The media can affect the way
we view sexuality and other important issues.
Constant exposure to today’s media can desensitize us by trivializing
moral choices.
This is clearly illustrated
in the following article by Ellen Goodman, which appeared in The Commercial
Appeal on May 27, 1999.
TV made
In just 38 months and with
only one channel, a television-free culture that defined a fat person as robust
has become a culture that sees robust as repulsive
BOSTON – First of
all, imagine a place where women greet each other at the market with open arms,
loving smiles and a cheerful exchange of ritual compliments:
”you look wonderful! You’ve put on weight!”
Does that sound like
dialog from Fat Fantasyland? Or a skit from fat-is-a-feminist-issue satire?
Well, this Western fantasy was a South Pacific fact of life. In
IN THIS ISLAND paradise, food was not only love, it was a
cultural imperative. Eating and
overeating were rites of mutual hospitality.
Everyone worried about losing weight – but not the way we do. “Going thin”
was considered to be a sign of some social problem, a worrisome indication the
person wasn’t getting enough to eat.
The Fijians were, to
be sure, a bit obsessed with food; they prescribed herbs to stimulate the
appetite. They were a reverse image of
our culture. And that turns out to be the point.
Something happened
in 1995. A Western mirror was shoved
into the face of the Fijians. Television
came to the island. Suddenly the girls
of rural coastal villages were watching the girls of
Within 38 months,
the number of teens at risk of eating disorders more than doubled, to 29
percent. The number of high school girls
who vomited for weight control went up five times, to 15 percent.
Worse yet, 74
percent of the
THIS BEFORE-AND-AFTER television portrait of a body image takeover
was drawn by Anne Becker, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who directs
research at the
Becker presented her
research to the American Psychiatric Association last week with all the usual
caveats. No, you cannot prove a direct
causal link between television and eating disorders. Heather Locklear doesn’t cause anorexia. Nor does Tori Spelling cause bulimia.
Nevertheless, you
don’t get a much better lab experiment than this. In just 38 months, and with only one channel,
a television-free culture that defined a fat person as robust has become a
television culture that sees robust as, well, repulsive.
All that and these
islanders didn’t even get Ally McBeal.
“Going thin” is no
longer a social disease but the perceived requirement for getting a good job,
nice clothes, and fancy cars. As Becker
says carefully: “The acute and constant bombardment of certain images in the media
are apparently quite influential in how teens experience their bodies.”
SPEAKING OF FIJI teens in a way that sounds all too familiar,
she adds: “We have a set of vulnerable teens consuming television. There’s a huge disparity between what they see
on television and what they look like themselves – that goes not only to
clothing, hairstyles and skin color but size of bodies.”
In short, the sum of
Western culture, the big success story of our entertainment industry, is our
ability to export insecurity: We can make any woman anywhere feel perfectly
rotten about her shape. At this rate, we
owe the islanders at least one year of the ample lawyer Camryn Manheim in The Practice for free.
I’M NOT SURPRISED by research showing that eating disorders
are a cultural byproduct. We’ve watched
the female image shrink down to Calista Flockhart at the same time we’ve seen
eating problems grow. But
Over the past few
weeks since the Columbine High massacre, we’ve broken through some denial about
violence as a teaching tool. It’s pretty
clear that boys are literally learning how to hate and harm others.
Maybe we ought to
worry a little more about what girls learn: to hate and harm themselves.
Ellen Goodman is a
columnist for The