A Brief History Of Body Image

Body shame is not a new phenomenon

Before the invention of photography, art was the only method of visually documenting beauty. The voluptuous female form was celebrated by artists such as Titian (1485–1576), Rubens (1577–1640) and Rembrandt (1606–69). They painted women sporting body mass indexes that would have the 21st-century fat police out in force, however by the beginning of the 18th-century, a fuller female figure was no longer considered to be a sign of prosperity, fertility and good health. In fact, Rubenesque ripples were already seen as indelicate, overindulgent and a sign of working class origins.

It is difficult to believe that the modern equation of thinness with attractiveness predates media of any kind, but long before photography, poets such as Keats (1795–1821) and Shelley (1792–1822) had romanticized the notion that beauty, sensitivity and creativity were linked to physical frailty; in fact, it is suggested that Byron actually starved himself in order to look more poetic. Rossetti (1828–82) and the Pre-Raphaelites created a new aesthetic with their paintings of big eyed, pale skinned women with angular boney bodies. And in an ironic parallel with the anorexic appearance of the contemporary catwalk model, the thin tubercular woman with a consumptive gleam in her eye, pale skin and a feverish glow, came to embody the 19th-century ideal of beauty. Women dieted and tied their whalebone corsets ever tighter in an effort to ape the fashion for frail. Even Royalty could not escape. By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, aged just 18, she was obsessed with the idea that she was too stout. Indeed, her diaries reveal that her own mother had already warned her that she was in danger of being mistaken for a milkmaid. 

The Camera Always Lies

When Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1839, he changed the course of visual history. But being able to capture reality did not mean the media would choose to present it so. As photographic techniques have improved, photographers and directors have employed liberal quantities of artistic licence to stretch, graft, trim, tuck and smooth a beautiful, but wholly unrealistic image of what now constitutes female physical perfection.

 Ironically, in an effort to sustain the art director’s fantasy, real models have had to become thinner and thinner. In the mid-’70s, the average model weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today, the average model is 23% below average weight and the anorexic androgyny of Twiggy (5’ 8”, 44kg/97lb), which was shocking in the 1960s, is now the norm. The models that grace the covers of magazines represent the body type of approximately 5% of the female population, but women, particularly high achieving, or fashion conscious women, have been trying to hit a constantly decreasing target body weight for the past 50 years.

Though models are the human equivalent to a needle in a haystack, the power of media magnification has projected the fat-free few into public consciousness with such force, that this fractional minority now set the standard by which 95% of women judge themselves. As a result, 95% of the female population have dieted at some time and 50% of women are on a diet at this very moment. Viewed in the context of studies which show that calorific deprivation induces depression, anxiety and irritability, these statistics would suggest that right now, half of all women are too hungry to be happy, or healthy.

The Psychological Boomerang  

Although research repeatedly shows that high levels of exposure to fashion magazines leaves women feeling depressed, female masochism is alive and well and fueling the magazine market. Women have always been encouraged to transfer their ‘anxieties’ into ‘actions’ (buying clothes, using beauty products, dieting, joining a gym) and for the last 50 years, magazines have been the medium of choice for anyone selling a promise ‘guaranteed’ to make a woman look or feel better.  As a form of immediate therapy, it half works. If a woman wears a new dress, goes on a diet or applies a new perfume, and gets paid a compliment, she smiles, inside and out. But if no one notices any change, she feels that her efforts have failed. Though she remains the same person either way, she allows her perception of herself to either escalate, or plummet as a result of how other people react to her. Since her feelings about herself and the choices she makes are not supported by self-belief, she is at the mercy of other people’s likes, dislikes, moods or emotions. Negative feedback, regardless of accuracy, destabilizes her, and she then expends more time and energy searching for another way to ‘improve’ herself so that she can conform more closely to someone else’s idea of attractiveness.

The Media

In 1995 a group of teenage girls on the remote island of Fiji were introduced to television for the first time. After three years with TV, the girls who watched it the most, were 50% more likely to describe themselves as "too fat"; 29% scored highly on a test of eating-disorder risk. One girl said of the young women she watched on Beverly Hills 90210: "In order to be like them, I have to work on myself, exercising, and my eating habits should change."

The media has created such a currency out of appearance that many young girls grow up believing that good looks pay greater, and more immediate dividends, than hard work, or intelligence. The actress Jennifer Aniston is a good example. At about 5’ 6” tall and weighing 50kg (110lb), she went from girl next door good looking to international superstar. How did she do it? Simple. She went on a diet and lost 13.5kg (30 pounds), nearly a third of her current bodyweight. As Anniston says "I wasn't fat, I was just Greek. Greeks are round, with big asses and boobs", but she went on a diet because she was told by her agent, in no uncertain terms, that she was too big to get acting parts. 

Social media heightens these insecurities. Apps like Tik Tok, Instagram and Snapchat have become competitive platforms where young girls are made to feel ‘less than’ if their photos are not “liked” as much as their peers and almost one third of young people have experienced some form of appearance-related cyber-bullying. The continual pressure to be as, if not more, beautiful, interesting or fabulous than their friends creates a gnawing dissatisfaction and when the University of Salford did a study on social media’s effects on self-esteem and anxiety, they found that 50% of their participants said that their “use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter makes their lives worse”.  

The Consequences

It becomes increasingly difficult to present young women with a convincing argument that says self-respect is more important than self-flagellation, when the evidence against this statement appears to be so overwhelming. Who gets more column inches and bling-bling? Kim Kardashian, who made a sex tape and married Kanye West, or Malala Yousifazi who got shot in the head by the Taliban and became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.

We desperately need role models who are willing to give current media ideals the finger, but ‘famous’ women who don’t conform are routinely slaughtered in the press. When Debenhams, the department store, used a larger model for their SlimSuit campaign in 2011, the adverts received offensive comments on Facebook. And the Daily Mail’s ‘Sidebar of Shame’ regularly humiliates celebrities who dare to wear a bikini whilst sporting inadequacies such as cellulite, or tummy rolls.

Research from Durham university has shown that the size of models in photos exerts a powerful influence on female attitudes to body size. Hardly surprising then, that 53% of 13-year-olds are unhappy with their bodies and by the age of 17, 78% of girls are dissatisfied with the way they look. Exacting ideals of physical perfection have created a crisis of confidence amongst teenage girls who, from a very early age, battle their preoccupation with body shape, often in the company of mothers who are doing exactly the same thing.

 It was thought that anxieties about weight and shape developed in adolescence but more recent research is finding that they develop in childhood. Parents moaning about their own weight issues plays a big part in establishing ideas about optimum weight in young children and although eating disorders typically develop around adolescence, younger children who diet are at increased risk of developing an eating disorder. The current popularity of crash diets that involve cutting out whole food groups, such as carbohydrates, meat or dairy products, can have seriously detrimental effects on long-term physical health, but future consequences seem very unimportant to a vulnerable teenage girl with low self esteem.

It Affects Men Too

It is not just girls who are affected. The relationship between muscularity and perceived masculinity is nothing new, but in recent years there has been an unprecedented proliferation in excessively muscular male models. This is affecting the way men perceive their bodies. In a study where young men were asked to pick the male body type they think females would prefer, most chose a body type that carried 30lb (13.6kg) more muscle than the body most women chose as ideal for a man (Olivardia et al, 2004). No wonder anabolic steroid abuse has escalated so rapidly in recent years.

Even action toy figures aimed at young boys have bulked up so much they look like they are on steroids. A study that measured the physical dimensions of contemporary action figures and compared them with their original versions, found the circumferences of the neck, chest, arm, forearm, thigh and calf were significantly larger (Baghurst, Hollander, Nardella & Haff, 2006). Although men are relative newbies to the unique psychological pressure of negative body image, a study carried out by the Centre for Appearance Research, Succeed Foundation and Central YMCA (2012) found that one third of men would sacrifice a year of their life to achieve their ideal body.

We can’t go on like this.

In 2014, a nationwide survey by the Schools Health Education Unit of 58,000 school students revealed that only one in three 15-year-old girls has high self-esteem compared to 50% of boys in the same age group. An alarming 62% of 14-15 year olds, 53% of 12-13 year old girls and 33% of children aged 10-11 wanted to lose weight and a quarter of all 7 year old girls had tried to lose weight at least once. Other statistics from the ‘Reflections on Body Image’  All Party Parliamentary Group Report indicate that one third of young boys aged 8-12 are dieting, half of all 16 to 21-year-old women would consider cosmetic surgery and in the past 15 years eating disorders have doubled.

Clearly, we can’t go on like this. Body hatred is a boring, pointless, depressing trap that makes young people feel rubbish about themselves and their lives. Young women who waste time worrying about how they look are statistically less likely to be powerful in the workplace and are even less likely to vote.  Research conducted at Loughborough University found that eight-year-old girls had a similar level of activity to boys but only 31% of 14 year old girls said they exercised regularly, compared with 50% of 14-year-old boys. Many young women say they are too self-aware to exercise; many say they drink to feel comfortable with the way they look; 50% of girls smoke to suppress their appetite. Because these young women believe that value is measurably quantified by looks, they are disempowered by their own perceived lack of value.

There is now widespread recognition that something has to be done to build positive body image initiatives and personal resilience into the school syllabus. More also needs to be done to educate parents about the importance of sustaining positive body image in very young children. We need better research into how body dissatisfaction develops and whether public health messages about the importance of diet and exercise may have done more to hinder than to help. We are continually told that we are in the midst of an “obesity epidemic” which predicts a whole smorgasbord of diseases in later life, but the only advice given on how to counter this, is to “diet and take exercise”.   Psychotherapist and eating disorder specialist, Professor Susie Orbach, told the Parliamentary Inquiry that dieting tends to be seen as a solution to health and body image dissatisfaction concerns, but is in fact actually part of the problem. There is no evidence that diets based on calorie or food restriction work in the long term and girls who diet are 12 times more likely to binge eat so, young people who yo-yo diet are simply setting themselves up for failure by screwing up their metabolism.

Body dissatisfaction is a first world problem and if we didn’t have enough to eat it would, I’m sure, disappear almost entirely. However, in the absence of enforced rationing, we need to halt this damaging and self-perpetuating problem in its tracks. Women have achieved so much that it is literally unbelievable that we continue to allow this self-imposed masochism to undermine our health and our happiness to such a great extent.

Dr Suzi Godson
Psychologist and Tellmi Co-CEO