We have blamed women’s body image issues on media, and called on all women to get online, speak out and resist the digitally enhanced, cookie-cutter fantasy images that so many of us feel we have to aspire to in order to be socially accepted.

Women’s Forum Australia has taken this issue head on. It has completed a major research project that looks at studies from around the world that answers such questions as:

* What really goes on when young women pick up a glossy women’s lifestyle magazine?
* What have psychologists, sociologists and other researchers found out about how they affect women’s health and wellbeing?
* What messages are really being sent through these magazines?
* How do advertising images affect us?
* What do magazines have to do with eating disorders?

The forum has published the study in a very readable, appealing magazine called Faking It: The Female Image in Young Women’s Magazines. From an article at ABC News in Australia, here are some of the study’s findings:

* Thin, sexualised and digitally enhanced mages of women are linked with women’s experiences of poor body image, depression and anxiety and eating disorders. The images contribute to self-harming behaviours and not performing well academically.

* Women’s attitudes toward their own bodies are worse after looking at thin media images.

* In young teenage girls, looking at pictures of thin, idealised models is likely to cause lowered satisfaction with their body and a high state of depression. Reading fashion and beauty magazines is associated with wanting to lose weight and initiating diets.

* A five-year study found that reading dieting advice in magazines was associated with skipping meals, smoking, vomiting and using laxatives in teenage girls.

Everyone should take a look at the website, which offers a sample chapter, “Hate your body: we show you how!” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful. She also knows that whatever beauty she has is leaving her, stealthily, day by day. Even if she is as freakishly beautiful as the supermodels whose images she sees replicated all around her until they are more familiar than the features of her own mother, she cannot be beautiful enough. There must be bits of her that will not do, her knees, her feet, her buttocks, her breasts…She is human, not a goddess or an angel. However much body hair she has, it is too much. However little and sweetly she sweats, it is too much. Left to her own devices she is sure to smell bad. If her body is thin enough, her breasts are sad. If her breasts are full, her arse is surely too big.

And if this isn’t enough to convince you to buy it, here’s the mini-documentary available on YouTube:

Finally, we want to point out that Faking It and its mission has received strong support from the Australian Government. Prime Minister John Howard sent a message to the WFA’s Get Real Forum, which said, among other things:

…The Australian Government is concerned about the influence that images used in advertising and marketing can have on young women’s perceptions of what is acceptable in terms of appearance and values and the effects of this on their health and self-esteem.

…The government is also calling on the commercial television and radio industries to look at the issue of child sexualisation in the media as part of their respective reviews of their codes of practice which are being conducted this year. The Government has asked the Australian Communications and Media Authority to report back to government on strategies to prevent and/or reduce the sexualisation of children in the media and on the effectiveness of different approaches by March 2008.

…The Australian Government is committed to supporting young women to succeed in achieving their full potential. The government recognises that young women are Australia’s next generation of leaders and is committed to building their capacity to take on greater leadership roles and responsibilities.

Hey, USA, Leader of the Free World, WHERE’S YOUR LEADERSHIP IN THIS?

~ Sybil and Mary