Dangerous obsession

September 10,
By SANDY NAIMAN
Toronto Sun

For too many young girls today, you are what you don't eat. A new Canadian study of 1,739 Ontario girls between the ages of 12 and 18 published last week in The Canadian Medical Association Journal confirms an alarming trend -- 27% have "disordered eating attitudes and behaviours," such as bingeing, self-induced vomiting and abuse of diet pills.

Consumed by their own body-consciousness, inescapable in our western "culture of thinness," many adolescent girls won't get into bathing suits, swim or even eat in front of boys, one 14-year-old explained recently.

"None of my friends do -- you just don't," she says. "I don't know why, but it's just not done."

This body dissatisfaction is becoming increasingly prevalent, almost a norm, in adolescence. Young women, more than men, too often grow up with a skewed self-image, a fun-house mirrored gaze, a constant sense of being observed. This picture is often mentally manipulated, just as the omnipresent idealized images of ultra-thin women in today's media are often electronically manipulated.

"If you look at civilized society, we've always idealized physical beauty," explains University of Vermont psychologist James Rosen, who has surveyed 3,000 adolescents about their bodies and eating habits.

This increase in body dissatisfaction among young women is fuelled by our cultural emphasis on physical appearance, fitness and, most of all, a lean body shape. Cosmetic surgery, on the rise in adolescents, is further evidence of this trend.

"Body dissatisfaction is a common experience today," he notes. "Women often catalogue their body parts and focus on what they like and don't like."

"I like some aspects of my body, but I think I'm fat," says Dana Lyons, 17, a Toronto OAC student, who is 5-foot-7 and weighs 119 lbs. "I don't think my stomach is skinny enough, or my thighs," she says. "And my feet are gross. But I like my wrists and arms because they're skinny."

Lyons (not her real name) wears a size 2 and admits, "I'm self-conscious about my body, frequently, but not all the time. It depends on the day." "We all grow up looking at other women's bodies," says Joan Crisler, a psychologist at Connecticut College in New London.

"Women have always been on display -- in museums, where there are far more studies of female bodies undressed, and in movies, where there are constantly more naked women than men."

'PERCEPTUAL PROBLEM'
Young girls, growing up faster than ever before, are picking up on this ubiquitous trend to thinness.

"It's a perceptual problem, striving to reach an ideal," says Crisler. "The whole point of an ideal is that you never get there. If too many people approximate that ideal, it will change.

"We start to think about ourselves as others see us, rather than how we experience ourselves," she says. "No wonder women lose their voices in adolescence. They're so focused on the outer, they're afraid to express the inner."

Weaned on Sesame Street and reading Seventeen from the ages of 10 or 11, adolescent girls "are tuned into the subliminal and superliminal messages of the media (which is) everywhere today," says Michael Levine, a psychologist and media activist with a 15-year-old daughter at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Here are the "in-your-face" messages they absorb: Beauty is a woman's principal project in life. Slenderness is crucial for success and goodness. Image is really substance. Women are naturally self-conscious and anxious about, and bound up with, their bodies. Fat is a transparent sign of personal responsibility for weakness, failure and helplessness.

A willing and winning woman can transform and renew herself through the technology of fashion, dieting and rigorous exercise.

"They tend to set up a conditioning that facilitates negative body imaging and a strange relationship with one's body," Levine states. "If you want a recipe for the loss of who you are as a person, focus on boys, mirrors, size and scales."

Linda Smolak, a psychology professor specializing in media literacy at Kenyon College, explains that young people don't fully understand how manipulative the media is. "Once they do, you get them angry. Then the media are only part of the problem. Activating them is another."

Smolak encourages girls to write letters to companies about unrealistic images, and though it's not clear whether this helps their body image, it makes them feel less helpless.

"Though it doesn't help them give up dieting," she admits, "these campaigns can help change advertising."

Imagine how young Canadian girls will feel watching Global TV's new Survivor-style series Search For The Supermodel, aimed specifically at a diminishing teenage viewership, says Loren Mawhinney, Global's VP of Canadian production.

"The concept has proven itself (with last season's enormously popular Popstars and a successful Australian pilot of Supermodel) and we're picking up on a commercial trend because it's our job to generate audience," says Mawhinney, who has a 12-year-old daughter.

We're not choosing a supermodel, we're following the Ford Model Agency process in choosing a supermodel, getting to know a group of 16- to 21-year-old gawky girls in heels."

When Global launched its new prime-time line-up in June, Mawhinney said, "The appeal of the show is in the backstage gossip, the in-fighting that goes on behind the scenes. There are heroes and anti-heroes, like in Survivor."

In a Toronto Sun interview, she added, "We'll hate this one and root for that one. It will be an eight-part docu-soap about the making of a model. It's not about body image."

ALL ABOUT IMAGE
But unlike Popstars, which demanded a certain degree of talent from its competitors, isn't Supermodel all about image?

Michael Geddes, Supermodel and Popstars producer, is convinced the show will "debunk the mythology around modelling and be entertaining and enlightening.

"If issues of body image or anorexia come up, I'm sure the Ford Agency will deal with it," he says. "It's about dreams coming true, not a runway show. It will travel home with these girls. But we don't know how it will unfold. It's a reality show ... edited reality."

People forget there are many ways to see the same program, says Kristen Harrison, a communications professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she specializes in body image, media and adolescents. "What's gripping, reality-based TV entertainment for adults may have a different impact on younger audiences. We have evidence that by virtue of a person being on TV, they're automatically idealized," she says. "There's absolutely no doubt and there's lots of evidence to support the fact that exposure to ideal body images has negative effects on adolescent girls' satisfaction with their own bodies and their emotions."

Furthermore, most adolescent girls and college women don't realize that photos of models in magazines are touched up and that their bodies are modified, says University of South Florida psychologist J. Kevin Thompson, a specialist in body image, media influences and risk factors.

"They compare their appearance and suffer because it's not a valid comparison," he says. "Only one in 200 women look like the average-size model, and the average size is an anorexic size at 5-foot-9 or 5-foot-10 and 105 or 110 lb."

This obsession with body image starts very early with media advertising, he says. "It's conceived to make people feel so unhappy, they'll go out and buy cosmetics, clothes, diet plans and foods.

If we were happy with the way we looked, we wouldn't have the angst to drive us to spend all this money."