84 The Meaning of Size
addition, women were more likely to be presented nude or partially clad
(Soley and Kurzbard, 1986). Research has also explored a phenomenon
called faceismto describe the degree of facial prominence in any given image,
with a score of 0 representing no face shown and 1 representing that only
the face was shown. The converse of this reflects bodyism(Archer et al., 1983).
The authors used this index to assess 1,750 representations of men and
women from at least 12 issues of five major American magazines, and the
results showed that the faceism index for men was 0.65, whereas for women
it was 0.45. This indicates that when women were portrayed greater
emphasis was placed on their body, whereas the images of men focused
more on the face. This approach has been used for publications in different
countries and for paintings from different centuries, and suggests that sex
differences in faceism are widespread, have existed for many centuries, and
have increased over time.
Women, therefore, appear less frequently in the media than men and
when they do appear they are of a lower status, younger, wearing less, show-
ing less face and more body, and more likely to be described in terms of
how they look. So how do they look?
Images of female body size and shapeMuch research has addressed the body size and shape of media images of
women. Historical analyses of images of women have reported that the
preferred woman’s body has become consistently smaller over the past
century than it had ever been before this time (Orbach, 1978; Fallon, 1990;
Grogan, 1999). For example, from the Middle Ages the rounder “repro-
ductive figure” was considered attractive and plumpness was erotic and
fashionable. In line with this, the women painted by Peter Paul Rubens
in the 1600s had full rounded hips and breasts, and in the 1800s Gustave
Courbet painted women who would be considered fat by today’s standards.
In fact Myers and Copplestone (1985) described how Édouard Manet’s
Olympiaof 1863, which portrays a female nude of average size, was con-
sidered obscene as the woman was deemed too thin to be erotic.
Analyses of more recent changes indicate that the current preference for
the thin female body can be traced back to the 1920s and the introduction
of the “flapper” look, which required a flat-chested boyish appearance
(Orbach, 1986). Women at this time bound their breasts and used starvation
diets and exercise in attempts to achieve the ideal body shape (Silverstein
et al., 1986). Some respite from this image followed World War II with the