So Cosmo Says You're Fat / Well I Ain't Down With That

Over at Voice in the Wilderness, Timmy posted about the recent trend towards cosmetic vaginal surgery (???), and it led to a pretty interesting discussion in the comment section. After thinking about it for a day or two, I left a bit of a long comment myself, and I figured maybe it was worth pulling out my main point and giving it a post of its own (yes, this is a way to post without writing something new, and I am lazy).

I get the impression that many people feel that the trend towards overly skinny models and celebrities along with anorexia and generally negative female body image is being driven by men and our desire to have women look attractive to us. And I'm sure that there is some truth to this, but I'm not sure that it's really the driving factor.

When it comes to being skinny, in particular, I think a lot of the pressure on women is coming from other women or from society (the media) to conform to what is considered aesthetically pleasing - where what is aesthetically pleasing is, not entirely, but significantly driven by women and gay men, filtering down primarily from runways, through magazines.

Consider the Reality TV show, 'America's Next Top Model'. Now if you follow the conventional wisdom, you'd figure that such a show would be all about skinny models who look skinny to please men (so as to be attractive to men), and you would think that this show following a group of skinny models around would be geared towards, and attract, a male audience. But this isn't the case. I, for one, can't stand the show, while my girlfriend is a big fan (well, she likes it more than I do, anyway). And we're hardly an unusual case. Consider this (telling, in its incoherence) write-up on 'Top Model' from Reality TV World,

"Looking back, the biggest questions are probably why it took so long for viewers to begin tuning in to watch a show starring attractive young women competing for a modeling contract -- and why they appear to largely be other women rather than the expected male audience."

But if you watch the show, it's obvious that it is targeted towards women. I've watched (under duress) a couple of episodes and in one that I saw there was the usual collection of stick figures, and one healthy looking girl. Of course this was the girl who was kicked off by the panel of judges. They pretty much came right out and said that the reason she was being kicked off was not because she wasn't a good model or that she wasn't attractive, but that, with her full figure (i.e. big breasts / hips), she belonged more in a 'mens' magazine like Maxim, not on the runway.

Consider this headline, "Flabby celebrities caught on camera', Or this one: 'So-and-so's battle with cellulite'. Where would you expect to see these headilnes? In a supermarket tabloid, the prime source of the hyper-criticism of any extra weight or jiggle that drives celebrities into their anorexia - and again catering to a largely female audience.

In the comments at Voice in the Wilderness, Princess Monkey takes hope that maybe 'urban' music, a culture where the super skinny model isn't the ideal, will begin to influence society away from the unhealthy skinny ideal (although I'd note that it's been a long time since Sir Mix-A-Lot released 'Baby Got Back' (the classic rap song which gives this post its title) and little has changed). But of course urban music is one of the most chauvinistic, macho cultures around, so maybe it's not surprising that this is one place where we get away from the super skinny model syndrome. You could write that off as just an artifact of black culture but I think you see the same factors at work in the country music scene as well.

So you can blame men for a lot of stuff, but I'm not convinced we're the prime culprits in this particular case.

Of course there are lots of other, (probably more important), related questions such as 'what is driving our increasing obsession with our bodies and attractiveness', and 'where do we draw the line between what is considered healthy and what isn't?' (most parents would get braces for their children but they probably wouldn't get them a nose job - why is this?) but I'm not up to taking any of those on today.