We are bombarded from both sides. On one hand, we feel constant pressure to look perfect. Girls: Be thin and beautiful! Boys: Be masculine and hunky! You must exercise, you must run on the treadmill for at least an hour, but most of all, you must not eat. And from the other side, we always hear: Love your body! Or worse, if we don’t succeed in meeting the ideal, we are told that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. While it is true that inner qualities are more important and longer lasting than physical beauty, when the phrase is used in such a context, it feels tantamount to being called ugly.
So which is it? You can’t bend to both pressures at once, even though our attitudes about our bodies vary from day to day. Though one day you may feel unlovely and compelled to work out, the next you might feel slightly more forgiving of your perceived imperfections. If you’re lucky, you might even like the looks of that person posing back at you in the mirror.
My attempt here isn’t to do a piece about eating disorders, though they can be the tragic result of negative self-perception gone too far. This is really just an effort to examine how we got so down on ourselves and what we can do to feel a little better about it.
The idea for this evolved slowly. I think any reshaping of body image is a process that happens in discrete steps — steps that find themselves few and far between in this commercialized standard of impossible beauty and sex. Put another way, our self-esteem plummets quickly; girls often start to have negative feelings toward their bodies around the middle school years. It takes a long time to build our body image back up, and for some it never happens at all. A whole life can be spent, in the midst of other events and distractions, hating one’s own body. As for boys, the phenomenon of negative body image traditionally hasn’t been as widespread, but many males still face eating disorders and negative attitudes toward their appearance.
For me, the body image shift started while I was studying abroad in France, when I decided I wasn’t going to work out anymore. I noticed that the French seemed to be eating wonderful-tasting, high-calorie food — though in admittedly smaller portions — all the while shunning gyms. And it didn’t seem to be taking much of a toll on their waistlines. They’re mostly wonderfully healthy-looking — few are gaunt, and equally few are obese. I decided if a whole country of people could get away with eating great food, without working out, so could I. They’re still active; the French walk a lot. At U.Va, we also walk a lot — the University Grounds are extensive. So while the gym is still an option when I just need to move and to de-stress, I don’t feel guilty if I don’t go.
But it’s not always possible or even necessary to go to a foreign country to improve one’s body image. The other essential process began when I started critically examining commercial advertising. It started with a book that I happened to stumble upon, which contains pictures of naked ladies. Normal naked ladies, in non-sexual poses. The book was specifically meant to address insecurities that girls may have about their bodies. So, I learned vital facts about airbrushing — even the thinnest models are airbrushed to erase blemishes and cellulite (which is in large part genetic). They’re not perfect. So many myths were debunked that my head was spinning! The biggest eye-opener, however, was the realization of just how skewed my perception was of what normal naked people look like.
Really, it’s astonishing how rarely we see unaltered naked photos of normal people (not that I’m advocating this as a pastime, but it was instructive). Some of these people had envy-inducing bodies, and some of them didn’t. In mere minutes, my body image improved by leaps and bounds. Now that I knew that there really are people out there who look like me, I felt so much better!
The message is: If you feel awful about your body, you may be comparing yourself to an impossible ideal, whether you are male or female. Those people you’re seeing in magazines (the illicit ones are not exempt either) — it’s their job to look so good. For many of them, a significant portion of their income is spent on cosmetic “enhancements,” anywhere from expensive makeup to new noses, breasts and buttocks. And then they still don’t meet the standard! From photo shoot to publication, they’re airbrushed. So if that fact alone doesn’t make you feel better about yourself, you need to go find yourself some photos (be clear, I’m advocating searching for photos that aren’t designed to cause sexual arousal) that help you realize that the rest of the world looks a whole lot more like you than those guys and gals in the perfume ads. You’ll have a whole new perspective on yourself.
Andrenne is a fourth-year College student. She can be reached at a.alsum@cavalierdaily.com.
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