Body Image Campaigns: Calling To Action The Unrealistic Depiction Of The Female Body

Our culture predominately conveys women in the media as slender, their makeup, hair and clothing up-to-date with the latest fashions and all of this is achieved with little to no effort. Of course, this image is unrealistic, and distorted. Even though a little outdated, The Dove Campaign calls to action this distorted depiction, "The campaign started a global conversation about the need for a wider definition of beauty after the study proved the hypothesis that the definition of beauty had become limiting and unattainable. Among the study's findings was the statistic that only 2% of women around the world would describe themselves as beautiful." The video above shows a women makeup-free and the steps it takes for her look 'perfect' for an advertisement. 

Amanda Czerniawski of The Society Pages, praises this advertisement and critiques how this image of the 'perfect' women in the media creates many social implications in that a women can look 'beautiful' if she has enough money for cosmetics, surgery and the latest diet fads. Czerniawski states, "We invest in and manipulate our bodies and engage in body regimes to cultivate our physiques, often towards unattainable goals of perfection. We become subjects (in the Foucauldian sense) to our own projects of becoming, as we police ourselves and internalize a normalizing gaze." To add on to this, it also shows that there is an issue of health inequality to obtain this image. Many individuals are too busy working (may even have multiple jobs), being a parent and other stressors that eating healthy and exercising isn't on the top of their list. Furthermore, it is very expensive to eat healthy, 'organic' foods. 

Girls Scouts of the USA released a body image campaign in 2010. The campaign was created after the Girls Scouts Research Institute study found, "Some alarming things about how images of fashion models and other media representations of women's bodies affect the self image of the girls consuming them." Furthermore, the campaign believes that the representations of women in the media will not change until we change our cultural ideas about what is considered beautiful. 

I found this campaign more important and speaks to the most important demographic, young girls. Girls are constructing their gender roles and images in the media seem to have a stronger effect on girls than older women. Jennings et al (1980) research examines influence of televised commercials on women's self-confidence and independent judgement. From a social psychology perspective  the research found that, "By college age, women have already internalized the traditional feminine stereotypes  which are ubiquitous in our culture...this research strongly implies that even if women do not buy the advertised products, they buy the implicit image of femininity conveyed by the commercials, whether they know it or not." (Jennings et al, 1980: 204)

Resources: The Society Pages, The Dove Beauty Campaign, Girls Scouts of the USA, Feministing, Jennings et al. (1980)