They inherit the gains of feminism and a pop language that is all about “empowerment”; but are today’s teenage girls freer than girls were in the past from obsessing about their flawed faces and bodies? Not according to last week’s poll by the teen magazine Bliss: it found that rather than claiming their girl power by loving their size they are as debilitated as any generation yet by images of physical perfection.
Bliss commissioned a survey of 2,000 teenage girls in Britain and found that 70% dislike their faces and two-thirds thought their lives would improve dramatically if they lost weight. A quarter of the girls said they had struggled with eating disorders and a substantial majority also said they were as influenced in feeling bad about their physiques by the images of “perfect” celebrities as they were by peer pressure.
This is no trivial finding. As I argued more than a decade ago in my book The Beauty Myth, if you create a mass culture of physical perfection that leads a young woman to hate her body and spend masses of time and energy preoccupied with her flaws, you are not just creating a girl worried about the size of her bum. You are also creating conditions in which a young woman suffers from a sufficiently lowered sense of self- respect and self-love such that she is likely to put up with other kinds of humiliations — from an atmosphere that condones harassment in the workplace to tolerating a lower wage for her work.
It is nothing new that young women still hate their bodies. What is news, however, is that a substantial cultural divide has opened up between the way that young American women are now deconstructing the images of beauty in pop culture, and the way young British women relate to these images.
In other words, in the decade since women first began to discuss the possibility that images of perfection might be manipulated and therefore unhealthy to use as a barometer of self-respect, America has developed a vigorous line of dissent that is force-fed to young girls to counteract the influence of such images. This does not seem to have happened in the UK in the same way. And this is leading to a real perception gap in how these two groups of young women look at and then “read ” the image of, say, Pamela Anderson’s body.
I am not claiming that American girls are free now of the pressure to look perfect — in the way that Beyoncé or Jennifer Lopez or Britney Spears convey perfection. But a strong counter-movement has arisen to equip them with the analytical tools to fight back and reclaim their self-esteem. This is not just happening in pockets of college towns where people eat alfalfa sprouts; it is happening in the mainstream on Oprah, in the Girl Scouts, at the mall.
By now, the notion that we must protect the self-esteem of pre-teen and teenage girls from the corrosive influence of celebrity images of physical perfection has become so entrenched in American mass culture that is has almost become a cliché in itself: the Girl Scouts run self-esteem seminars to teach 12-year-olds how to read media images and see where they are manipulated and manipulative.
Kelly Osbourne, the non-stick-figure heroine of the reality TV show The Osbournes, has legions of girl fans precisely because she rejects pressure to be too thin; Star magazine and other tabloids scold actresses such as Mary-Kate Olsen for succumbing to anorexia, and celebrate when she appears to have gained a few pounds; People magazine runs letters from readers shaming Kirstie Alley, the now 14st sitcom performer whose upcoming reality show will be called Fat Actress, for expressing self-hatred about her weight and vowing to embark on a crash diet.
It is not that American pop culture has embraced fatness; but it has become a truism that it is healthier for young girls, who are easily influenced, to love their bodies first, in whatever shape or size they come, and then take care of their health in ways that are not extreme or obsessive. Teen magazines now routinely run features to help teenage girls spot an eating disorder in themselves or their friends and get help; magazines such as Glamour and Marie Claire run features like Look Sexy at Any Size and Stop Dieting, Stop Obsessing to support women in finding a healthy approach to fitness that is not about imitating impossibly thin celebrity norms.
So why has this movement not proliferated in Britain? The biggest reason has to do with the profound misogyny of the popular press. The framing of female physical perfection, especially as it applies to weight, has a lot to do with humiliation; the rejection of rigid norms for body size has a lot to do with self-respect. The British press routinely humiliates women in the public eye in a particularly sexualised, intrusive and judgmental way.
It is no surprise that Princess Diana suffered from an eating disorder that grew worse the more intensely the British press examined her; every ounce of “baby fat” was condemned. By the same token, when Sarah Ferguson was relentlessly hounded and shamed as the Duchess of Pork, you could imagine every larger woman in Britain looking at her own reflection that morning with renewed self-loathing. Such framing of women affects teenage girls even more than it affects grown women.
The second reason this counter-argument has not emerged in the UK has to do with the nature of hierarchy in Britain. I am not saying that we Americans are more virtuous; many of us treat the rest of the world like a throwaway backdrop to our own self-centred Disneyland. But I do think that Britain’s relationship to all kinds of authority is more reverential than ours. This goes for celebrities too.
Americans tend to see celebrities as people like them who got a better break or have a special talent. In the UK, however, celebrities are alternately worshipped and viciously attacked. When the attitude is worshipful, young girls are not taught to disdain comparison with Posh Spice but rather to study and emulate her tiny undernourished body as a route to fame, fortune and self-respect. When the treatment of celebrities is a savage reflex of schadenfreude young girls learn merely that they too had better watch their step.
Americans, those gormless democratisers, do it differently. We embrace Oprah’s weight struggles, we are waiting to give Kirstie Alley’s career a second chance, we will like Martha Stewart much more after she has been made one of us by her prison experience. In other words, the way to fail as a celebrity in America is by disavowing the commonality with the chubby reader of Star in the checkout line — not by becoming less than perfect. We create icons out of populism, not distance. The moms of America nod sagely whenever Oprah refers to how damaging the tiny starlet ideal is to the self- esteem of America’s young girls.
Kate Winslet elicited scorn in certain sections of the UK press after she declared that skinny beauty ideals were bad for girls. That made her a radical, in British pop-cultural terms. The same remarks — especially her public declaration that her legs had been artificially elongated on a magazine cover — made her a beloved character in America.
I would love to import to my home country the UK’s engagement with the global community, its literacy rate and its respect for the countryside. But I would also love to export to those anguished British teenage girls the ability to roll their eyes at the next anorexic celebrity presented to them as a role model, turn the page and reach without guilt for a biscuit.
India Knight is away
