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.




References


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Kilbourne, Jean (1999). Can't buy my love. New York, New York: Simon
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Malkin, A. R., Wornian, K., & Chrisler, J. C. (1999). “Women and weight:
gendered messages on magazine covers. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 40(7-8), 647+. Retrieved October 8, 2007, from Questia database: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001270637

Wolf, Naomi (1991). The beauty myth. New York, New York: Harper Perennial.179-201.

Mill’s Nightmare
Free Speech and the Media


In 2007, the stakes of preserving democracy in the United States may be at their highest since the founding of the country, and media is at the helm of this ship. Yet, the country is divided and confused. This is not by accident.

The mainstream media is driven by the specific goal of profit, thereby both instilling fear into its audience to behave in a certain manner— agreement with the officials of the society— and to numb minds to societal needs by focusing on the individual. Receiving this type of media does not require work. The receiver is bombarded by it. The work to be done is for the consumer to pay very careful attention to these messages in terms of who sent them, their political, social, and cultural effects, and what has been left out of these messages. Professor Sut Jhally (2005) has stated that “The most important thing about the message system is not what is in it but what is absent and that is the ultimate form of power.”(Jhally, 2005)

John Stuart Mill appealed to his audience, in his book of essays On Liberty (1869), to protect democratic freedom against tyranny accomplished through censorship. He claimed that the government has no right to use coercive power, and that this power is more injurious to the society when public opinion goes along with it. Mill realized that if the citizens are in agreement with the concept of being controlled, their minds must have been tainted in someway. He also stated that every single voice has the right to be heard.

Mill was correct that democracy would be forever under siege, and that those in power would endlessly seek to silence dissenting voices. Seven years following Mill’s publication of On Liberty, Karl Marx (1876) published The Capital, an insightful glimpse into the future world of industrial capitalism.Yet Mill had no way of foreseeing the impending economic changes from an agricultural society to an industrial nation, nor did he take into account the effect that these changes would have on free speech. Although the right to speak freely remains protected in our Constitution, it cannot rightly be termed “free speech”. Speech, via media, is not free. It costs. It is a hybrid form of fascist control when the media is dominated by corporations. In his article Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse, Sut Jhally (1997) stated:

“Indeed, commercial interests intent on maximizing the consumption of the immense collection of commodities have colonized more and more of the spaces of our culture. For instance, almost the entire media system (television and print) has been developed as a delivery system for marketers its prime function is to produce audiences for sale to advertisers. Both the advertisements it carries, as well as the editorial matter that acts as a support for it, celebrate the consumer society.” (Sut Jhally, 1997, ¶6 )

As the Industrial Revolution began to take hold in the United Stated, Mother Jones, an Irish immigrant, worked in vehement opposition to the lack of enforcement of newly established child labor laws. In 1903, she encouraged a strike of textile workers in Kensington, Pennsylvania. Of the 75,000 workers, 10,000 or more were children under ten years of age. These children were working long hours in dangerous factories where injuries, some life threatening, were a daily occurrence and included the loss of limbs. Jones questioned the press as to why they were not publicizing the fate of these children. According to Judith Pinkerton Josephson (1997) in her biography of Mother Jones, the newsmen simply stated, “They couldn't because the mill owners had stock in the papers.” (Pinkerton Josephson, 1997, p. 84)

This corporate media institution, born out of the Industrial Revolution, is driven by a profit motive; its purpose is to sell products and ideology that will justify the colonization of minds and territories to exploit the labor force and to lay claim to the natural resources, thereby committing atrocities against humanity, cultures, and the natural environment. The justification is a free market and a global economy that will improve the quality of life for those residing in underdeveloped countries, as well as ensuring an availability of inexpensive commodities for those residing in the West. The competing value of free speech, in this sense, is a draw between political ideologies that foster democratic, humanitarian, environmental, and social values and those that prioritize economic gain for an already wealthy few.

Jhally’s point of view was not new to opinions concerning a free society and media. In the late 1920’s, the decade that introduced the advertising industry, Edward Bernays coined the phrase “Corporate Journalism” and described this new found media as “an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.” (Pilger, 2007, ¶1). In order to profit, this new corporate journalism needed to attract advertisers to fund production and sales, and therefore developed its own need to sell an image. The irony defies the ideology and ethics of journalistic free speech, where the purpose is to inform, while the sole purpose of this new corporate journalism is to sell. To do so, the image chosen by this new capitalist venture needed to appear respectable to the establishment. As a result, the image of a democratic perspective was constructed— an image that Robert McChesney, one of the leading scholars on media and ethics, has called “entirely bogus.” (Pilger, 2007, ¶1)

Under this new corporate journalism, the news as well as opinions were dominated by “official” sources, specifically government and financial interests. (Pilger, 2007, ¶1). To exemplify this point is the journalistic role of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Judith Miller, writing for one of the most respected newspapers in the world, The New York Times. Because of the respectability of both the paper and Ms. Miller, her work was vital in promoting the United States invasion of Iraq.

Prior to the invasion, Miller wrote many articles, including her front-page article under the headline “Secret Sites; Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms” which told a story of knowledge of sites that were creating biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. (Rich, 2006, p. 40) These articles all confirmed Saddam’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction, backing up her journalism with seemingly reliable sources, and instilling fear in the minds of the worldwide readers of The New York Times. After the invasion of Iraq, it came to light that Miller’s primary source of information was a practitioner of fraud, Ahmed Chalabi, who was on his own political and economic mission, aligned with the Bush administration, to overthrow Saddam’s government.

Not only did Miller’s articles assist in “selling the war”, dissenting views were rejected from mainstream media. According to Mills (1869), a clear failure in the ethics of free speech occurs when a contradictory opinion is suppressed, the reason being that this contradictory opinion may be the truth, and if it is being censored, the truth of that message is being denied. The power structure “assumes that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.” (Mill, 1869, ¶ 2)

In February of 2003, then Secretary of State Collin Powell went before the United Nations, using Miller’s self-serving source, Chalabi, as a voice of the absolute truth. This is not surprising, based on Mill’s analysis of the denial of dissenting voices. Later that year, Chalabi was exposed and accused in the London based newspaper, The Telegraph, “of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington.” He said, “Information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator.” (Fairweather and La Guardia, 2004, ¶ 1)

The selling of the invasion of Iraq was an administrative propaganda ploy in which the mainstream, or corporate media, played a primary role while dissenting voices were silenced. FAIR (2003), or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, researched and presented statistics concluding that while the majority of U.S. citizens were hoping for their government to honor the United Nations Resolution and follow diplomacy, they were being bombarded by media messages that were banging the war drums. (FAIR, 2003) It is also essential to note that the images and voices of those promoting war were “officials”, and the manner in which the mainstream media presented the voices of anti-war activism was via biased images of nameless people on the streets, implying ignorance on the part of the messengers.

In addition to the absence of dissenting voices in mainstream media, other absences exist. These include the reporting of actions that change the power structure. Often fear, a charm of a seller for media, is used as a diversion tactic, as the threat of terrorism has been used against U.S. citizens post 9-11. If the public’s attention is diverted, the passing and signing of laws that give the powers that be further power encounter little to no opposition. An example of such a law that presently exempts the United States from Habeas Corpus and terms set forth in The Geneva Conventions is The Military Commissions Act, signed into law in October, 2006. According to this act, extraordinary rendition is an acceptable practice. On the same notorious day that this act was signed into law, President Bush also signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act. This act allows the President to declare public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. (Morales, 2006, ¶2) This act grants the government permission to declare and enforce marital law, stripping U.S. citizens of all of their freedoms. It is a true attack on the freedoms granted U.S. citizens based on their Constitutional rights, as it is all encompassing, and immensely threatening to democratic freedom in that it is widely interpretive.

According to Project Censored (2007), several other top stories that grant further and sometimes unlimited power to the present United States Government include AFRICOM, a revised and upwardly aggressive form of Former President Carter’s CENTCOM, founded in his ideology that “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” (Hunt, 2007, ¶ 3). This mission to colonize the oil regions of the globe is now in full throttle, and as Africa is the home of this essential resource, oil, the U.S. is putting the moves via a military presence on the continent. (Hunt, 2007, ¶ 3). This is occurring in “silence”, unbeknownst to the majority of U.S. citizens and bereft of their consent.

In her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , Naomi Klein (2007) stated that, “the administration quickly moved (post 9-11) to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through a radical vision of hollow government, in which everything from waging wars to reconstructing from those wars to disaster response became an entirely for-profit venture.” (Klein, 2007, ¶ 15)

According to Thomas Jefferson (1816), “No man can be both ignorant and free.” To be a free thinker in our consumer culture dominated by corporate media messages, it is essential that citizens seek out information, and ask the right questions regarding the information: “How are messages constructed? How messages are made sense of by audiences? What social, political and cultural effects do messages have? and “What has been left out of media messages?” (Jhally, 2007)

Linguistic scholar, Noam Chomsky (2007), is among other scholars in his reasoning that the risks for a citizen of a democratic society to be mentally controlled compared to a person living in a totalitarian society are higher by the nature of each. In a totalitarian society, it is clear that the message is that of the state, while in a democratic society, the boundaries are unclear. “This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty.” (Chomsky, 2007, ¶8 )

The internet offers hope in the challenging struggle to make and keep information available to all. Independent media is a media based on conscience, humanitarian voices, and strife towards truth via the subjective voices of many. If Mill were alive today, he would probably be a regular on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, he would most likely be a blogger, yet he most certainly would be monitoring the Federal Communications Commission like a hawk to assure freedom of speech and the protection of a healthy democracy. Although Mill could not have anticipated that the messages of corporations would dominate speech in the United States, he would surely recognize the biggest culprits, media conglomerates, such as News Corporation, Viacom, CBS, Disney, Time Warner, and General Electric, and the need to support Network Neutrality, which will keep the internet free of corporate control.




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