By Rowan
McArthur
The body often
shows us the physical manifestation of the brunt of our physical, emotional and
spiritual exploitation under capitalism. Just as a worker in a factory may be
cursed at by their bosses for not working fast enough because of pain in their
hands and backs from hours of repetition, so too do we get cursed and abused by
capitalism for our bodies’ physical
manifestations of the exploitation we experience in our everyday lives.
Everywhere we
look we see the image of the ‘perfect
body’, an emaciated
body is projected onto us by this exploitative system as a way to repress the
majority who cannot conform. An emaciated body, representing the emotional,
spiritual, mental and physical hunger we all experience under an economy based
on exploitation and profit, rather than human need. A body that everyone wants
but no one can achieve; for this body is not real. Just as the body on the
billboard advertising the latest fashion, has been warped, cropped and coloured
to trick us into believing that the emaciated and sick is beautiful, so too
does capitalism warp, crop and colour our exploitation to blind us of the
reality of this sick and corrupted system. This body dominates our thoughts and
conversations as well as those who judge us by it. It dominates how we feel
about ourselves. It dominates our television screens and creates huge amounts
of profit for fashion, weight loss clinics, pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic
surgeons and other parasitical industries feeding off the vulnerable. This body
represents perfectly the unsustainable system which dominates our world, but
sadly it also represents the domination and emotional hunger experienced in
many people’s lives.
This is the
tyranny of slenderness!
This emaciated
body has not always been the ideal for women to conform to. There was a time
under capitalism that a curvaceous woman was the picture of beauty. So why has
this changed? Why do so many women strive for the pre-pubescent, boyish figure
which we are brainwashed into thinking is normal for a grown woman? Why do
almost all women think that a size 12 is fat? Why are most women not happy with
the way they look? Why do we live in a society where people starve themselves
to death or eat themselves into oblivion?
There are so
many places to point the finger too, but more than often we point it ourselves
or at one another rather than pointing it at those who impose their ideologies
upon us for their own benefit. How often do we judge those people walking down the
street who do not fit in the box of a ‘healthy weight’? All too often there are snide remarks and laughter
which follow those who are overweight or gasps and looks of horror at those who
no longer eat. Both those who eat to a point of excess and those who starve
themselves are representing the lack of control we have over our lives. Some
people feel that the only thing they can control is what they eat and so when
they realise they cannot control any other aspect of their lives they restrict
themselves from participating in one of the fundamental acts of keeping
ourselves alive.
The anxiety
girls and women experience from feeling unattractive is arguably one of the
most pervasive and damaging consequence of advertising and mainstream media.
Only one body type is almost always presented in the media and in
advertisements -- that of a very tall,thin woman -- a woman who would meet the
criteria for anorexia as 15% below normal weight. In reality, this unhealthy
body shape is unattainable for 99% of women.
Eating disorders
are a symptom of a sick society. A
society that celebrates thin women in the media, advertising, film and
chastises women deemed overweight. 'A WOMAN can't be too rich or too thin.' So
said the Duchess of Windsor, and so says every fashion and beauty magazine,
every television ad, every weight loss centre and even many families, friends
and doctors.
The most
well-known eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, is the third most common chronic
illness among young women. Anorexic women suffer from the perception that they
are overweight, when they are in fact often dangerously thin. Other common
eating disorders include bulimia nervosa, in which a person binges and then
purges themselves (usually by self-induced vomiting), and binge eating, in which
a person cannot control their desire to overeat. While some men experience
eating disorders, over 90% of people with them are women.
Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth (1990) powerfully documents the effects of the
unattainable body ideal on women's physical and mental health, and indicts the
fashion, cosmetics and plastic surgery industries, which benefit from women's
misery to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
These profits
are made by creating a deep sense of dissatisfaction amongst millions of women
about their bodies, a dissatisfaction that is growing with the growing gap
between the 'ideal' body and reality.
Media images do
have a powerful effect, but they are also continually reinforced in everyday
life. Comments on women's appearance are so commonplace and accepted that we
can underestimate the effect they have on how women see themselves.
These powerful
media images indicating a thin women is a good women are affecting people at a
younger and younger age. In some disturbing statistics presented by the British
journal of psychology half of three to six-year-old girls say they worry about
being fat. By the age of seven, 70 per cent of girls want to be thinner. By
nine, half have been on a diet. For girls aged between 11 and 17, it’s their number one wish in life. This
may seem surprising, but when you think of the images seen in advertising,
billboards, magazines, films and TV which glorify and focuses on thin actors,
actresses, models and other ‘successful’ and ‘important’ figures it doesn’t seem so surprising after all.
In a study of
children’s movies and
books for messages about the importance of appearance, media targeted for
children were heavily saturated with messages emphasizing attractiveness as an
important part of relationships and interpersonal interaction. Among the movies
used in the study, two Disney movies contained the highest amount of messages
about personal beauty. This study also found 64% of the videos studied
portrayed obese characters as unattractive, evil, cruel, unfriendly, and more
than half of the portrayals involved the consideration or consumption of food.
Representation
of overweight individuals in prime time programming is not representative of
the actual proportion in the population. Only 14% of females and 24% of males
featured in the top ten prime-time fictional programs of 2003 were overweight.
Those that were shown had few romantic interactions, rarely shared affection
with other characters, and were frequently shown consuming food.
Many times, even
these "beautiful" women are deemed not good enough for
advertisements. Photographs are airbrushed or otherwise altered to remove any
lines, bumps, or lumps - anything less than "perfection." If the
ideal of beauty is physically unattainable, then consumers will never be able
to attain the image they want, and therefore there will be an endless demand
for new beauty products.
This is the
reason for the incredible proliferation of the weight-loss, fashion, and
cosmetics industries, which are among the largest and most profitable consumer
industries.
As a result, the
millions of women and girls who are unable to reach this standard of beauty
feel a sense of failure, shame, and guilt. In 1984 a survey of 33thousand woman
was taken showing that most women would choose loosing 5 to 7kg over success in
work as their most desired goal. This clearly shows how this desire to be thin
infiltrates out from women’s
individual lives into the advancement of their careers, participation in their
unions and the political arena. Naomi Wolf describes dieting as the most potent
political sedative in women’s
history. The concern about weight leads to a virtual collapse of self-esteem
and sense of effectiveness in women’s lives.
This change in
perception of women’s ideal body
came into being as a dominant feature of women’s everyday lives can be linked to women’s liberation movement of the 60s and
70s. The Women’s liberation was leading to a more assertive,
politically clear, self-confident woman, the opposite traits of women concerned
about their weight. What Naomi Wolf describes as caloric restriction was a
means to take the oomph out of our desires to be treated as equal and has
warped the struggle for our liberation from a mass movement into an individual
struggle against our own bodies.
The distorted,
unattainable, sexist mass images are a product of the exploitation of women as
wage workers, unwaged domestic labourers and sex objects. They are an
inevitable consequence of (and prop for) a system in which those with power
benefit from the exploitation of women in the home and the workplace.
Undermining women's self-confidence not only keeps them buying more and more
products in their struggle to attain an ideal, but also helps to keep them from
challenging their roles.
Campaigns to change
the images without changing the social conditions which produce them and give
them their power can advance things only so far. Legislation to ban particular
types of advertisements, or regulating the size and shape of fashion models,
doesn't challenge the basis upon which it is so lucrative for industries to use
such images to sell their products.
The most
effective way to combat sexist images is to develop a mass movement which aim
to change women's unequal living conditions in a whole range of spheres and out
of which alternative images, will develop. This will also challenge the nuclear
family structure, the unpaid work in the home which the majority of women
undertake and the pay gap between women and men. But further than this women’s liberation cannot be achieved by women
alone, it has to be a part of a working class movement, intent on creating
equality for all oppressed groups not just for women. A working class movement
is the only way to completely topple and smash this tyranny of slenderness!
[An image of Broadsheet, New Zealand's pioneering left-wing feminist journal. The women's liberation generated a whole array of radical publications, theories, and organisations.]
