When is too much of a good thing too much?
Psychologist and body image researcher Renee Engeln brings us a TED Talk based on her 15 years of study with female college students. She discusses a growing epidemic she calls "beauty sickness." What is that? It's the obsession to attain the ideal beauty promoted by the media and the consequent frustration at failing to attain it. In her earlier career as a teacher, Engeln noticed how her female students struggled to be beautiful and spent alarming amounts of time worrying about their physical appearance and trying to modify it.
Knowing that the ideal beauty displayed in the media is unrealistic and photoshopped didn't make them feel better about themselves. When Engeln showed them an ad with a model in a bikini, one of the students commented: "This body type is unrealistically skinny and her ribs are showing..." Then she added: "I'm not that skinny... Should I go to drastic weight loss programs and tan... risking my health? I feel like I want to be like that. I wish I was a model. Maybe after seeing this picture I won't want to eat."
That is precisely what Engeln calls "beauty sickness." It also affects men, but mostly women because they are far more prone to hate their bodies, suffer from anorexia and bulimia, and spend lots of time and money in beauty treatments. Women are also more likely to get commentary about their physical appearance in any instance. From the 1.5 million plastic surgeries performed in the US in 2012, 90% went to women.
How come young, bright female students are so obsessed with their physical appearance and weight, which are concerns that used to belong only to professional models and actresses?
The answer is, they're hurting.
It hurts to live in a culture where you're bombarded with these three messages over and over again: 1) Beautiful is the most important and powerful thing a girl or woman can be; 2) This is the ideal beauty; 3) You don't look like this. It doesn't come as a surprise that in laboratory studies, when women are exposed to pictures of models for just a few minutes, it triggers depression, shame, low self-esteem and body dissatisfaction.
This is beauty sickness.
Engeln explains that our perception of beauty is complex and has deep evolucionary roots. From a scientific perspective, beauty is not only desirable but also rare—maybe the reason why it's appealing. When it comes to beauty, though, our sense of what's real and possible becomes warped by our overexposure to those ideal images. Instead of seeing them for what they are— extremely rare—we begin to see them as typical or average. The gap between real women and those images, however, is a chasm.
This obsessive cult to beauty is everywhere we look. Even popular online news sources such as The Huffington Post display on their main page, along with serious issues like crime and politics, irrelevant pieces revolving around what famous women look like and what they are wearing, whether they gained weight, how they lost weight, and so on.
Wake up, woman. You're a slave to the beauty industry.
Break free from the cage.
Don't worry about the shape of your legs: walk instead
Let's not forget what educational psychologist Lori Day wrote in the Huffington Post about the widespread, deceptive practice of misrepresenting the appearance of models in order to sell products and services, creating false and unrealistic expectations about what people should, can, and do look like. It damages girls and women, and also boys and men, who are influenced to believe females should look like these advertisements. But mostly girls.
Among them, studies show that eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem are the 3 most common problems; 42% of girls in grades 1-3 want to be thinner; 53% of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies; by the age of 17, girls have seen 250,000 TV commercials telling them they should aspire to be a sex object or have a body size they can never achieve; 78% of 17-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies; 30% of high school girls suffer from disordered eating; adolescent girls are more afraid of gaining weight than getting cancer, losing their parents or facing nuclear war.
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