2008 Woodie Awards
Media pervasiveness: It's not perfect
Dr. Susan Kahlenberg
Issue date: 10/26/06 Section: Focus
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What is the perfect body? People magazine dedicates an issue annually to the 'perfect body.' Readers are asked to identify attributes of celebrities that they deem perfect-and a composite ideal celebrity body burgeons from the pages. Despite variance in responses, what emerges is a profile of svelte, ultra-thin, fantastically muscular bodies.
Consumers of celebrity culture are not surprised by this aforementioned tidbit. Photos of celebrities like Kate Bosworth, Jesse Metcalf, Keira Knightley and Matt McConaughey are mainstays in magazines like People, US Weekly and In Touch. And the feature stories regularly celebrate their bodies, touting them as the best dressed, or sharing their exercise and weight loss secrets, which read like plugs for the billion-dollar fashion, fitness and diet industries; the double-ententre here, of the term 'industry' is that media messages are designed with the goal of maximizing profit, rather than serving public interest.
For years, there has been a growing body of research indicating that media exposure contributes to body dissatisfaction, negative mood states and eating disorders pathologies. When asked about body type preferences, girls and boys as young as five show preferences for muscular mesomorphic body types and ectomorphic-thin body types respectively. Yet no scientific research has established a cause and effect linkage, for the current social standards of beauty for men and women are exerted by a variety of sources (e.g. parents, peers, toys).
However, scholars and even the lay public recognize a robust reciprocity between media and society, explaining why headlines in magazines abound weekly proclaiming "Anorexia runs in her family," "Skinny 911!" and "Crazy diets! Extreme Workouts!" My own research examined body image and attractiveness, determining that on prime-time TV programming, less than one percent of overweight and obese characters were considered attractive, compared to more than 38% of thin characters. And though there was no rating of 'perfection,' the most attractive TV characters were muscular and voluptuous, rather than lanky, average, stocky or obese.
Consumers of celebrity culture are not surprised by this aforementioned tidbit. Photos of celebrities like Kate Bosworth, Jesse Metcalf, Keira Knightley and Matt McConaughey are mainstays in magazines like People, US Weekly and In Touch. And the feature stories regularly celebrate their bodies, touting them as the best dressed, or sharing their exercise and weight loss secrets, which read like plugs for the billion-dollar fashion, fitness and diet industries; the double-ententre here, of the term 'industry' is that media messages are designed with the goal of maximizing profit, rather than serving public interest.
For years, there has been a growing body of research indicating that media exposure contributes to body dissatisfaction, negative mood states and eating disorders pathologies. When asked about body type preferences, girls and boys as young as five show preferences for muscular mesomorphic body types and ectomorphic-thin body types respectively. Yet no scientific research has established a cause and effect linkage, for the current social standards of beauty for men and women are exerted by a variety of sources (e.g. parents, peers, toys).
However, scholars and even the lay public recognize a robust reciprocity between media and society, explaining why headlines in magazines abound weekly proclaiming "Anorexia runs in her family," "Skinny 911!" and "Crazy diets! Extreme Workouts!" My own research examined body image and attractiveness, determining that on prime-time TV programming, less than one percent of overweight and obese characters were considered attractive, compared to more than 38% of thin characters. And though there was no rating of 'perfection,' the most attractive TV characters were muscular and voluptuous, rather than lanky, average, stocky or obese.