What Makes You Really Attractive?

Why do women obsess about their shapes? Are we hell-bent on perfection or smitten with totally unrealistic ideas about beauty?

Beauty is a valuable commodity in our image-obsessed society, so it’s not surprising that Miss Indias and Miss Worlds make headlines. These young women aren’t just beautiful; they’re most often thin too. But Chloe Marshall, the 2008 Miss England runner-up, was size 16 (“full-figured” or “ample,” to put it politely) and therefore made even more news.

A full-figured beauty pageant finalist creating a stop-the-press moment highlights the fact that larger women are not usually considered “the fairest of them all.” Indeed, pick up a magazine or newspaper on any other day and the message is loud and clear—thin is in.

With the average woman hovering around a size 14 or above, the comparison is odious. A recent survey revealed only six percent of women aged 18 to 64 were “very satisfied” with their looks. That leaves 94 percent of women critical of their appearance. In other words, the majority of the women sitting with you on the bus this morning woke up feeling judgmental and negative about their looks.

It’s a sobering thought and one that calls for questions: How did this fabulous, diverse sex become so obsessed with physical appearance? And why haven’t women wised up to themselves and shrugged off the stereotype?

Vested Interests
“If every woman in the world woke up, slapped herself on the head and said: ‘I’m happy with who I am,’ entire economies would collapse,” says Jane Caro, an award-winning advertising writer and co-author of The F Word: How We Learned to Swear by Feminism. Caro believes the fashion and cosmetics industries have a vested interest in keeping women insecure by presenting an ideal that no one can ever achieve. “Advertising isn’t immoral, it’s amoral,” she says. “It responds to where the money and the desire is.”

Logically we know that many images of women in ads, magazines and films are idealized versions of reality, often airbrushed to perfection, but still we agonize over the difference between them and us, often in minute detail.

“Women see perfection around them, and do a social comparison bit by bit,” says Professor Marika Tiggemann, from FlindersUniversity’s School of Psychology in Australia. The dissection of the female form in advertising, where bottoms, legs, breasts and mouths are isolated and glorified, is known as “bodyism.” Women, too, single out aspects of their bodies, although usually for negative attention—a recent poll revealed that women are most critical of their bellies, thighs and bottoms.

Children Too!
The media is often portrayed as the bogeyman in the body-image debate, but experts such as Professor Susan Paxton from La Trobe University’s School of Psychological Science say it’s only part of the picture. Paxton notes women are getting messages from family from an early age. “There’s evidence that by age three, children prefer thin people to those who are not so thin,” she says. “When given the option of picking a picture of a plump child or a thin child to be their friend, they generally choose the latter.”

The way in which parents view their bodies also impacts on their children’s attitudes. “A mother who is always dieting or being critical of her body is sending a clear message to her daughters,” says Tiggemann. “That sense of body dissatisfaction is passed on.”

The anti-obesity push is also unhelpful. “It’s shifted the focus away from health and onto weight and looks,” she says. “It’s perpetuating the notion that fat is bad, thin is good, and thinner is better.” And it’s a notion that has recently been proved to be untrue.

Fat and Fit
Results of a 12-year study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that while being overweight alone shortened people’s lives, subjects who were fat and fit (that is, did 30 minutes of walking most days) were at no greater risk of dying. Other studies have shown that a slender, inactive person is twice as likely to die as an overweight active person.

So we can be fat, fit and fabulous. The problem is that thin is the new beautiful, and being beautiful has always been prized. Research shows that attractive people are regarded by others as possessing desirable qualities such as intelligence, confidence, social skills and superior moral virtue. The notion that “to be beautiful is to be blessed” is hard-wired into our DNA.

It’s unlikely that our obsession with “beauty” is going to abate any time soon, but there are signs of a shift in attitude, and advertising and media are driving it.

New TrendsAlready, television has sniffed out a prevailing trend and jumped on it. The TV series Ugly Betty puts an average girl in the office of a fashion magazine and shows that if thin is the new beautiful, then real is the new fabulous. Ordinary women also star in Carson Kressley’s series How to Look Good Naked, a surprisingly touching and inspiring show that sees the flamboyant style-master teach women how to “accept, embrace and accentuate” what they see in the mirror.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, featuring women of all shapes, sizes and ages, has also struck a chord. “It started when someone in the global team was flicking through a magazine and thought the images of perfect women were inspirational, but unachievable,” says Candice Fernandez, a Dove marketing manager for skincare. The first campaign for firming body products, “featuring fabulous, real women in their underwear,” was clever branding, and a refreshing change.
Body image experts say international ad campaigns such as Dove’s are helping to level the playing field, but many of them remain unconvinced it’s enough to change entrenched values.

“We need more individual approaches,” says Tiggemann, “such as teaching young girls strong media literacy; education about advertising; and instilling self-esteem through something other than looks—such as sports, music, academic achievements, or being kind.”

It’s a goal worth pursuing.
Imagine a day when every woman on your bus is smiling because she got up feeling great about herself regardless of her dress size.

Today the bus. Tomorrow the world!
 Rich-Fat, Poor-Thin

All Are Unhappy!

 A street survey Reader’s Digest did in Mumbai last year proved a few things: That healthy middle-class Indians are usually overweight, and most of them would like to be thinner. But poorer people didn’t like being thin. “If I looked thin, my friends and family will think I’m unhealthy and not doing well,” one stocky parking attendant in Mumbai told us. So the well-to-do want to be thin, while the less fortunate want to be plump.

Remember When...

Society’s obsession with the female figure took hold in the 1920s when women stepped out of their corsets, lifted their hemlines and kicked up their newly tanned legs. The cosmetics, fashion and film industries locked their focus on the female form, where it has remained ever since.

It wasn’t until the ’60s, however, that the hourglass-shaped film sirens of the ’50s were replaced by doe-eyed girls with super-thin Twiggy proportions. Thin became fashionable and female icons have been downsizing ever since.

In the ’70s, a healthy glow and supple body were essential: Bo Derek and Christie Brinkley were typical of the sexy girl-next-door look, and Farrah Fawcett was the sexiest of them all. The 1976 poster of her in a red swimsuit remains an iconic image of the decade.

In 1981, Olivia Newton-John suggested we get Physical; a year later, a 44-year-old Jane Fonda rose phoenix-like from the ashes of her film career to suggest we go for “the burn”—burn calories.

The 1990s started with the glamazons Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista and ended with waifs Kate Moss and Jodie Kidd baring their bony bods for big money.

In the past decade, we’ve seen many women shrink. In 2000 the British Medical Association noted models and actresses have just 10 to 15 percent body fat (22 to 26 percent is considered healthy). No wonder celebrities are painfully thin—weekly magazines monitor their sizes with frenzied glee; admonishing them in equal measure for weight gains and losses.

Source: Readers' Digest