106 Body Dissatisfaction
Social factors and body dissatisfactionResearch exploring the impact of social factors in causing body dissatis-
faction has particularly indicated roles for the media, culture, and the family.
The media
The most commonly held belief in both the lay and academic communities
is that body dissatisfaction is a response to representations of thin women
in the media. Magazines, newspapers, television, films and even novels pre-
dominantly use images of thin women. These women may be advertising
body-size-related items such as food and clothes or neutral items such as
vacuum cleaners and wallpaper, but they are always thin. Alternatively, they
may be characters in a story or simply passersby to illustrate the real world,
but this real world is always represented by thinness. Whatever their role
and wherever their existence, women used by the media are generally thin,
and we are therefore led to believe that thinness is not only the desired
norm but also the actual norm. When, on those rare occasions, a fatter
woman appears, she is usually there making a statement about being fat
(fat comedians make jokes about chocolate cake, and fat actresses are either
evil or unhappy), not simply as a normal woman (see chapter 5). Do these
representations then make women dissatisfied with their bodies?
Many books and papers suggest that media stereotypes, particularly of
women, play a central role in creating and exacerbating body dissatisfac-
tion. It is suggested that comparisons between the self and media ideals of
female attractiveness create dissatisfaction and “shame” (Silberstein et al.,
1987; Morrison et al., 2004; Bessenoff, 2006) and that media stereotypes
in the Western world where thinness is valued highly create and perpetuate
the association between ideals of thinness and positive attributes such as
a sense of control, success, and attractiveness (e.g., Glassner, 1988; Clay et al.,
2005; Clark and Tiggemann, 2006). In addition, the media are deemed
responsible for the association between fatness and negative attributes of
self-indulgence, lethargy, and slovenliness (e.g., Glassner, 1988). The increased
prevalence of dieting behavior has also been related to the decreased size of
fashion models (Morris et al., 1989), and the differences between the women
selected by artists as their models in past centuries and contemporary
models are often cited as possible reasons for the increase in eating dis-
orders (e.g., Morris et al., 1989; Stice et al., 1994; Morrison et al., 2004).
Some empirical research has directly explored the association between
media presentations of women and experiences of body dissatisfaction. For