A Man’s Perspective on Body Image
Photo by myspaceantics.com
William Leith, a well-intentioned male journalist from UK’s Telegraph, wrote an article yesterday entitled, “Women and body image: a man’s perspective.”
He talks about a situation where a guy’s frazzled girlfriend is getting ready to go to a party but can’t find anything to wear. When she finally has a “meltdown” the guy can’t figure out what to say to make her feel better. (Personally, if my boyfriend told me I looked beautiful I think I would go with it and head to the party, but apparently for the “plenty of guys” that Leith knows, it’s a much more complicated situation).
He writes, “When it comes to their bodies, women are extremely vulnerable – and, what’s more, lots of people take advantage of that vulnerability.” In truth, lots of people, or companies, seek to make women feel vulnerable in order to sell their products. Women are not, by nature, any more vulnerable than men, men simply aren’t preyed upon the same way. Leith seems to get there eventually, though, adding, “Men are not at the mercy of corporate manipulation on remotely this scale.”
He makes an interesting point that, for men, body image is binary. “A man’s body is either fine, or it’s not fine.” If it’s not fine the guy simply has to eat a little less or work out a little more. For women it’s more complicated because they’re encouraged (sorry, passive voice), companies, through advertising agencies, encourage them to obsess over every possible flaw: cellulite, fat arms, body hair, cankles, breasts that are either too small or too droopy, guts, stretch marks, etc, etc, etc.
Leith points out, “In 1960 the average model weighed 10 per cent less than the average woman. Now she weighs 25 per cent less.”
Maybe there should be a law about skinny women in advertisements. Maybe models should be legally required to be a healthy weight, determined by the (admittedly generally useless) FDA. If corporations were to use unhealthily thin models or digitally alter model’s bodies in unrealistic ways, they could be fined.
What we should really do is sue the companies that promote these damaging images of women and push for something similar to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of 1998, in which the largest US tobacco companies had to pay $206 billion for anti-smoking ads and the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. It would be money well spent; according to the Renfrew Center Foundation, roughly 24 million people in the United States experience an eating disorder, and according to The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, 50,000 people die from it.
I’m glad Leith attempted to write an article about a man’s perspective on a woman’s perspective of body image (I know that might sound sarcastic, but I really am). I particularly like his conclusion:
“As the art critic John Berger wrote: ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.’ It’s a tough one, isn’t it?
Surely guys can understand that, at least. If it happened to us, we’d have a meltdown, too.”
