Post 4 - Body Policing

Over the last century, women have been afforded the right to vote, own property, and not require their husband’s permission to do everything. Although it’s not written in America’s legislation that women are second class citizens with no authority over their own autonomy, doesn’t mean that the media and society doesn’t constantly reinforce messages that have just been considered standard for our  doesn’t mean that women aren’t still hindered and influenced by the same messages and values in other pervasive and more subliminal ways. Many of these indelicacies have been so ingrained into our mode of thinking that they hardly are perceived to be as damaging as they really are. Messages and images explaining how a women should look, dress, act, behave, are repeated continuously and ubiquitously in every form of media consumption. Eventually, it just becomes commonplace. It becomes “just how things are”; and its that mode of complacency that allows for this devaluing of women to come full circle in just as tangibly and malicious as before.

Lucky Strike's notorious ad campaign

Out of all of the different modes of policing women, mind and body alike, my favorite would have to be from reading material not from this class, simply because of the absurdity of its effect on beauty standards. A book by Tim Wu, American lawyer and author, called The Attention Merchants, focuses a lot about advertising and public relations through the years. A chapter focuses on advertising campaigns for Lucky Strikes. Edward Bernays, their main advertiser, threw millions of dollars into ideology-shaping cigarette campaigns specifically to include women into their smoking demographic. Bernay, who is largely attributed to pushing the cultural ideal of thinness as a positive attribute onto women, decided the best way to get women involved in a typically masculine activity often kept away from women, was through demand engineering; creating a demand where there isn’t none. Millions of dollars was poured into “green” fashion shows featuring slim models and unicolored dresses and attire specifically to market three things to this “gold mine right in [their] front yard”: cigarettes and thinness -- and most importantly the fact that cigarettes could make you thin (Wu 77-79). Slogans like “when tempted to overindulge, Reach for a Lucky” and “Grab a Lucky instead of a sweet” were common, and later so many other companies piggybacked on the same ideas since a multi-million dollar foundation of manufacturing and then preying on said insecurities was paved for them (Wu 80). Outlined more in Susan Bordo’s Hunger as an Ideology, companies as late as 1968 were still using this trend of ‘cigarettes make you thin’ and selling them to appeal to the newly understood societal truth that perfection was a thin women, and that anyone could be that perfection (103). That message was again, continuous and ubiquitous to the point where everyone believed it, absurdly enough that men and women nearly a century later began to view that shape as the primary attractive form just because one man wanted to sell cigarettes and had a million dollars.

"Terri" MacGregor, the Degrassi character who's weight
in the first thing in every character summary of her

What consequence does this have though? Along with loss of self-esteem and self worth, millions of women in the U.S. suffer from bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa and are slowly killing themselves as a result of it. Jean Kilbourne discusses this in her essay Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, citing a reader survey wherein “75 percent of women felt too fat… 15 percent felt right” and from Dr. Rita Freedman’s book Beauty Bound where she claims of a sample of college aged women, 40 percent claimed to be overweight, when only 12 percent of them were (124). Women end up believing they a\re overweight, above the ideal size, or simply not valuable because they do not look like the women they see in media, and that’s what advertisers want. Despite the dangerous consequences, such as one in five women developing life-threatening eating disorders, keeping women hating their bodies fuels industries that strive on this artificial insecurity (Kilbourne 123-124). To them, women are, and always have been, consumers at most, and objects at best. When women hate their bodies, they continue to partake in culture and consumption that promises them beauty. And the way companies prey on women is a health issue.

Even today, outside of advertisements and marketing, women in forms of music, entertainment, and all forms of popular consumption there is a stress on women to be thin. Fat is seen as ugly, unsightly, unhealthy, and unwanted, and in media becomes synonymous with self-loathing, unsuccessfulness, and a plethora of other negative characteristics. So much so that even media that tries to include and embrace fat bodies usually do so in sometimes equally damaging ways. Insatiable’s Patty Bladell, Theresa McGreggor of Degrassi -- hell, even Bob from Tekken 7 -- can’t seem to do anything without being ridiculed for their size, or have their size be their only characteristic. And it’s everywhere. The messages are again, continuous, and again, ubiquitous. The idea is constantly stressed that if you’re fat, it’s all you are, and being fat is the worst thing a woman can be.

Bibliography

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Roxane Gray on Refinery29

Hunger as an Ideology by Susan Bordo

Beauty and the Beast of Advertising by Jean Kilbourne

Body Messages and Body Meanings by Maggie Wykes and Barrie Gunther