Breaking news—models make us feel bad about our bodies! Okay, so maybe that’s not so shocking, but according to a recent study, it’s not just the rail-thin ones we’ve been railing against that bring us down. On the heels of Glamour’s much-celebrated inclusion of fuller-figured female models comes a study suggesting that even these images can have negative affects. Researchers from the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands recently found that overweight women who viewed pictures of both thin and heavier models experienced a decrease in self-esteem.
I guess we can add models of all sizes to a disturbingly long list of reasons we hate on ourselves. There are people out there actively encouraging that body hate, as if women don’t encounter subtle and not-so-subtle attacks on their self-esteem enough as it is. What’s worse, they’re calling it an optimal way of life.
Thumbs Down: The Skinny Bitch Series
Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin are the authors of the Skinny Bitch diet book series, including the recent Skinny Bitch Bun in the Oven. (Because skinny’s the look pregnant women should aspire toward, right?) Their books are supposed to be a “no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls.” This translates to lots of four-letter words, demonizing anyone who doesn’t follow a vegan diet, and advocating skinniness as the ideal body image.
Criticizing women about their lifestyle choices (“Don’t be a fat pig anymore” is an actual quote) and advocating “skinny” as the only desirable body shape doesn’t send a message about taking good care of our bodies, which is what any good diet starts with. If anything, it just encourages taking drastic measures to achieve someone else’s standard of beauty. What irks me the most is that these women have made dieting synonymous with veganism, a dietary lifestyle that people should embrace because they feel strongly about its tenets, not for its supposed weight-loss guarantee. There are plenty of highly-processed vegan products out there that are just as bad for one’s health. Some of the products they suggest have mile-long ingredient lists filled with unpronounceable items manufactured in labs—not unlike the “crap” and “garbage” Freedman and Barnouin insist we’re stuffing our non-vegan faces with.
But for all their guilt-tripping, these two writers—notice I didn’t say nutritionists or dieticians, as neither one has an accredited degree—fail to recognize themselves as the worst purveyors of garbage. With each of their best-selling books, they succeed in making millions of women across the country feel like total crap.
Thumbs Up: Body Drama
Luckily, there’s at least one book out there telling women their bodies are absolutely perfect. Body Drama is a book by Nancy Amanda Redd, a former Miss America swimsuit winner who wanted to expose women’s bodies for what they really are—varied, complex, and beautiful. She recognized the fact that women of all ages have a million questions and insecurities about their bodies that they’re too embarrassed to bring up, which explains the sections on mustaches, common poop problems, and nipple issues. I don’t know about you, but none of the “What’s happening to my body?!” books I read as an adolescent covered that kind of material.
