Social Media and Women’s Body Image

“The ideal figure of fashion has never been the celebration of the natural, but the test of a woman’s ability to resist it.” (Techno Fashion, 2002)

One of the most common subjects we women talk about is weight and beauty. If you consider yourself thin or fat, it doesn’t matter: there’s always someone looking for a tip, an advice, an idea, and of course, always someone there to talk about it. It’s our very own version of small talk. And most of the time it’s harmless: we have seen many times in this class how society pushes us into those subjects, how much the cosmetic and fashion industry pushes us towards this ideal because it is very profitable. So talking about beauty is not a crime. But what if the type of beauty you are talking about is unhealthy and harmful to yourself? And instead of a conversation in the bathroom with one girl, you are posting that type of opinion online for millions of people to see?

“These physical regimes have psychological repercussions. Modern subjects start to monitor  their own actions for conformity to these expert norms, just as the prisoners in Bentham’s Panopticon internalize the warder’s critical gaze and thus become their own jailers: “In the perpetual self-surveillance of the inmate lies the genesis of the celebrated ‘individualism’ and heightened self-consciousness which are hallmarks of modern times.” …. Rather than being coerced into conformity by a localized, external power, we define and regulate ourselves in relation to internalized norms” (Fashion philosophy for everyone – 2011)

So we have internalized the need to be thin and pretty according to society’s standards. We have become our very own jailers. We feel guilty when we eat more than we should, and we feel happy when we have lost a pound. But some teenage girls have taken it to an extreme. They are the toughest jailers you would ever see. What happens when this type of personality decides that they want to “help” other people to be like them?

A few years ago there was a big scandal regarding the “pro-ana” websites. These sites were endorsing anorexia as a lifestyle, giving teenage girls tips on how to fool their parents into believing they were eating, how to mask the feeling of hunger, or the feeling of weakness that comes with not eating. They shared crash diets recipes, teached each other how to refuse food in parties, competed on losing wait, talked about how to use laxatives. They were a community that believed in something – a dangerous something – and what better way to come together than the internet?

But after these websites started becoming too popular, the support groups for these types of eating disorders started pressuring the web hosts to shut them down. According to Wikipedia, in 2001 Yahoo removed “pro-ana sites from its Yahoo Clubs (now Yahoo Groups) service, stating that such sites endorsing self-harm were violations of its terms of service agreement”. On a second wave of pro-ana online, these types of organizations started creating pages on Facebook, Live Journal and other social media websites. And each one of them seems to have a different view on the problem. Facebook shuts down such pages, but Live Journal in 2007 had said they did not believe shutting down those pages would do any good. According to them, those types of websites could raise awareness to the problem. MySpace said something along the same lines. Bottom line: there is no formula in dealing with teenagers who want to create a community – they will find a way. Or is there?

I had not heard about pro-ana communities for at least 3 years now, and had figured they had just gone away because of the pressure against it. But recently they started resurfacing, disguised, in one of my favorite social websites: Pinterest.

Pinterest is often referred to as “Twitter for women”, and the majority of the users, the Pinners, are females indeed. It resembles Twitter in a way because you can follow other pinners. Basically, it works like this: after you register, you can “pin” anything you like onto your own board, and it will be stored there for anyone to see. You can create different boards for recipes, fashion, beauty, anything you like, really. In the front page you can see the recent pins from all the other pinners, or you can choose to see only pins related to clothing, hairstyles, etc.

Recently I had noticed a new trend on Pinterest called “Thinspiration”. Quotes such as “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” or “What you eat in private shows in public” and pictures of extremely thin models followed by tips on how to lose weight. The tips are far from healthy: “drink ice water every hour to avoid feeling hungry” , “Take cold showers because your body will burn calories to heat you back up”, “Wear a rubberband around your wrist. Snap it when you want to eat.” And so on. Again, jailers. These girls clearly punish themselves for feeling hungry. And these tips are splattered all around Pinterest, below pictures of women with perfect bodies. Since there’s nothing wrong with the pictures, and the comments are not clearly telling girls to be anorexic, there will be nothing Pinterest can do about it.

So this is what we have come to. Because of the search for the ideal body that the fashion and cosmetic industry, we now have online ambassadors of the idea that in order to achieve that ideal anything is worth trying. Social media has the good side of bringing people together, but when these people come together to hurt other girls thoughts about themselves with their influence – as if being told by regular media was not enough – what do we do?

Luckily, counter groups emerge. And after going through the comments section on those pictures and doing some research online, I have seen that many pinners are aware of the situation. Even though there are thousands of “Thinspiration” boards, there are also thousands that endorse healthy lifestyles. In response to one of the Thinspiration quotes, a pinner posted “Nothing tastes as good as HEALTHY feels”, and there have been a lot of comments from other pinners requesting to stop the pro-ana pins on Pinterest.

Social media and technology can play wonderful parts in our lives, but they are also clearly the fastest and easiest way for these types of groups to proliferate. I could sit here and talk about how much the fashion industry is to blame for this, but at this point we are all very aware of where the need to resist our natural bodies comes from. What is relieving right now is seeing other women fighting back. No matter how much the fashion industry dictates the ideal body, if we fight back for acceptance, eventually they will have to give in. According to Fashion Philosophy for Everyone (Wonfedale J., Kennett J., 2011) more than the male gaze, women seek for each other’s approval when it comes to beauty. The conclusion I have come to is that the more accepting women become to embrace our different figures, the less unhealthy and psychologically hurt we will be.