Hi!
This was a research paper that I wrote for my english class two years ago about the paradox of the fashion industry: how it praises natural beauty but at the same time it photoshops pictures and forces models to go on extreme diets. This goes along with this week's blog I'm writing about Fashion's Dark Side. Teenage girls see these false images and without knowing any better, they take it to heart and their self esteem plummets. I really enjoyed writing this paper, it is kind of long mind you, but I got a good grade on it and I feel it has some good information in it.
Logan Scandling
Cahlik
ENG
1304
25
April 2012
A Menace to
Society: The Fashion Industry Ideal
“Every 2
hours and 3 minutes, 1 youth commits suicide,” says Professor Keith King of
Health Promotion and Education at the University of Cincinnati (2). This shocking
statistic is caused by a multitude of reasons, such as problems at home or at
school, but in the case of teenage girls it is usually caused by a lack of
self-esteem. These teenage girls no longer feel adequate in their own skin. Barbie
dolls, fashion models, and perpetually photo-shopped advertisements in
magazines are attributed to this; they skew teenagers’ perception of beauty.
Because the fashion industry’s perception of beauty is different than
society’s definition, it over-exposes negative beauty ideas, an occurrence
which has created self -esteem issues and negative self- talk in teenage girls.
These issues have affected teens in three ways: they have led to unrealistic
body expectations, to eating disorders, and to suicide. Thus, the concept of beauty
needs to be defined and true beauty needs to be shown in the mass medias a way
to have true beauty be generally accepted and thus decrease negative self-
esteem.
When
teenagers are judged only on physical beauty, it can take a toll on them
mentally, which could drive them to try to fix this judgment physically.
Unfortunately, eating disorders are the most common way young teenagers try to
achieve the so-called “perfect” body. “Perfect looks are highly valued because
they symbolize success, happiness, and being loved and admired by others,”
(Yang). Because of this, rates of anorexia, bulimia and teen suicide are on the
rise due to a lack of self-esteem in teenagers. The exposure of this “perfect
body” is very overused in the fashion industry. Teens see this flawless picture
on the cover of magazines and then feel pressure from society to be like the
image on the cover. They thus resort to serious actions like those named above.
On the covers of magazines, on the runway, in commercials, this perfect body
image is practically bombarding teenagers’ minds multiple times a day. James
Gentry states, “Cultural norms in the United States dictate the
importance of being physically attractive, especially of being thin. The
emphasis on being physically attractive begins in infancy and continues
throughout childhood and adolescence” (1). Because teens see these images
repeatedly, they are trained to think these images are what one is supposed to
look like; that the images show what is considered beautiful. This negative
thinking brings down their thinking of themselves, which could cause them to do
something drastic in order to achieve the look that they believe society
considers beautiful.
Oxford Dictionary defines beauty as “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or
form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight”. This definition
is particularly intriguing because people are different; every one is going to
have a different perception of what is pleasing and what is not. Contrarily, the
fashion industry seems to think of beauty in only a physical way; it tends to
use tall, unhealthily skinny models with sickly pale or tan skin to show their clothing. Defining beauty by only physical
attributes is not a new phenomenon. Since before 3500 BC, when ancient
Mesopotamia was created, women have been thought only as objects and not as
human beings. Bethany Nelson, author of Leaving
Beauty Behind says:
“The objectification of
women takes shape in many different ways within various cultures, but across
cultural boundaries, one of the chief ways it occurs is through casting women
in the lens of an abstract ‘Beauty.’ If women are primarily ‘Beauties’, then
they are no longer primarily human, and are defined strictly by outside forces
that determine what beauty is... Walk into any convenience or grocery store and
you’ll see the evidence of our addiction to this. So many glossy magazine
pages, all screaming one thing: You need
to change yourself!” (5)
By
casting women in the category of “Beauties” people are not thinking of them as
actual human beings. It would be like calling all men “Handsomes”. Such
categorizing of both men and women implies that the thought process behind the
name is purely physical, almost as an object, and it has nothing to do with the
person’s mental intelligence, personality, belief system or emotions. This is
the reasoning behind why so many girls feel that they do not measure up to
society’s standards; they feel like they are being judged and thought of as
only an object.
Similarly, the article Body Weight and Beauty also talks about
the current differentiation of body types. “Unfortunately, today, beauty (and
the ideal body weight) is not exactly in the eye of the beholder, but in the
body image presented by the media and sold to a malleable public,” (Bonafini
65). Those words “malleable public” are a good way to describe current American
society. It is like America is a ball of clay, and the media, government, and
any other kind of big industry is shaping the clay into what they want. People
are spoon-fed bits of information and are receiving subliminal messages from
hundreds of places every day. The people don’t even know they are receiving
these bits of information. In this way, these groups are telling the people
what to buy, how to think, who to vote for in the coming election, where to eat
for lunch, where to buy their clothes, and things of the like. The media is
constantly portraying a body type that it considers normal, but in actuality is
quite abnormal. Lots of women do not grow 5’11’’ and to weigh 115 pounds like
the majority of the models on the runway. But because the fashion industry
promotes their wares with the editorials of the skinny and tall models, teenagers
feel like they must look like that in order to become beautiful in the eyes of
society.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Thomas
Leddy, an author for the British Journal
of Aesthetics, defines true beauty. “We do not
simply look at the hills and decide that they are beautiful with respect to
colour. In general beauty emanates from the whole scene. We cannot ultimately
separate the beauty with respect to colour from the beauty with respect to
other features. Beauty may, and generally does, apply in several irreducibly overlapping
and interrelated respects. Beauty, metaphorically, is a shining, which emanates
from the whole, and from its most inner nature,” (4). Leddy is saying that there
are many interrelated components of beauty that make the entire scene have
beauty. The hills are not beautiful just because of their physical color. He
does not say the painting of the hills was pretty because it was green. He said
the culmination of all of the other aspects along with color made it beautiful.
Similarly, I define true beauty in people as being greater than the sum of its
parts, meaning that the entire being is not beautiful if every other part of
the being is also not. The other parts are the inner being that no one sees,
the character, moral values, personality, etc., that make up the entire person.
If those parts are “ugly”, then the person will be too. True beauty is essentially
says that what is on the inside is what counts. Although that sounds cliché, it
is true. One cannot live one’s life based on physical beauty alone, because it
is only skin deep and it will fade with time.
Another example of true
beauty is found in the article, "Beauty: Soul Or Surface? in the Journal Of Cosmetic Dermatology. This
article discusses a story about a beautiful Croatian girl, Tena, who was very
beautiful and fell in love with a Czech soldier. After he left for war, she had
many affairs. Because “she was a person who lacked (contemporary) moral values-
all too easy if the admiration of all males around is obvious- and eventually,
she became a simple, egotistic beauty.” She then fell ill with smallpox, which
left scars all over her body. Naturally, because all of her affairs were based
strictly on her appearance, they all ended. She was deemed repulsive and ugly.
She had all but given up on life itself when her Czech soldier suddenly returned
from war. He had lost his arm and was declared an invalid- just like her. “They
met again and what began as a union of desperation of two invalids, developed
into a lasting and tender relationship based on deeper values than external
looks” (Fatović-Ferenčić). This parable is a great way to describe the detriments
of how society perceives physical beauty. Because physical beauty is so
fleeting, one should not rely on looks alone. One needs to be beautiful on the
inside. Thus, when the physical beauty is gone, the inner self can shine
through and the person can be truly beautiful.
The definition of true
beauty is not shown frequently in the industry of fashion, because it is exactly
what the title says - an industry. It is a center for jobs and professions, all
of which are a means to money. The fashion designers must make sure their
garments are made well and presented well, or they will not get sold in stores
and result in no money to pay rent and other bills. The easiest way to present
a look down the runway is on a very tall and slender frame, for this shows the
movement and the lines of the garment best. “‘[S]traight-size’ fashion models (i.e., those we typically
see in print advertisements and catalogues), wear a size two through size six,
while runway models are smaller and wear between a size zero to size four,
depending on each design season’s aesthetics” (Czerniawski). Designers must choose models that will show their
aesthetic pleasingly. If their look has lots of volume, texture, patterns or movement,
different body are required for the aesthetic. Some models will have to be
smaller than others to show the clothes better. Because of this fact, I don’t believe the fashion industry uses skinny models
to make the population feel bad about them selves on purpose, but I believe
that’s what it has come to. Because America places such an importance on
fashion, that unfortunately in turn places importance on every person’s
physical aspect. This is why we need to change what the fashion industry puts
on the covers of magazines.
The ramifications of using
thin models for runway shows and editorials go far beyond what the fashion industry
requires for aesthetics. Studies have shown that the fashion industry has led
teenagers to unrealistic body expectations by printing pictures of overly
perfect girls. “Fashion
serves as a cosmetic panopticon, shaping norms and expectation of physical
appearance. In this cosmetic panopticon, women face a universal pressure to
achieve this ideal at the risk of cultural rejection... Women must continually
toil over their bodies because they have internalized the sense that fashion
watches and judges them for their ability to match the ideal aesthetic,” (Czerniawski). The use of the author’s
word panopticon interested me greatly. Webster’s dictionary defines it as, “A
prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all
times, without being seen” and also as a “circular prison with cells
distributed around a central surveillance station.” The author is literally
saying fashion is a kind of jail. Her metaphor is that fashion is the command
post, and society is all around being influenced by it but not seeing the
influence. Any kind of jail is defined as “a state of confinement or captivity”
(Webster’s). Fashion is confining a teenager’s belief about her body into a box
that the industry has created.
Another ramification that has increased
with the overexposure of the perfect body is the rate of suicide. Teen girls
that have low self-esteem are at a high risk for suicide. Being constantly
bombarded by images of perfect girls from the fashion industry could drive a
girl to the brink. “Sex (gender) made an independent contribution to the
prediction of both suicide risk and violence risk- but in opposite ways, with
female sex contributing to the former and male sex contributing to the latter,”
(Becker 576). A psychiatric study was done of 487 different patients that compare
the suicide and depression rates of males and females and what factors affected
each sex the most. Daniel F Becker, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at
University of California, did this study. His results confirmed that when
teenagers had low self-esteem, it increased the risk for suicide. “For the
female subgroup, our model accounted for 63% of the variance in predicting
suicide risk, with only low self esteem and depression making significant
independent contributions” (Becker 576). Low self-esteem and depression
directly affected the risk of suicide in females aged 12-19. Unfortunately, the
fashion industry sends the message that normal women’s bodies are not worthy
enough to be praised like the bodies of models in the magazines are, which
affects teenagers’ self worth. The feeling of unworthiness is enough to drive
someone to do serious things.
The last consequence sweeping
the nation that is a result of the fashion industry’s overexposure of the
“perfect body type” is eating disorders. “Results showed that, while all three
domain measures predicted disordered eating (dieting, binge eating), physical
appearance perfectionism showed significantly higher correlations with
disordered eating than the other two perfectionism domains, suggesting that
physical appearance perfectionism may be an important factor when investigating
disordered eating,” said H Yang, of the Department of Psychology and Behavioral
Sciences of Zhejiang University. This research was a series of eight studies,
all which dealt with the validation of the Physical Appearance Perfectionism
Scale. In this study, they found out that eating disorders would be the result
of physical appearance perfectionism, which means striving for physical
perfection. The teenager would have seen so many of the photo- shopped
advertisements in this month’s Vogue that it drove them to want to be just like
those models and they would become anorexic, bulimic, go on a diet, or
something worse, like try to have weight loss surgery. But it isn’t just the
readers of these magazines that feel the pressure to be thin. It is the models
too. There is so much pressure from the industry to either keep the weight off
if you are a runway model or to maintain the weight if you are a plus size
model. If they waver off this path they have set for themselves, the pressure
from the industry drives lots of models to do unhealthy things to fix it.
“Complicating
this management of model physical capital, several of the models revealed past
disordered eating patterns (such as binge eating, compulsive exercising, or
yo-yo dieting). Mary, for example, a size fourteen fit model, spent most of her
adolescence loathing her body and tried dieting to correct this “defect”: ‘I even tried this crazy liquid diet and
wore little acupressure balls behind my ears. All I ate was a liter of milk and
mushy cabbage. After a month, I only lost twelve pounds, and I had to stop because
I was too weak to even move’” (Czerniawski
142).
This is such serious problem that is affects many models and
many teens in America. Unfortunately,
the fashion industry is doing nothing about it. If the fashion industry
implemented positive self talk instead of negative, I believe this problem
would be lessened.
If positive
self-talk was shown more throughout the media, I believe it would be beneficial
to many teenagers. If the media showed all kinds of bodies instead of just the skinny
and tall, many teenagers’ self- esteem and lives could be saved. “Affirmed
girls showed significantly greater body satisfaction and perceived
significantly less threat from having to rate their body shape and weight
compared with an equivalently active control group,” and “The findings provide
support for the unique effects of self affirmation on girls’ body satisfaction
thereby isolating one active ingredient of programs to increase body
satisfaction and identify a potential mechanism for understanding self
affirmation effects,” (Armitage 1). I believe that talking positively about the
body, instead of always pointing out the negatives, will help self-esteem.
Pointing out the positives, or talking about the parts of the body that the
girl does like, will make her feel better rather than just putting her down and
pointing out the things she already has a mental problem with. Fashion models
of differing sizes should be put on the runways to give girls a better ideal to
compare themselves to, rather than just to skinny, tall girls. The definition of
true beauty also needs to be implemented in the world, by advertisement and by
other means. Teenagers need to know that not everything depends on the physical
aspect of a person.
The fashion
industry is creating problems with teenager’s self esteem by overexposing the
photo- shopped perfect body and the same body type in runway models. Because of
this, there has been a rise in unrealistic body expectations, in suicide rates,
and in eating disorders. These negative reactions begin with low self-esteem
from the constant media bombardment with these images. I believe that if the
definition of true beauty was better taught and advertised to teenagers, these
rates would drop. Also, if positive self-talk was encouraged and even taught in
school, this affirmation could help with these unfortunate problems. If we do
not fix the way the fashion industry is promoting body image and negative body
talk, the low self esteem, depression and suicide rates will only climb. “Every 2 hours and 3 minutes, 1 youth commits suicide,”
said Professor Keith King. I hope that someday that number is many days apart,
instead of only two hours.
Works
Cited
Armitage,
Christopher J. "Evidence That Self-Affirmation Reduces Body
Dissatisfaction By Basing Self-Esteem On Domains Other Than Body Weight And
Shape." Journal Of Child Psychology
& Psychiatry 53.1 (2012): 81-88. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 Apr.
2012.
Bonafini,
B. A., and P. Pozzilli. "Body Weight And Beauty: The Changing Face Of The
Ideal Female Body Weight." Obesity
Reviews 12.1 (2011): 62-65. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 Apr. 2012
Czerniawski,
Amanda M. "Disciplining Corpulence: The Case Of Plus-Size Fashion
Models." Journal Of Contemporary
Ethnography 41.2 (2012): 127-153. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Apr.
2012.
Fatović-Ferenčić, S., M.-A.
Dürrigl, and K. Holubar. "Beauty: Soul Or Surface?." Journal Of Cosmetic Dermatology 2.2
(2003): 82-85. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Apr. 2012.
Gentry, James
W., and Martin, Mary C.. "Stuck in the model trap: the effects of
beautiful models in ads on female pre-adolescents and adolescents." Journal
of Advertising. Summer 1997: 19+. Academic OneFile. Web. 27 Mar.
2012.
Leddy,
Thomas. "Sparkle and
shine." The British Journal of Aesthetics 37.3 (1997): 259+. Academic
OneFile. Web. 21 Apr. 2012.
King,
Keith A., Catherine M. Strunk, and Michael T. Sorter. "Preliminary
Effectiveness Of Surviving The Teens® Suicide Prevention And Depression
Awareness Program On Adolescents' Suicidality And Self-Efficacy In Performing
Help-Seeking Behaviors." Journal Of
School Health 81.9 (2011): 581-590. Academic Search Complete. Web. 9 Apr.
2012.
Merriam-Webster “Prison." Merriam-Webster.
Web. 23 Apr. 2012. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prison.
Nelson, Bethany.
"Leaving Beauty Behind." Mutuality
18.1 (2011): 4-7. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 Apr. 2012
Oxford Dictionary. "Beauty." Definition
for Beauty. Web. 12 Apr. 2012. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/beauty?region=us
Websters. "Dictionary - Definition
of Panopticon." Webster's Online Dictionary. Web. 23 Apr. 2012. http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definitions/Panopticon.
Yang, Hongfei, and Joachim
Stoeber. "The Physical Appearance Perfectionism Scale: Development And Preliminary
Validation." Journal Of
Psychopathology & Behavioral Assessment 34.1 (2012): 69-83. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 12 Apr. 2012
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