We get a lot of information from a huge range of media - magazines, telly etc - where people are trying to sell us something.
There is masses of information coming to us about food - not just the tv programmes and adverts, but the variety of food in the supermarket and the range of eating places in the high street. These are "messages to eat".
And on the other hand, we get messages about what we should look like. There was a report published this week seeking to control the images of women portrayed in the media, with all that airbrushing, which puts pressure on girls to present themselves as sexy before they are old enough to know what is going on. And at the same time, these images encourage men to consider women as only interesting if they are sexy.
This sort of advertising puts a huge pressure on women to conform to unrealistic expectations. And is the major cause of eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder and body dissatisfaction and perhaps surprisingly, obesity.
www.carolinebrowntherapy.com
Friday 26 February 2010
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2 comments:
It is about time that the media was made to own up to all the re-jigging of human bodies it undertakes in order to sell us a fabricated, perverse image of ourselves.
I don’t know any women who don’t have cellulite, which is normal!
Sadly, most women I know (myself included) have some part of their body they intensely dislike, which is crazy!!
The world wasn’t always like this…
The reality is that the only people benefiting from all of this misery and self-doubt are those who are set to make a profit from manipulating our view of ourselves to encourage us to consume EVER MORE STUFF to fill the hole in our confidence. But MORE STUFF won’t make the feeling go away…
We must reclaim our bodies loving them not as clothes horses but for what they are actually on this earth to do: to think, touch, feel, digest food, grow children, see, hear, move us around, experiencing myriad of sensations all of the time…
Interesting article to remind us that what makes us interesting is not how we look but how we think:
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/02/women-power-walter-dimensional
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