Obsessing about how we look is extremely destructive, writes Davis Clark
Our constant presence in the digital world leaves us open to the bombardments of advertising, and because we unconsciously, whether by nature or nurture, compare ourselves to those around us, it would seem especially cruel that unreachable and often fabricated ideals are constantly paraded before us in both our social media lives and through advertisement.
If you’ve ever found yourself staring at these images of toned models looming from billboards and television screens and poking your gut dissatisfiedly, you are certainly not alone. It is almost unanimously agreed that we are far more critical toward our own bodies than any generation before, and it is equally well known that women have, both now and in the past, borne the brunt of these assaults, as female bodies of impossible proportions are used to sell everything from cars to cleaning supplies.
And it’s not only traditional advertising anymore. Now that everyone has an online profile to maintain, we choose to show only the most positive aspects of our lives and omit the less headline-grabbing events. This creates a culture of digital effacement, and a standard that is unreachable in day-to-day life.
The impulse to show only our best selves is neither new nor a crime, but the problem is greater than mere vanity. Recently, the youth charity YMCA released findings from research done on teenage body image, finding that 62% of 15-16-year olds felt that their conception of what they should look like was shaped by photographs they saw on social media sites, typically photos that were staged or enhanced in some way. Furthermore, 58% of 11–16-year olds cited “celebrity culture” as being the most significant influence on their ideals of physical perfection.
Appearance
These findings add an insidious new dimension to a well-documented problem, namely that the growing obsession with our bodies and physical appearance has filtered down to young children.
Perhaps this problem was easier to stomach when advertising and self-concept was purely the realm of the fully mature, but social media giants like Instagram and Snapchat have given children a precocious education in the arts of persona-construction and self-doubt.
For people of younger generations, perforation of self-esteem comes not from the traditional slings and arrows of bikini-clad carwashes and the like, but from “influencers” whom young people follow and often attempt to emulate. These influencers are typically wealthy and physically fit, and offer a tantalising glimpse into the life of someone who effortlessly embodies society’s various gold standards.
That these glimpses are inherently doctored should go without saying: the subject of the content, the angles chosen, and when the celebrity in question chooses to begin and cease recording work together to provide a deliberate and constructed version of their lives that they sell to viewers. The filmmaker retains total control of the exchange, and this advantage is used to construct a persona so imposing and seductive that the viewer cannot escape with esteem unscathed, or even look away.
It is because these influencers aren’t celebrities in the typical sense that their influence can be so dangerous, says Jacqueline Campion, an eating distress practitioner at the Marino Therapy Centre in Dublin. “Now the lines are very blurred, because anybody can get a hold of a camera and PhotoShop and it seems like it’s just everyday people, like this person is living this life with this kind of body.”
Social media may create a lack of clear division between the rarities and the average, creating a false sense of normalcy. “Instagram is definitely blurring the idea of what’s real and not real. Even though we know that the images are Photoshopped, a lot of people are underestimating how much they’re influenced by it.”
Distressing
By now, it is well documented that young women experience this phenomenon in distressingly high numbers. A survey done in 2017 as part of the Dove Global Girls Beauty and Confidence Report found that only 39% of girls in the UK had high body esteem, with the majority feeling that their bodies were flawed or inadequate in some way. Such self-perceptions have widespread consequences, as those with low body esteem were susceptible to unhealthy behaviours.
Nine out of ten girls with low body esteem told researchers that they had stopped themselves from eating or otherwise engaged in harmful behaviour, and a similar number said that their negative self-image had prevented them from seeing friends and family, or from participating in a team or club.
And no longer is it only women who suffer from dissatisfaction with their bodies. Numbers released by the NHS show a 70% increase in the number of adult men admitted into hospitals for eating disorders from 2010 to 2011. Young boys are also suffering from unrealistic body expectations in ways similar to women. The advertising think tank Credos polled over 1,000 boys aged eight-18 and 55% said that they would consider changing their diet in order to look better, while 23% said they thought a “perfect male body” existed.
The majority of these boys also felt that eating disorders were problems for both boys and girls, and that extreme dieting and excessive exercise were gender neutral problems.
While women and girls still experience body-image related problems at a higher rate than males, men seem to have been closing the gap in recent years. More and more, men have become obsessed with obtaining a certain aesthetic, one that broadcasts physical strength and capability, and to attain it they may spend more hours in the gym and in front of the mirror than ever before.
The widespread celebration of gym culture may be doing more harm than good, says Ms Campion. “Something that people don’t really want to work on is acceptance, because the gym now and fitness is a very celebrated behaviour, and a lot of people come in now dealing with over-exercising and the obsession with health food,” she says. Fixation on ‘clean’ eating – that is, food so devoid of the unnecessary that it simply becomes fuel for the physique – is another way in which the desire to embody a certain image invades day-to-day life.
As it crosses gender lines, the growing nature of the body image problem highlights that we may have a very fundamental problem in our over-emphasis on appearance. What perhaps began as merely a mating strategy has been inflated and brought to the forefront in the digital age.
Nowhere is our obsession with the body more visible than in TV programmes like Love Island. The show features a remarkably narrow range of human forms – the men are ripped, the women thin and attractive.
The show has received extensive criticism for a limited and regressive beauty standard that continues to enforce pressures to look a certain way. But if this wasn’t enough, breast enlargement surgery ads began to be aired during the programme, prompting a letter from the NHS urging broadcasters to regulate advertisements more closely. NHS England’s mental health director Claire Murdoch wrote a letter saying “not only are there clear risks associated with cosmetic surgery, but placed alongside the body image pressures that can be inherent in many online and social media interactions, adverts such as these could pose a risk to mental health”.
The matter is especially dark when one considers that the placement of these ads is hardly an accident – clearly, media companies believe that the type of person who watches Love Island might, in some cases, be the same type of person who feels the need to augment their physical features. Programmes like Love Island either create insecurity or prey on insecurity that already exists – either way they are contributing to a growing mental health crisis.
There certainly must be a greater external push to regulate ads and media, but there is also a need to change how we portray ourselves and conceive of others. Ms Campion advises those struggling with these issues to be more accepting of imperfection, more willing to look at it in others and to display it themselves.
“When you feel a certain way, when you feel very unattractive, disgusted with yourself, disgusted with your body, you should stop, slow down and do some simple thinking. With body image, it’s about getting curious with questions about what’s my worth, what are my values, would I speak to my best friend this way? Are these my values, or are these my conditioned values?
“We are more than our bodies, we are more than our size, we are more than our physical appearance”.