Women’s beauty and body image projected in media

By Lionel Wijesiri

Recently, I had the opportunity of watching a documentary film titled Miss Representation. The film’s goal is to encourage young people to think critically about how women are represented in the media. Spliced in were interviews of scholars pointing out the absurdity of these portrayals. The director recounts how, as a new actress just starting out, she was advised by her agency to omit from her resume the fact that she had an MBA degree from Stanford. It might limit her roles if she was thought of as “too smart”, her manager told her. What a strange perception!

Miss Representation presents a thought-provoking and sobering case for change. In the world we live in, full of dangers both known and as yet undreamed of, is it right that women spend more on body image products and plastic surgery than they do on higher education? Is it right that the media machines we have created and condoned can engage in the “symbolic annihilation” of one of our great resources - our young women?

Glamour

Today’s media comes in many forms, television, radio, newspapers, movies and advertisements and it is so intertwined in our lives that we do not truly comprehend on a conscious level how much influence it really has over us. Some of the images and messages we see and hear can be both positive and negative.

More often than not, we are exposed to images that are so unrealistic and unattainable by the average person that we become discontented with our lives and ourselves. Images of luxury homes, cars, glamorous clothes and glamorous body images make us more self-conscious of how we live and how we look.

Beautiful, attractive, rebellious, dreamy, exciting - these are some of the qualities of women as presented in our mass media, drama series and satellite television channels. However, do these qualities represent the real female? How does this stereotypical image of the female affect the family? Is this really the society’s viewpoint or the viewpoint of the mass media that totally contradicts reality? These are the questions that need to be answered.

Family break-up

Recent media studies show that video clips and advertisements exploit the woman’s body for the benefit of commercial business and product advertising. The worst thing is that video clips exploit femininity in spreading adultery and immorality because it only focuses on the sexually-arousing parts of a woman’s body and mostly depicts her as the sweetheart who flirts with her lover.

With regard to drama series, many of them present the woman as a person who always suffers from problems because of being either a mother or a wife. In this way, the two main roles of a woman in this life are presented as the causes of her misery. The solution for these problems, as presented in these drama series, is that a woman should rebel against these two roles and against her responsibilities. Additionally, it is noticed that many of the drama series urge women to be rebellious and belittle the effort and role of housewives.

The female pattern presented by the mass media today is difficult to be followed. It even leads to increasing the rate of family break-ups. Always presenting women who look elegant and attractive in their full adornment and best clothes in the mass media is the cause of many husbands losing interest in their wives.

In reality, only a small percentage of women look like this and most wives cannot attain the beauty of the women presented in the media. This is the cause of problems between spouses as the husband starts feeling dissatisfied with the beauty of his wife.

Rivalry

On one hand, it seems that the mass media speaks about women rather than allowing women to speak for themselves. The other shortcoming in the performance of mass media in solving women’s issues is the negligence of religion and culture and adopting a rivalry and conflict-oriented approach as if there is a battle going on between men and women with some people supporting women against men and vice versa.

The media approach is not supposed to be provocative, as the whole family is in the same boat, that is to say, if it sinks it will drown both the man and the woman, and likewise if it is saved, it will save them both.

Also, the mass media pays exaggerated attention to certain professions such as actresses, sportswomen and businesswomen at the expense of female teachers, researchers and scientists.

Pressure

This trend focuses on a concept known as “self-objectification” where women learn to think of and treat their own bodies as objects of others’ desires. Sexually objectifying images of women can be regularly viewed across all types of media that teens consume, from their music and the barrage of images available via the Internet to TV programs and movies they watch and the magazines they read.

Women, having internalised how an observer views their physical selves, learn to treat themselves as objects to be looked at and evaluated for their appearance.

According to the Objectification Theory, the girl adopts a third-person perspective on her physical self, constantly assessing her own body in an effort to conform to modern “sexy” standards of attractiveness. This standard can lead a woman to evaluate and control her body more in terms of sexual desirability to others than in terms of her own desires, health, wellness, achievements or competence.

The pressure on women to look and behave in certain ways is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that it’s easy to overlook the impact mass culture has on how we feel about ourselves and our bodies. Watching television, reading magazines and newspapers, surfing the Net, we are bombarded with airbrushed images of perfect beauty and thinness.

Inevitably we absorb the relentless message that such beauty is the norm, and is achievable, if only we would … use this makeup, remove that hair, buy the right clothes, reshape that body part.

Many of the women know that the unspoken promise - use our product and you will get the love, the happiness, or the success you want - is a lie. Many of them have had long, ongoing struggles to accept their bodies as they are and to make peace with, and possibly even celebrate food. Still, there are times their insecurities and self-loathing outweigh their feminist sensibilities, and they need reinforcements to remind them that looks don’t make the woman.

The media industry, as a whole, is a multi-billion rupee industry, and the fact that women are constantly being told that they need to look better, feeds into the bottom line of these industries selling the perfect image.

It is a lose-lose situation for the Sri Lankan female. While women spend endless rupees on trying to perfect themselves, the companies that create the fantasy of the ideal female body, just keep getting richer.

Reality

I believe women should be accepted for who they are without trying to fit them into some ideal that a male-dominated company has created to expand their profit margins.

Unfortunately, we as a society have bought into what the media have been selling and there seems to be no turning back. Focusing on the issues that have arisen from these media images and the damage it has caused our female population, in particular our young ones, will help us to learn about ourselves as a society and as a human race. It may also help us understand our expectations for one another, in a society where looks and image have become the most important part of the human existence.

If we could start thinking about what is reality as a collective society, then maybe we can also accept that reality without constantly trying to change it.

We need to accept people for how they look, no matter what they look like without trying to live up to some unrealistic image in the media.