducted several studies on the relationship between media exposure and eating disorders. Stice tested the fit of a structural equation model, including media exposure, gender-role endorsement, ideal-body stereotype internalization, body dissatisfaction, and eating-disorder symptomatology with a sample of female college undergraduates. Media exposure was significantly related to disordered eating (standardized path coefficient = .30, p < .001). In another study of college women, Stice and Shaw found exposure to thin female magazine models to be positively related to bulimic symptomatology. (Harrison, 2000, ¶2)

Harrison and Cantor’s (1997) prior research examined the relationship between exposure to media that was specifically aimed at fashion and diet and eating disorders and other magazine and television media that used images of conspicuously thin females. Their findings concluded that both affected the media consumers equally, even when the female media consumer was not interested in diet and exercise. Harrison and Cantor (1997) found that exposure to TDP (thinness-depicting and thinness-promoting) media, especially magazines, predicted anorexia, bulimia, drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and ineffectiveness in women.(Harrison, 2000, ¶ 3) Although young adults were the subjects of the study, not adolescents, when disordered eating typically begins, it appears logical, especially recognizing the impressionability factor of adolescents, that a researched study on the younger age group may prove an even greater connection to media images and eating disorders.

Presently, our society is faced with obesity as a health risk factor for our youth; yet eating disorders that embrace starvation and purging among youth, primarily adolescent females, continue to flourish. Ninety-five percent of all anorexics and bulimics are women and one thousand women in the United States die of anorexia each year. At least fifteen percent of women go undiagnosed with eating disorders. (Dittrich, 2000, ¶ 2) Not an official (DSM IV) psychiatric diagnosis, “diabulimia” has been added to teen vocabulary, referring to diabetics who manipulate their intake of insulin in order to temporarily alter their weight. Many websites and blogs that focus on recovery for eating disorders include diabulimia in the discussion, revealing that it is far from a rare. “Gwen Malnassy, 21, detailed her struggle with diabulimia for three years in a diary she posted on the Internet. Doctors diagnosed Malnassy with both anorexia and bulimia at 13. In a recent interview she said, “I would look at magazines and think that if I looked like the models, I would have more friends and be more popular.’ ” (The Associated Press, 2007) This practice is instantly and consistently life threatening. Although advertising and media do not create eating disorders, they play a key role in the promotion of abusive and abnormal attitudes around food, particularly for the young female.

The harm done by this media, whose primary goal is to sell products and services, is unconscionable. Much of the harm is clear physical and emotional damage to the female population. Much of this damage is irreversible. The damage includes: “psychological and physical health, ranging from dental problems, cardiac and gastrointestinal problems to death. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders.” (Dittrich, 2000, ¶ 10)

The medical effects of anorexia include hypothermia, edema, hypotension, impaired heartbeat, growth of body hair, infertility, and death. Bulimia may bring on medical impairments including dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, epileptic seizures, abnormal heart rhythms, and death. Each of these disorders may also have prolonged effects that include tooth erosion, hiatal hernia, abraded esophagus, kidney failure, osteoporosis, and death. (Wolf, 1991, p. 183)
Yet, there is an equivocal societal harm. In Naomi Wolf’s national best seller, The Beauty Myth, the Rhodes Scholar begins her chapter entitled “Hunger” as an apocalyptic vision of wealthy white adolescent males falling victim to eating disorders at the alarming rate that their female counter parts were so doing in the 1990’s. She stated, “Up to one tenth of all American young women, up to one fifth of women students in the United States, are locked into one woman hunger camps.” At this point in time, there were over a million reported cases of anorexia and bulimia in the United States, ninety-five percent female. (Wolf. 1991, p.181). The stakes have only heightened in the past twenty six years, as studies have shown that between 40-80% of forth grade girls are dieting. (Kilbourne, 1999, p. 134). Wolf claims that “if anorexia is defined as compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most Western women can be called, twenty years into back lash, mental anorexics.” (Wolf, 1991, p. 183) What Wolf is referring to is that the mental fixation on food, diet, and weight watching captivates the minds of women, holding them hostage in their progress of their life paths. An advertisement for A/X or Armani Exchange claimed, “The more you subtract the more you add.” In another ad for Tommy Hilfiger’s fragrance, Tommy Girl, the print stated, “A Declaration of Independence”, yet the image that accompanies the print, an emaciated model, is the woman detained in the one woman hunger camp. She represents the antithesis of liberation. Unfortunately, she is not an oxymoron or a paradox; she represents the pretense of the power structure: that self control over food consumption represents power in the larger society. It is actually the powerless who fall victim to eating disorders, those who feel that it is their only hope in grasping and garnishing any power what-so-ever. Yet starvation of the body quickly leads to starvation of the mind. On a political spectrum, it is essential to identify the specific point in history that the media image of female beauty shifted from the robust, healthy, curvaceous, or natural female model. Cross culturally, from birth, girls have 10-15 percent more body fat than boys, and the ratio of fat to muscle increases in adolescent girls: body fat ratio increases as females age, the norms of the species, (Wolf, 1991, p. 192). This image of the societal standards of beauty changed from women’s lush fertility including plump ripe bellies and faces to an emaciated, sickly, and poverty stricken model in the early twentieth century, specifically in the 1920’s when women achieved the right to vote. (Wolf, 1991, p. 184)

The 1920’s beauty was the flapper, boyishly thin and straight bodied. There was a brief hiatus of this movement in the 1950’s, when female models once again appeared naturally curvaceous, yet this was a time when domesticity was praised and the seclusion of the home served well in keeping females in their “proper place”. With the advent of the Pill and sexual freedom, the 1960’s media images of anorexic models stunned media consumers. Twiggy appeared in Vogue in 1965. Of this event, Wolf (1991) wrote,

Like many beauty myth symbols, she was double-edged, suggesting to women the freedom from the constraint of reproduction of earlier generations (since female fat is categorically understood by the subconscious of fertile sexuality), while reassuring men with her suggestion of female weakness, asexuality, and hunger. (Wolf, 1991, p. 184)

Following Twiggy’s arrival, the average weight of media stars plummeted in every arena, and newly “liberated” women began to suffer from feelings of extreme inadequacy. The standards could not be met in any sense that took health into account. As Naomi Wolf (1991) stated, “A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.” (Wolf, 1991, p. 189) This obsession has viciously trickled down to younger and younger age groups, and the messages are being sent and received at an alarming rate.

In order to salvage the health of individual females, as well as that of the society, Media Literacy education should be a core course in all grade levels in the United States educational system. With the advent of television and the internet, mass media communication takes up tremendous space in our visual and aural environment. These prolific and consistent messages are received without analysis by most media consumers. For the most part, they are sent out, not sought out. Research has weighed in on media’s adverse effect on young women and girls in terms of their body image and self esteem. To ensure a true democratic freedom, that of freedom of the mind, young people need the skills to deconstruct and analyze these media messages. Looking specifically at young women and girls in relationship to the issue of food, food has been and continues to be the most treasured and valued resource in all cultures. It is substance; it represents family, love, and social worth. Girls need food physical. They also need to know that they are valued. They need to reclaim their bodies from the media’s hunger camps, and in doing so, make their minds their own.




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