Body image

1 January 2007

Thousands of teenage hopefuls glued to the Channel 5 series "Make me a supermodel" last month learned that a size 10/12 is simply too fat. As if that message was not sufficiently disturbing, newspapers covered the death of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston whose supermodel diet of tomatoes and apples proved fatal. Even on the somewhat ironically named Breakfast Television this week, Paul McKenna is promising to make us thin.  This is size-ism gone mad, timed to address the collective guilt of Christmas indulgence.

Consider too that strange advertisement which graced our screens recently. A well-known, curvaceous presenter of daytime television chats to camera from a slim body, clearly not her own, whilst snacking backstage. She is then strapped into her own body before announcing "Showtime!" Marshall McLuhan warned that the medium is the message, and that we become what we behold, so I worry about this post-snack metamorphosis. Presumably the ad's message is that inside every fat exterior is a pert little body screaming to be released - and devouring these snacks is the answer. Presumably, the subtler message is that no one in right mind would sport a large body unless it was worn deliberately, to entertain others.

Buried in that seemingly innocuous bit of nonsense, however, was one of the biggest incongruities of our time. We have a serious national problem with obesity, as technology facilitates an evermore sedentary existence and "convenience" rules the kitchen. But of equal concern is the growing epidemic of eating disorders and the worship of the unattainable size zero. Our love-hate relationship with food, which is more accessible than ever in 24/7 superstores, sits uncomfortably within an appearance-obsessed culture, one where politicians are subjected to sartorial scrutiny more rigorously than their policies ever are, and where style gurus on prime-time television claim to change lives by changing fashion sense. Those of us tasked with teaching young adults about healthy living, trying to nurture their burgeoning self-confidence, battle against the lure of a powerful, often imbalanced media message. For all the apparent concern in recent months, designers are still recruiting painfully thin models, still approaching diagnosed anorexics to offer contracts. Aspiring starlets still haunt the tabloids and gossip magazines in their double zero-size dresses.

Any anorexic will tell you that, in some bizarre way, rejecting food can be enormously liberating. It represents the ultimate act of control in a world where she (for it is almost always a female) has been monitored and controlled, regulated and assessed at every turn. Young women believe that being thin will lead to peer acceptance and popularity with boys: they will be noticed and valued. There is an uncanny echo here of those intrepid women at the start of the last century, waving the purple, green and white banner of suffrage, who resorted to hunger strikes, also to be noticed and valued. What a depressing thought that for all the advances women have enjoyed since that struggle, the method of getting attention should be the same! What price progress when so many young women now aspire to be a zero, a nought, nihil - literally "annihilated"?

The designers and retailers have a lot to answer for. However much we deplore its shallowness as a concept, dress offers developing young adults an identity amidst all the confusion of puberty: it provides a means of instant social inclusion. To be denied access to a particular fashion because of your size is more significant than (inevitably slim) designers can imagine. Memory carries me back reluctantly to the mid - sixties, and the agonies of trendy boutiques where everyone sought to look like Twiggy. Larger women in those days were outcasts, and scurried furtively into "The outsize shop" for their baggy crimplene numbers. Outsize meant outside what was normal, acceptable, desirable.

 A search up the high street for a smart, tailored business suit is still a nightmare if you are on the large side. In one hallowed glass emporium after another, your custom is rejected. Some stick-thin 17 year-old will toss her tinted mane, look you up and down and, with withering contempt announce, "We have nothing in the store for YOU, Madam". It takes a lot of self-confidence to ride out that sort of discrimination, a lot of self-belief to wear clothes labelled "Extra large". It is much, much easier and infinitely less embarrassing to change shape, to stop eating and aim to be a "nothing", and thus conform to what the designers and retailers have decided is acceptable. Theirs is the power to determine which bodies will carry their creations. If the Devil wears Prada, gluttony certainly doesn't count as one of her deadly sins.

But perhaps there is hope ahead. In the States, Dan Kindlon, Harvard Child Psychologist, has recently encountered a new breed of teenage "Alpha Girl", confident, assertive, ambitious and free of gender stereotyping. "The alpha girl doesn't feel limited by her sex," he writes. "She is a person first and then a woman." Girls here in the UK are achieving more than they ever have. Now we must empower them to feel good about themselves, to be healthy and active, to be confident enough to reject the pressure to morph into what others want them to be. We must alert them to the power of the media to control their perceptions, and help them differentiate between fantasy media creations and the truth. Not so much "Make me a supermodel" as "Make sure I'm a happy, healthy human being".

 Over fifty years ago, McLuhan's "The Mechanical Bride" portrayed women as victims of advertising. Still at the mercy of commercial pressures, young females today must wake up and smell the copy, remembering the message on McLuhan's tomb: "The truth shall make you free."