Posted by admin on April 23rd, 2009 in Health, Middle School Boys, Parenting, Stress, Teen Age Girls

Last night I had the privilege of hearing Nancy Redd speak to a group of mothers and daughters about body image.  A brief introduction about Nancy I copied from her website:

“In her latest book, Body Drama,  Nancy celebrates the many versions of “normal,” replacing seriously erroneous information with the honest, medically proven truth in a language all girls can understand. Nancy is a self-esteem advisor to FITNESS magazine, an AOL Wellness Coach, and an editor for the Dove campaign’s MSN.com site. Until the magazine closed in December, she was also a contributing editor at CosmoGIRL! magazine and on Cosmogirl.com, where she wrote a monthly body and soul advice column.”

Nancy graduated from Harvard with an honors degree in Women’s Studies but what makes her a unique speaker on the subject of body image is the fact that she was Miss Virginia.  She went on to  compete in the Miss America pageant in 2004 where she won the swimsuit competition and ended up a Top 10 finalist.   As you can see, she has a decidedly “informed” perspective about body image and women.

Take-Aways

I left with two thoughts.  One was pertaining to her book – I hope you will take a look at it, perhaps purchase it if you have a teenage daughter.  This is why – the book is one of the few I’ve  seen that has up-close pictures of parts of women’s bodies that help explain many questions a young girl might have.  Heck, I know plenty of adult women who didn’t understand some things about her body and didn’t have the nerve to ask about them until she was either pregnant or menopausal.  As a young girl growing up, I was fortunate that my father was a physician and I could ask him, or if I felt uncomfortable, I would  steal away and search his medical books to answer my questions or look at the pictures.  Sometimes you feel better just knowing you aren’t the only one who…?

The second thought:  “I wish someone would produce a book like this for adolescent boys”.  Any book that can “normalize” the growing human body is a good thing.  Young girls certainly are bombarded  with distorted, air-brushed versions of “women” that can pervert their view of what is a normal body.  But, I think adolescent/teenage boys have pressures too.

Boy Pressures

Take a look at a magazine ad from the ’60’s or ’70’s and notice that the boy or man featured will NOT be a muscle-bound, hairless hunk.  In fact, they (men) didn’t take off their shirts in ads as much as they do today.  I also believe young men are tricked into thinking that real women look like the models in ads or like the media-version of girls (Gossip Girls, Britney Spears etc) and when they are faced with a real girl, they don’t know what to do (not that many adolescent boys would know what to do…)

The internet is full of pornography, young men are watching it in record numbers.  Online sexually-charged (and purely pornographic) images are so easily obtained and consumed by anyone, it doesn’t take a brainiac to figure out the most hormonally charged man-child will be a prime audience.  If you’ve never seen a girl naked before (except girls with hyper-inflated, surgically-enhanced breasts, bodies and faces), it can be a problem when it comes time to be intimate with a girl.  It’s also a problem in terms of smoking.

Nancy gave us a slide show of magazine ads and photos, the “before” and “after re-touching”.  It is remarkable that even the most beautiful and in-shape women are  enhanced.  What are we doing to the brains and perceptions of our young people with these images?  What is the long-term effect of comparing an otherwise normal body to those of “air-brush perfection”.  In a world where a mole in the wrong place or a small wrinkle near the eyes is considered a crime, we have to fight hard to keep our kids version of themselves intact and healthy.  Not an easy task when you consider that a recent study  on media’s impact on adolescent body dissatisfaction found that:

1. Teens who watched soaps and TV shows that emphasized the ideal body typed reported higher sense of body dissatisfaction. This was also true for girls who watched music videos.
2. Reading magazines for teen girls or women also correlated with body dissatisfaction for girls.
3. Identification with television stars (for girls and boys), and models (girls) or athletes (boys), positively correlated with body dissatisfaction

Culture of Thinness

Women’s magazines have 10  more ads and articles promoting weight loss than men’s magazines do, and over 3/4  of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a woman’s bodily appearance—by diet, exercise or cosmetic surgery. Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8 per cent less than the average woman—but today’s models weigh 23 per cent less. The barrage of messages about thinness, dieting and beauty tells “ordinary” women that they are always in need of adjustment—and that the female body is an object to be perfected.

So I say to Nancy..Good work and keep talking to our young girls about the realities and myths surrounding, “Being Beautiful!”