Media Analysis: Socio-cultural Issues and Eating Disorders
I chose two controversial topics to focus on for this media analysis. The advertisement I chose has been popping up throughout the UK (which has now band it) and the US, and has drawn a lot of attention. The video I am going to critique is a music video, to which the images and lyrics are both pertinent. I chose these two pieces of media because they are at two different ends of the spectrum of different types of body shaming, the commonly known fat shaming, and the less common and underrated skinny shaming.
I feel that it is important to cover both topics because both largely exist in our society and the resolution is quite easy, that is to not shame anyone about their body. The advertisement I chose is a large yellow billboard with a fair skinned, fair-haired woman, who is typically skinny with curves and a tiny waist. She is wearing a yellow bikini, standing with her shoulders pushed back and legs separated; emphasizing her breasts, slim waist and slim legs. Across the billboard reads “ARE YOU BEACH BODY READY?” and underneath is a weight loss protein powder line being advertised. My first reaction to the image of this beautiful woman plastered on the billboard was “wow I wish I looked like that”. After internalizing how this poster made me feel it just made me mad, because it is telling women that there is only one perfect body type, and that you have to use a weight loss supplement to reach these near unachievable goals. I think these ads are dangerous; they are leading you to believe that you can look like this slender but toned model by taking an appetite suppressant.
This is a lie. First of all to achieve a body type similar to this model not only takes years in the gym and healthy eating, but also depends on the bone structure of your body, which can only be changed surgically. Secondly, to tone your muscles you must be able to build muscle and replenish it, which you cannot do if you follow the guidelines of this product. I decided to do a little research about the product to see what the product actually is. The protein world website, which is where this product is sold, details that the weight loss protein shake is less than 143 calories per serving and can be used to replace two meals a day. Looking at the government of Canada’s daily food recommendation an inactive person needs at least 2500 calories a day. If you replace two meals a day with this protein shake and have two servings per meal replacement you are only sitting at an average of 900 calories.
This is before your real food meal, meaning you would have to consume about 1600 calories in a meal and this is not considering the daily food servings guide or the amounts of oils and fats you should be consuming daily. This is promoting an unhealthy way to become skinny and I too have been a victim of these meal replacement supplements in my high school years. These types of ads breed ignorance and self-confidence issues, which in turn will lead to women and especially impressionable young girls to take alternative methods of eating disorders of becoming skinny when these supplements do not work the way they wanted them too. Lastly, I think that this ad and ads similar to it cause bullying. Children bully their classmates for many reasons including looks and weight, whether it is to make themselves feel better or because they really believe that there is only one perfect “beach body”. I think that bullying is a common cause of eating disorders because it puts an idea into the bullied child’s head telling them they need to be self-conscious about their body when they may or may not have been so before. This causes them to want to change their body in an unhealthy way, to meet someone else’s standards or the standards of this ad.
The music video I decided to critique is “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor. There are a few aspects that I take issue with in this music video, the first one being that she skinny shames, a lot. In her lyrics she says, “Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches”, enforcing a stereotype that attractive slim girls are “bitches”, Trainor then goes on to say that she is joking and “I know you think you’re fat. But I’m here to tell you… Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top. ” Yet again enforcing another stereotype that all skinny girls are self-conscious and think they are fat, but also contradicting herself in other parts of her lyrics. She is saying that she is kidding and that skinny girls are perfect too, but then earlier on in her song she says “It’s pretty clear, I ain’t no size two, but I can shake it, shake it, like I’m supposed to do”.
As if women who are less curvy, and do not have certain features such as; a large behind, large breasts and or hourglass figure are any less of a woman than those who look like this. This could possibly cause women to incur eating disorders that are not discussed as much such as binge eating/compulsive overeating to gain weight, or even using alternatives such as waist trainers to tighten their waist making it smaller over time. She continues by saying that she got “All the right junk, in all the right places”, saying that there are certain places you should carry more weight and if you have it in those place then you are “right” and if not you are wrong. I feel like the intention of this song should have been to move the focus from “fat shaming” and to promote healthy bodies, but instead she lost that positivity and stooped down to shaming skinny women.
I think this song instead of saying one or the other body type is “right” or wrong should have focused on promoting healthy living. Recently the focus has moved from fat shaming to glorifying obesity and on the other end of the scale, the unhealthily skinny. We want to make all people feel loved, so now we are trying to promote that there is no one perfect body type, but that we are all perfect. This is simply naïve. In regards to this video they have cast a larger man, I do not know how much he weighs and I do not know if he has medical problem or eating disorder, but in my opinion he looks overweight, in a video that is telling us that all our bodies are perfect. We should not be conveying messages saying that obese or anorexic people are “perfect” too, not that we should be shaming them either, but we should be spreading awareness of the severity of these conditions and eating disorders and the tolls they can take on your body.
What I also found interesting is that there is a scene in the video where Meghan Tailor is sitting at a table with a man and the table is filled with cupcakes and candy along with the lyrics “My mama, she told me, ‘don’t worry about your size’ ”, again enforcing unhealthy eating habits, as if you should not worry about the kind of food you are putting in your body. The last part of the music video that really rubs me the wrong way is that she talks a lot about what boys like about girl’s bodies. I thought the message of this song is that all our bodies are perfect, not only the bodies that boys like? In the first verse of her song she sings “Cause I got that boom, boom, that all the boys chase. And all the right junk in all the right places”, promoting that she is better because boys like her body type, and that means that we should all become what boys like?
Enforcing certain body images and eating disorders, by placing importance on what kind of body a man wants a woman to have. She then goes on to say “Yeah, My mama she told me ‘don’t worry about your size’, she say’s ‘boys like a little more booty to hold at night’. You know I won’t be no stick figure silicone Barbie doll”, reinforcing that we should decide what body type we want to have based on what men are attracted to, whether that is to gain or lose weight, it is disrupting your eating habit for an unhealthy reason. She continues on to insult skinny women again by suggesting that they are fake silicon Barbie dolls and too skinny as if all skinny women are from the same cookie cutter image. To me it seems like she is going as far to suggest that curvy or heavier women have their own individuality, but slim women do not. ReflectionI think western culture has had a large impact on the increase of eating disorders because it has directly changed our standards of what we consider beautiful.
For example there were eras in the past that favoured women who were more plump and curvy, because it showed signs of wealth, health or fertility; such as ancient Greece and up to as recently as the 1950’s, the time of Marilyn Monroe, but this was before the western technological advances and the rise of capitalism. Not to say that technology or capitalism is bad, but now we are able to spread information much more easily, and the people who are creating our new body “ideals” only care about the number on their pay cheque, and not so much about women’s confidence. My interpretation of how the western world came to glamorize unhealthily slim figures starts off around World War 2, I think that naturally, because of rationing, women became skinnier and in a turn advertising of women modelling clothes etc. , were also skinnier. From there I believe that designers could see that their clothing presented or hung better on slimmer statures. In reading this article about why models are so slim, the former editor of Australian Vogue Kirstie Clements said that designers kept sending samples in smaller and smaller sizes (Clements, 2013). At this point western media is starting to influence women and men’s preference of body images, and there was a realization that there was a demand for something that would help promote weight loss such as; dieting, appetite suppressants and other modes of marketable weight loss products.
These products start to become very popular, with hundreds of different brands, options and medicinal ingredients being advertised on the internet and being supported by well known influencers such as Dr. Oz who raved about Garcinia Gambogia appetite suppressant. From there we have all these different “easy” weight loss solutions circulating in magazines, newspapers, internet advertisements, billboards, tv commercials etc. , and I think instinctually we tend to take the easy way out. In my personal experience, I tried the Garcinia Cambogia appetite suppressant pills when I was in high school. They made me feel tired and weak, but did not do much to help me lose weight and as a result this lead to me becoming anorexic. I was obsessed with being skinnier and in my mind that was the only way I could succeed. Fortunately, I had good friends who noticed what was going on in my life and encourage me to begin working on my body in a healthier manner. I began eating healthier and started to work out at the gym with my friends.
Unfortunately, there are days that I still feel the pressures of our society to look a certain way, but I have become much happier and accepting of the fact that I am much healthier now than I would be by trying to reach unrealistic goals for my body type. Western culture will always have an impact on eating disorders unless we change what our message is. It is interesting because even though I have always been an athletic/slim stature growing up I remember wishing that I could be shorter, slimmer or have a larger “thigh gap”, naturally my mom would tell me that I am perfect, but I would then hear her talk about how she was unsatisfied with her body and wished she was slimmer. I always thought it was so hypocritical. How can you expect young girls or boys to believe their parents when they tell them they are perfect and don not need to form to societies expectations, when parents are also succumbing to these pressures. It is unfortunate because the culture is really targeting children now, many models are under the age of 18 and are pressured by their agencies to lose weight when they are already very slim, Kirstie Clements commented that models are often scolded by agencies if they gain even a little bit of weight (Clements, 2013).
It is becoming more common among children that dance, as shown in the study of Socio-cultural factors in the development of anorexia nervosa; it reports that anorexia nervosa is more common among women who are models or dancers (Garner & Garfinkel, 1980). I would even go as far to say that this also applies to dance academies for children.
When I was a child I had dance classes at the National Ballet School, community classes that you had to audition for, submit your height, weight and other measurements. At the time I did not think about it much because I was only 10, and even then I was aware that ballerinas had to have a certain body type. It is absolutely absurd, why do they need measurements of such young children? It is not as if we are auditioning to be principal dancers of the company, or even to attend as full time students. And it is so wrong that a child would think it is “normal” to be asked their measurements to be allowed to learn how to dance.
Thinking now of how long children spend looking at phone screens, tablet screens, tv screens and computer screens I would imagine that they are even more influenced by body image and eating disorders than when I was a child. In the study ‘Eating behaviours and attitudes following prolonged exposure to television among ethnic Fijian adolescent girls’, they studied two groups of girls about 16-17, one group from 1995 and one from 1998. Fiji was chosen because they had low eating disorder rates and specifically Nadroga, a province in Fiji, because up until 1995 not many people had televisions, which meant low exposure rates (A. Becker, R. Burwell, S. Gilman, D. Herzog, P. Hamburg, 2002). The results of this study showed that there was an increase in what is commonly classed as disordered eating. The 1998 population group showed that after an extended amount of time being exposed to television, the ethnic Fijian adolescents had high EAT-26 scores and self-induced vomiting to lose weight as well as the rate increase in homes that owned televisions. They also said that “narrative data explicitly link changing attitudes about diet, weight loss and aesthetic ideals in the peer environment to Western media imagery.
The impact of television appears especially profound, given the longstanding cultural traditions that previously had appeared protective against dieting, purging and body dissatisfaction in Fiji” (A. Becker, R. Burwell, S. Gilman, D. Herzog, P. Hamburg, 2002). These finding directly show that exposure to western culture is causing young women to be self conscious of their bodies and develop serious eating disorders, and it completely unwarranted. I am definitely aware that western culture is largely responsible for our extreme problem with body image and eating disorders. I think it is very important that instead of telling society that each body is perfect and glorifying unhealthy extremes, that we start educating society, to promote healthy lifestyles and how to balance diet and exercise. I think we also need to help individuals find their confidence again after being battered by this culture of body shaming for so long. We need to stop accepting that this is just how our culture is and do something about it, I too am guilty of this, but if we want to see a change we have to make that change ourselves.
