Acco, I don’t blame the media entirely. But trying to count out the media entirely from one’s life and influence is not unrealistic. Go to the front page of this board and count how many threads are about the media. I WORK for the f-ing media, just like you said. I know exactly what they’re doing. It doesn’t stop it from happening, and it’s my own fault that it does.
Why does a guy at a Bears game matter? Because he hurt my feelings and in addition, put into audible words (audible to about 12,000 people around him) exactly what I feel about myself. I can’t pretend to not care what people think about me. I’m a human being. Insults and compliments weigh the same.
I’m not her, so I can’t speak for her. HOWEVER, speaking from my own experience, because that’s what people fucking do. We form self images of ourselves based on the opinions of others. We’ve done it since the day we were born, we did it to a fantastic degree during puberty, and we continually do it throughout our adulthood.
But why, why, why, you ask? The need for approval is a part of human nature. You might as well ask someone to “turn off” their tendency towards jealousy or lust or anger or whatever the fuck other classic human emotions. We’re hardwired that way. We can’t control whether or not we desire approval. We can only control (to a limited extent) how strongly we desire peer approval and the actions we will take to gain said approval.
However, I do think that the Information Age we live in does amplify this natural human tendency. Even so, that doesn’t justify a “media made me do it” defense. God, I hate those.
He was SATISFIED with what he saw. And as I fuckin’ pointed out earlier, a person is only as selective as they can afford to be. Now, for all I know (no offense, jar), her husband could be a fucking chump, inside and outside. In which case, he had few options to begin with. In which case, his wife was simply the best he could do. And IF he was a chump, what does that make her? (Just pointing out that someone thinking you’re hot doesn’t actually make you hot.) As far as the drunken asshole goes, I think it’s a mistake to put too much stock in what he said. HOWEVER, as regards putting more stock in a stranger’s opinion than that of someone who loves you, I have often put more trust in a stranger’s opinion. Not a serious amount, mind you. But if family members tell me I’m a handsome, handsome young man, yet every decent (not “hot,” i reiterate. DECENT, as in “normal” or “human-looking”) girl i meet gives me the fuckin’ cold shoulder, who do i trust? The people who love me? Or the girls who don’t know my name and don’t especially care, 'cause goddamn it, i’m not prince fucking charming? (Just pointing out that someone who loves you often has an “airbrushed” view of you, too. MEANING that their opinion is far from objective.)
Honestly, guys, I’m never this bitter, really. It’s just been a long fucking day at work. No offense meant to anyone.**
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Situations (like the Bears asshole) can have a real impact on your psyche and leave you like a football star who’s gotten his knee bent 90 degrees the wrong way - you play scared. always. All the time, you’re wondering, “will it happen again?” and in the special case of the verbal abuse “is there truth in it?”
Now of course, i realize that shit just happens that way, and you have to put it behind you. But it can be hard. I mean, i know more or less how physical pain works. Action against a membrane triggers electrochemical signal across pain receptors which is transmitted to brain and interpreted into pain which informs brain of injury…fine. But KNOWING where pain comes from doesn’t make it go away. Slide a knife in my thigh, and the best thing for me to do is to get my bearings, call EMS, and look for a first aid kit. But that’s not gonna fuckin’ happen. I’m still gonna scream.
Kinda the same thing with verbal abuse. You know where it’s coming from, and you know you’re not responding as you should, but it still hurts, and you can’t help screaming. And it stays around for a long, long time.
Funny you should say this, because I’ve worked in ad agencies in this town and seen it from the inside. Advertisers want you to make an emotional or value connection to their brand that is strong enough to make you buy their products. Their researchers try to get “inside the heads” of customers, figure out their wants, fears, desires, hopes, and target marketing efforts appropriately. They have found it profitable to make use of and promote women’s desires to look like the celebrities shown on the television programs sponsored by guess who: advertisers. Ads that hit the right emotional targets, shown during the right TV shows at the right times with the right frequency sell more stuff. They can track this on a nice graph for you.
I hope I’m not whining that it’s ALL the fault of advertising and the media - there are other cultural and psychological things going on - some new, some not so new. But images of the supposedly “ideal” woman are pushed into our brains through every possible medium, along with a list of products and steps to make ourselves look that way, and the strong implication that there is something wrong with us if we don’t buy into it. It is possible to tune it out, ignore it, and rise above it to an extent, but it really takes some swimming against the cultural tide to do so. Who carries the cultural tide? Mass media. Who pays for mass media? Advertisers and producers of consumer products.
I don’t think “the media sends messages that my body isn’t okay” is remotely equivalent to “I saw killing people on TV so I killed someone.” Nice try, straw man.
Yes McCoy, but there comes a time when enough is enough. I had a breakthrough a couple of months ago which freed me from the restraints society placed on me.
Without getting into it too much, I decided this is my life and I’ll live it the best I can no matter what anybody says.
That meant improving the changable variables in my life and accepting the unchangables. This and a good dose of appreciate-the-good-things-in-your-life while they’re there helped me along. (Nothing made me feel better about my thinning hair than consoling a friend who recently was diagnosed with a severe case of Lyme disease.) It, as is so commonly said, will give one Perspective.
And there are worse things than that, I know. Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
Look at all you have and be happy. Find the beauty in the world and be happy. Accept that which you can’t change - it’s not your fault.
Most importantly, find the beauty in yourself. If you are unable or unwilling to do that… well, find the courage to try.
Acco40, I’m glad you had your moment of self-transformation. Just because you have doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist for other people, like, say, the 11 year old girls who are on diets and the 13-year-olds who beg daddy for breast implants and the 6-year-old who wants Slim-Fast for lunch - young people who are trying to find their own identity in the midst of a media barrage.
I thought this thread was less about your personal revelations than about debating the question: “Do the images of women portrayed in mass media contribute to the way that some American women feel about their appearance?”
Do the unrealistic images sold to women, teens, and young girls promote eating disorders and low self-esteem? Do the images tell even women who have strong, healthy, bodies that they are too fat? Are these unrealistic images providing economic benefits to the people who disseminate them?
That’s kinda what I said (though not so glowingly) in the “we can, to a degree, control the extent to which we desire approval and the actions we take to gain it” part. (It went something like that.) The main difference is in tone and the fact that you seem to think the “love yourself” mantra (though offered with the best intentions, I’m sure) means anything to the high self-esteem-challenged here. There had to be a time when you were more than a little insecure. What would you have told anyone who told you to find the inner beauty within yourself? That’s right, you would’ve given them a nice, warm “fuck off.”
I’m not saying that, cause i know you’ve got the best intentions and that, at least regarding taking control of one’s life, we see more or less eye to eye.
I guess the other difference is that you seem to see “finding the inner beauty,” “taking control,” etc. as this cathartic process that occurs with violins or beatles music in the background. I see it more like going into rehab or removing your own appendix - hard as hell and hazerdous if you screw up somehow. And no, not everyone can do it.
And no, not everyone has inner beauty.
I will, because this is a big topic for me, but I did want to point something out.
I am a very big woman, I shop at Lane Bryant, which is a specialty store for big women. Their catalog, which is exclusively size 14 - 28, is almost entirely size 6 models.
I find this extremely irritating. Not only as a political matter, but as a practical one. Showing me what these clothes look like on a body that bears no resemblence to my own is not helpful.
So I asked someone at Lane Bryant about it, and you know what they told me? The clothes didn’t sell when they were on big models.
But the point is that messages in the media and/or among women have nothing to do with what men find attractive in women. Men don’t need the media to tell us who’s beautiful. I maintain that there is a spectrum of looks and body types within which most men will find a woman attractive, but if a woman falls outside that spectrum, the number of men who do falls off sharply.
Men are clearly rebelling against the idea that a woman has to be extremely thin. It’s OK to have some meat on your bones so long as you’re well proportioned.
If you’re obsessed with comparing yourself with the media or with what other women think, I can’t help you. But I’ll tell you one thing ladies, there’s nothing more atractive than a woman who clearly demonstrates that she finds me attractive. An ounce of assertiveness is worth a pound of looks.
Alright, alright, maybe I was pulpitting a little bit.
But I’m desperately trying to put the situation in perspective for those of you who are clearly affected. I’ll tell you what worked for me. I’ll try to address the issues. I used phrases that are practically coined as “corny”, and they’ve been said, and scoffed at years before I came along. I’m sorry for that.
But many of you are correct, and I agree wholeheartedly that it’s a personal choice for one to make. There is no magic wand I can use from here in cyberspace.
And that ‘mental-shift’ cannot always be made alone. I can offer no other perspective to see the issue from.
[slight hijack]The headline for that article is inaccurate. The study discussed in the article focused solely on weight and appears to have defined “poor body image” as ‘thinking one is too heavy when they aren’t’. The article does not mention anything about those who marked “too light” or “just about right” inaccurately. To say that this is evidence that women have poorer body image than men is an exaggeration, since the only physical trait studied was weight.
I’m not making any contrary claims or anything, just pointing out that the headline is hyperbole, at least going by how it describes the study.
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what do you think about this?
If women truly believe that they are held to a certain standard by the media i can’t figure out why some of these women, who are clearly below the media standard, would send their pictures in to be rated. Do they enjoy finding out that their average rating is a 1. I doubt it.
It just seems weird that so many people send their pictures to be rated if so many people think it is a problem that we have media images to live up. What do they think the raters are using as a standard?
See Mag, this is what I’m talking about. Punching the media in the gut with one hand (“These ads make me feel fat!”) and taking your paycheck from them with the other.
It’s this hypocracy that I don’t understand.
There is no argument there. Of course. I say that those “evil advertisers” are us. Those “evil advertisers” fuel this economy, which I may add is the strongest on Earth. You enjoy the fruits of that economic strength, so stop moaning.
Who says its the women sending in their own pictures? What steps does the site take to make sure the picture is being sent by the person in the image? I can send in ugly unflattering pictures of the girl who stole my boyfriend. I can, if I were a guy, send in pictures of my girlfriend or my ex-girlfriend.
I also think it takes a certain awareness (which you’ll find plenty of on the SMDB, but less of in the general populace) to even recognize that this is a problem.
BTW, I flipped through a couple of pictures rating every one of them a 10.
I have a pretty low hypocracy tolerance, but this one doesn’t hit my meter. I, too, have worked in advertizing, as has my hubby (he much more recently). Advertising is a big business. Its also one of the few profitable, fairly secure fields to get into if you want to make a living as a writer or an artist. Now, there are some sorts of advertising I wouldn’t do (I had the luck to work in a very non-sexy industry), but lots of it is hacking for a paycheck.
Maybe you have only done things for pay for companies that only do things you fully agree with. Lucky you. Or maybe you are (like a friend of mine with very high moral standards) financially independant and so don’t ever have to compromise. Lucky you.
It’s not necessarily hypocrisy. There’s more that factors into people’s career choices than their ideals, sadly (kids, debts, tuition).
While most people possess some sort of inner “beauty” (though that sounds way too corny) or some sort of potential for beauty, there are many others who are just a deep, dark pit of barbwire that neither you nor I want to get mixed up in.
Humanity is as hideous and frightening as it is beautiful. That’s the glory of existence, in my view. Anything’s possible.
First, it’s spelled “hypocrisy.” Second, worked. Past tense. Temporary assignments managing training departments, computer helpdesk stuff, some market research. I was offered a permanent position in account planning but got out because I didn’t like exactly the stuff I’m talking about. A year ago I left a public relations job because I though my clients were hurting the environment and I didn’t feel like putting a positive spin on that for a paycheck. And just why am I responding to your personal attacks?
Okay, that’s what I wanted to hear. So you have no argument with the overall point that I’m making.
I didn’t realize I was “moaning.” I thought I was “describing how the unrealistic body images perpetuated in mass media support the selling of products.” The extent to which advertising fuels our economy shows its power, which goes to my point exactly in this thread = advertising affects us profoundly. Our economy is based on it. We will keep seeing the kinds of people we see on television and in magazines until someone decides that it would be profitable to do otherwise.
You took what I said out of context. **
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Sorry, I should have phrased it differently. Someone who says “I feel pressure to attain the physical standards I see everywhere in our culture” is different from someone who tries to justify killing someone because they saw it on television.
Acco40, I doubt that any participants in this thread are asking for your personal insight on how to “use some self-restraint” or particularly interested in your own path to enlightenment. We are having a discussion about how media images affect our own self-images. Participating in this debate doesn’t mean that I personally have a problem with my own self image, it means that I can recognize the overall problem in the culture and postulate some reasons for it. You’ve already indicated that you agree with my basic argument. If you wish to attack me personally, please start a Pit thread.
I didn’t meant to offend you, Rachelle, or other slender women in this board. That comment was said to me when I was all bitchy and whining about my desire to be skinny, instead of fat(yea, using the offensive terms). It was meant to make me realize I should try to be sexy just the way I am, instead of becoming a complaining slender girl. Another thing…for me, overweight is more offensive than fat.
As long as you look healthy, all is well. That’s my mantra(or at least I try to make it one of them). I’ve seen both thin and overweight people who look sick.
And I am happy you have found a person who considers you perfect and beautiful. Lucky gal, I hope I can found one too someday.
Yea, I know those people too. They suck, you are right.
I know thin people have image problems too. I have skinny (sorry, but at least I can not see how the connotation of skinny has the same offensive charge as fat, maybe I’m not familiar with the slang?)friends who complain about their image, how they have no booty, no boobs, no nothing. At least, that’s the poor image they have of themselves. And it’s wrong too.
PD. I am getting better with this quoting/italics thing.
enculturation. Young girls are more likely to be enculturated to perceive being beautiful (i.e., the physical ability to attract a husband) as their primary goal in life. They are also often strongly enculturated to see other girls as direct competition for that ultimate prize: a husband. Nor is this a recent development in the history of any culture. I don’t know about schools now, but when I was just a tadpole those message was quite loud and quite clear.
“Sit up straight. Boys don’t like girls who slouch; it makes you look cheap.”
“Don’t eat so much. Boys don’t like girls who eat a lot. You’ll get fat and boys don’t like fat girls.”
“Don’t try to take too many difficult classes. Thinking gives you wrinkles.”
“Don’t try to be a doctor. By the time you graduate, you’ll be to old to marry and have children.”
“Don’t keep beating the boys at math contests. Boys don’t like girls who seem too smart. Anyway, all that thinking will make your hair fall out. Boys don’t like girls with short hair.”
“Take ballet classes, not folk dance. Ballet will keep you thin. Boys don’t like girls who are too heavy.”
I could go on but my point is that I was hearing this stuff before I entered the third grade! Now, you could tell me that seven year old girls should just darn well know better and should be reaching for the beauty within. But they don’t. They are children. And if these are the messages that little girls hear, before they’ve entered puberty, then how will they feel at the abrupt hip widening/chest developing stage?
Oh yeah, another favourite: “Shake it, don’t break it!” Generally shouted at any 11 or 12 year old girl who had hit puberty and now had hips. Lord forbid, she now looks “fat!”
I consider myself a fortunate woman; I am not easily swayed by anyone’s opinion. Yeah, I am the descedent of a long line of short, round people from cold, fogbound, northern islands. I keep myself fit, flexible and strong and that is all I am willing to do. My SO likes me just the way I am (he prefers “big 'ol butts” on women) and I’m not interested in anyone else’s opinion. Frankly, I’ve never solicited his, either.