I’m going to assume that most people know the dangers of body image and what it can do to men and women alike if it is not a healthy one. After searching the Internet, I came across two pieces of slam poetry that really caught my attention and made this issue even more clear. The first, titled Skinny, portrays a young girl describing her feelings about how she looks and what she should eat or not eat. She explains the struggle to hide one’s insecurities and pretend that you’re happy yet still understand that the body that you have is not good enough.
Today, girls are presented with such opposing views that it is nearly impossible to be comfortable and satisfied in one’s skin. Women in magazines, photos, music videos, and on television tell a very different story than do those people that say “stay true to yourself, don’t change how you look for anyone. Be yourself and be healthy and you will be happy.” Unfortunately, that is not really how it works for many girls today.
As Dodie Clark explains in her Skinny slam poetry, “They say be healthy be happy and I am neither.” How is it possible for girls to feel happy about their bodies when they are only able to see images of perfectly sculpted women in the media. Their mental image of what is “healthy and happy” will ultimately prove to be different than what their actual body looks like. Aerie’s Real Campaign is trying to target this exact problem by vowing to stop retouching their models in order to embrace the natural female body and its beauty without enhancements. It is a way to show other girls that they can look beautiful without looking perfectly skinny.
The statistics shown below can further explain this phenomenon and how it is affecting girls, especially at a very young age. Once these ideas are instilled in these girls at young ages, it can make it a lot more difficult to change the way that they see themselves or others.
A second slam poetry that explains this growing problem is titled Shrinking Women by Lily Myers. It explains how she was brought up by a woman who subconsciously had been shrinking herself in order to allow her husband to grow – both physically and emotionally. Myers goes on to describe how she has noticed these nuances in the way that her mother eats and speaks compared with that of her father, and she sees how these characteristics have already begun planting themselves in her brother as well as herself. She expresses how it is nearly impossible to not pick up on these habits when you are around them every day. This only goes to show how influential the media can also be in this problem because it is a facet of every day life for a lot of people, yet it does very little to portray what an average woman really looks like.
Finally, I came across a photographer whose newest project includes that of women “au natural”, that is to say that they are photographed with their arms in the air and with completely unshaven armpits. In order to do the shoot, the women had to grow out the hair under their arms for a certain length of time. The photographer, Ben Hopper, is trying to breakthrough the societal “norm” that has been created in order to show how armpit hair can be beautiful. Although his photographs do not explicitly show this, it is possible to bring his idea into other facets of the female body as well.
Do you think that something should be done in the media to change this ever-growing body image problem? Do you see this problem beginning to occur for boys and men too?