Reports that eating-disordered behavior is just as likely to exist
in the average woman who's pursuing the cultural ideal of thinness, as it
is in the skinnier woman who represents the ideal. Cultural expectations
of unrealistic thinness affect woman across the board; Study by Jennifer
B. Brenner and Joseph C. Cunningham; Results.
By
PT Staff, published on January 01, 1992
Eating Disorders
Fashion models may be a whole lot taller than most women-and so
much skinnier that it's shocking. But models represent only an extreme of
human variation, not a different breed. Garden-variety women are more
like models than they realize and that appearances would suggest.
The surprising truth is that eating-disordered behavior is just as
likely to exist in the average woman, who's pursuing the cultural ideal
of thinness, as it is in the skinnier woman who represents the ideal.
Cultural expectations of unrealistic thinness affect women across the
board, concludes a team of Brandeis University psychologists.
Jennifer B. Brenner, Ph.D., and Joseph C. Cunningham, Ph.D.,
studied body weight and height differences as well as eating attitudes,
body concept, and self-esteem among male and female models and matched
groups of college undergraduates. Female models, they found, generally
have the Same unrealistic aspirations as ordinary folk, only more
so.
The male models weighed significantly more than their collegiate
counterparts, but the female models weighed somewhat less than the
controls--a finding especially striking since they were nearly five
inches taller.
"An alarming 73 percent of female models maintained body weights
which fell below the lower limits of conservative recommended weight
ranges," Brenner and Cunningham reported. Yet, like the controls, the
models failed to meet their own ideal weights--on average they wanted to
be 20% skinnier!
The researchers had expected that the professional female models
would display significantly more eating-disordered behavior than the
other groups, but that, however, did not turn out to be the case. In
fact, the undergraduates outdid them somewhat. Eating disorders proved to
be a function of gender rather than of professional status.
To be a woman in the world today means having to contend with
cultural ideals of thinness. And that wreaks ongoing havoc with the
psyche. "The cultural expectations of unrealistic thinness," conclude
Brenner and Cunningham, "continue to diminish the self-esteem of
contemporary women."
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
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