There are two things that we want to tell those people. Firstly the weight of scientific evidence is on their side. There is something to be worried about. The research in Faking It shows that media portrayals of women as sex objects is bad for girls’ and women’s health. It’s not about censorship, or taking the high moral ground; it’s about women’s wellbeing.
There are academics and researchers thinking and writing who have the language and the evidence to support their concerns. We want to make these tools available to people who otherwise might remain silent.
Secondly, it has become clear that there are vast numbers of people supporting what we’re doing. We have held successful Get Real events in eight cities around Australia, with thousands of women attending, and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback and appreciation. Grassroots movements can have great power in changing things, even changing cultural trends. What we’ve been seeing over recent months is a groundswell of public opinion against premature sexualisation, and against sexual objectification. This is a movement of concerned parents, educators and health activists and, importantly, it is supported by the strength of research evidence.
Our research in Faking It is an important tool in this movement. The findings are sometimes shocking and often illuminating, helping to make sense of the media onslaught to which we are subjected every day. Many girls and women have directly responded to us: ‘So I’m not the only teenager who detests her own body?’ ‘What is it about fashion and beauty advertisements that somehow make me feel fat and ugly?’ ‘Why do I feel depressed after reading a girls’ or women’s magazine that I chose to purchase and read?’
After reviewing reams of research from peer-reviewed academic journals, we’re not convinced that glossy mags are empowering for women. Many other researchers are worried too. Most of them are psychologists and others come from the disciplines of health, economics, feminism, politics, and language. Faking It draws together a variety of approaches into one resource that demystifies the impact of women’s magazines on women’s lives.
It would not be fair to say that all glossy women’s magazines are the same. In some ways they are all a little different, yet in many key ways they’re very similar. There seems to be a winning formula that sells the most copies—notice, for example, how all the covers are very much the same. It’s not just the cover graphics and layout, but the phrases on the cover. The themes and the philosophies seem to be very similar—perhaps even predictable.
The headlines are always a combination of fashion, beauty, men and sex. Advertisements in these magazines, as well, combine to send a clear message to the person checking out the cover in the supermarket. What is this message? It is this: to be happy and normal, young women should be thin, sexy and beautiful. They should spend much time and money achieving that look. And here are the women they should look like—celebrities, supermodels, and porn stars, sometimes young women who do nothing but dress up and party hard—the new role models for today’s young women.
In addition, young women should have a man and they should be having lots of hot sex with him. Because everyone else is. At least, that seems to be the message from your average magazine.
The idea that your body, how you look, and especially your sexual parts, are your whole self is known as objectification. It is an idea that comes at the expense of recognising that women are complex, whole and intrinsically valuable individuals with intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual capacities, and that we have unique talents and interests. It makes empty shells of us.
When pop culture repeats over and over, in images and messages, that women are most valued for their looks and their bodies, women might begin to believe it. Enter the very scary phenomenon called self-objectification. Young women who believe this idea will be devoting most of their energies towards meeting ideals of physical perfection—which, by the way, are based on digitally altered images of carefully selected women, and therefore completely unattainable.
Self-objectification involves the over-valuation of shape and appearance, and research shows that self-objectification and perfectionism can result in women submitting their bodies to constant surveillance, comparing themselves to media images, and ending up feeling intensely ashamed of their own bodies (Tiggemann and Kuring, 2004; Tylka and Hill, 2004; Hebl, King and Lin, 2004; Evans, 2003; Durkin and Paxton, 2002; Pinhas, 1999; Thornton and Maurice, 1997; Monro and Huon, 2005). It affects women’s everyday activities, with some studies showing that self-objectification can result in compromised intellectual and motor performance (Fredrickson et al., 1998; Fredrickson and Harrison, 2005; Gapinski, 2003; Strelan, Mehaffey and Tiggemann, 2003; Segar, Spruijt-Metz and Nolen-Hoeksema, 2006; Tiggemann and Williamson, 2000).
Researchers have analysed magazines in a few different ways.
One way is to come up with some classifications for all the pictures, including advertisements. They make codes for what the people in the pictures are doing, what they’re wearing, how they’re posed, and so on. Then they do statistical analyses of the pictures and their meanings. Using this method, some researchers (Krassas, Blauwkamp and Wesselink, 1997) concluded that the US edition of Cosmopolitan sent a very similar message to the one of the US editions of Playboy—that women have an insatiable appetite for sex, and must be continually available to men. And both magazines mainly had pictures of women—very few pictures of men. Cosmopolitan is the most widely-read women’s magazine in many countries, including Australia.
If this is indeed a message that Cosmo and perhaps other magazines are sending, this presents at least two problems for young women.
Firstly, research shows that we are influenced in our sexual behaviour—even against our better judgment—by what we think everyone else thinks, and by believing media messages that suggest everyone else is doing it. Teenagers in particular want to fit in and be accepted. And as research shows, and people intuitively know, media messages are very powerful. Why else would anyone bother advertising? Advertising is a billion-dollar global industry and those who claim that young people can just ignore advertising are naïve.2
Secondly, because sex is often portrayed as young women’s main currency, many young women feel they have to make excuses for why they don’t want sex. Not wanting sex is so unusual, according to pop culture, that it’s either a personal insult to the man in question, or it’s evidence that the young woman is prudish or dysfunctional in some way.
Young women also tend to highly value their relationships, and be eager to please others, so saying no to sexual advances can be very difficult. Not to mention the fact that young women who are ashamed of their bodies or who have very low self-esteem are particularly vulnerable to sexual advances, sometimes seeing even the worst of them as flattering (Brumberg, 1997).
Another way of analysing magazines is to try to understand the messages in the articles. British researchers (Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2003) were interested in the advice given to women in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan. Their research identified a theme, a philosophy, in the advice to women. It was ‘it’s up to you to take action to solve your own problems.’
Some people might see this as an empowering message to women; but how empowering is it really to suggest that your problems are all your own, and that no-one else needs to be involved in solving them? This is a lonely, false message, and, above all, it is the message of an individualist consumer culture.
The reality is that women are, and need to be, part of communities and families. And most of our problems aren’t simply private, individual matters. There are in fact social, economic, structural, historical and many other reasons why women are faced with particular problems, especially in terms of relationships and sexual encounters. Women’s Forum Australia looks especially to public policy, education and advocacy to help women be their best. We are very wary of those who expect women to change themselves while everyone and everything else remains the same. We are especially concerned with those who believe women should just buy
a product, or pop a pill, or undergo a procedure, to solve their alleged problems like low self-esteem, or being apparently different to others, or failing to have those hot sexual relationships that popular culture expects everyone to have.
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2 For an expose of how advertising affects us, read Jean Kilbourne’s book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (1999).
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So some messages might be false or a little fanciful. Does it really matter what we read and look at? Isn’t it just a bit of entertainment?
Unfortunately not. Another research direction that you can read about in Faking It is an analysis of how women think and feel before and after reading magazines. Their reactions might be observed in the short term, or over a period of years. Researchers have looked at women’s beliefs about themselves, their bodies, about other women, their eating and exercise behaviours, and other aspects of their lives, in relation to the media to which they are exposed.
One very clear finding is that there are harmful effects of being exposed to pictures of thin and glamourous women. Poor body image, lower self-esteem, anger, anxiety, shame, self-surveillance are documented responses (Groesz, Levine and Murnen, 2002; Pinhas et al., 1999; Evans, 2003; Durkin and Paxton, 2002; Thornton and Maurice, 1997; Monro and Huon, 2005). Put differently, research shows clearly that what we see really does affect us. This is serious stuff. Women may not realise this is happening to them; they may not make any connection between the glossy, beautiful, popular magazines and the negative, often hidden aspects of their own lives. Sometimes research and advocacy are necessary to cast light on these connections.
Fortunately, occasionally positive things happen that we can applaud. The Australian edition of Cosmopolitan has made at least two good moves recently. One is to ban diets. The other is their Body Love Policy that ensures differently-sized women are pictured throughout the magazine.
We think it is also positive that Girlfriend and other magazines sometimes write about accepting yourself as you are, and sometimes make a point of admiring those who are considered larger-sized models and celebrities rather than just young women who look like stick insects (a particular feature in Faking It). In fact since publishing Faking It we have noticed many women’s magazines featuring articles on body image, finding celebrities who are willing to discuss more frankly their own body image issues, and to show their bodies in a more realistic light.
Nevertheless, in spite of these good things, the expectation to look good and to be sexy remains a priority in these magazines. And on balance, the messages dominating these magazines, especially as a result of the advertisements, effectively drown out any efforts of well-meaning editors and journalists to provide positive, realistic messages.
After all, page after page of sexy, perfect models in advertisements do not correspond with a message that you’re okay the way you are, or that your intellectual achievements matter as much as how ‘hot’ you look, or that you don’t need a man to be a fulfilled woman.
It’s a paradox: if the editors really want to empower women, their ambition is scuttled by the fact that the very existence of these magazines is tied to advertising. In most advertising aimed at women’s fashion and beauty products, women need to be made to feel like they’re not good enough in order to spend their money on the product in question.
Faking It has struck a chord with thousands of women and girls, proving to be a very effective way of unlocking the research about how magazines speak to us and impact upon our lives. Sometimes the mass media needs to be drawn back to reality, to be accountable for the damage they may be doing. And sometimes the wider community needs to be given a nudge to act, and a voice to speak. Our aim is to do all of that, and to help girls and women to resist the pressure to fake it, and to keep it real.
References
Brumberg J.J. (1997) The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Random House, New York.
Durkin S.J. and Paxton S.J. (2002) ‘Predictors of vulnerability to reduced body image satisfaction and psychological wellbeing in response to exposure to idealized female media images in adolescent girls’ Journal of Psychosomatic Research 53, pp. 995–1005.
Evans P.C. (2003) ‘“If only I were thin like her, maybe I could be happy like her”: the self-implications of associating a thin female ideal with life success’ Psychology of Women Quarterly 27 pp. 209–214.
Fredrickson B.L., Roberts T.A., Noll S.M., Quinn D.M. and Twenge J.M. (1998) ‘That swimsuit becomes you: sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1), pp. 269–284.
Fredrickson B.L. and Harrison K. (2005) ‘Throwing like a girl: self-objectification predicts adolescent girls’ motor performance’ Journal of Sport and Social Issues February 29 (1), pp. 79–101.
Gapinski K.D. (2003) ‘Body objectification and “fat talk”: effects on emotion, motivation and cognitive performance’ Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 48 (9/10), pp. 377–388.
Groesz L.M., Levine M.P. and Murnen S.K. (2002) ‘The effect of experimental presentation of thin media images on body satisfaction: a meta-analytic review’ International Journal of Eating Disorders 31 pp. 1–16.
Hebl M.R., King E.B. and Lin J. (2004) ‘The swimsuit becomes us all: Ethnicity, gender, and vulnerability to self-objectification’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (10), pp. 1322–1331.
Kilbourne, Jean (1999) Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. Touchstone Rockefeller Centre, New York.
Krassas N.R., Blauwkamp J.M. and Wesselink P. (2001) ‘Boxing Helena and corseting Eunice: sexual rhetoric in Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines’ Sex Roles 44 (11/12), pp. 751–771.
Machin D. and van Leeuwen T. (2003) ‘Global schemas and local discourses in Cosmopolitan’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4), pp. 493–512.
Monro F. and Huon G. (2005) ‘Media-portrayed idealised images, body shame, and appearance anxiety’ International Journal of Eating Disorders 38, pp. 85–90.
Pinhas L., Toner B.B., Ali A., Garfinkel P.E., Stuckless N. (1999) ‘The effects of the ideal of female beauty on mood and body satisfaction’ International Journal of Eating Disorders 25, pp. 223–226.
Segar M., Spruijt-Metz D. and Nolen-Hoeksema S. (2006) ‘Go Figure? Body-shape motivations are associated with decreased physical activity among midlife women’ Sex Roles February 54 (3/4), pp. 175–187.
Strelan P., Mehaffey S.F. and Tiggemann M. (2003) ‘Self-objectification and esteem in young women: the mediating role of reasons for exercise’ Sex Roles 48 (1/2), pp. 89–95.
Thornton B. and Maurice J. (1997) ‘Physique contrast effect: adverse impacts of idealized body images for women’ Sex Roles 37 (5/6), pp. 433–439.
Tiggemann M. and Kuring J. (2004) ‘The role of body objectification in disordered eating and depressed mood’ British Journal of Clinical Psychology 43, pp. 299–311.
Tiggemann M. and Williamson S. (2000) ‘The effect of exercise on body satisfaction and self-esteem as a function of gender and age’ Sex Roles 43 (1/2), pp. 119–127.
Tylka T.L. and Hill M.S. (2004) ‘Objectification theory as it relates to disordered eating among college women’ Sex Roles 51 (11/12), pp. 719–730.
The Gaze that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Bill Henson and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics1
Abigail Bray
Pulease, pulease leave me alone…For Christ’s sake leave me alone.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1958, p. 194)
The lesson of photography is that there are many truths, not one…People do sometimes only see what they want to…The greatness of art comes from the ambiguities, which is another way of saying it stops us from knowing what to think. It redeems us from a world of moralism and opinionation and claptrap. It stops us in our tracks as we are formulating the truths we think we believe in. It stops us and makes us wonder.
Bill Henson (in Shanahan, 2008)2
What is the lesson of Henson’s photographs of naked girls? How did the Australian 2008 ‘moral panic’ over Henson’s photographs of a naked thirteen-year-old girl bring to the surface hidden cultural rules about who can and cannot see the commercial sexual exploitation of children? How do we situate a gaze that ‘redeems us from a world of moralism and opinionation and claptrap?’ (my emphasis) Whose world and whose gaze is being humiliated and silenced here as mere moralism, opinion and claptrap?
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1 This chapter draws on Bray, 2009, ‘Governing the gaze: child sexual abuse moral panics and the post-feminist blind spot.’
2 For the full text of the Henson speech see http://fddp.theage.com.au/pdf/Bill%20Henson%20speech%NGA.pdf
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‘After a regrettable period of moral panic’, reported The Australian on June 7, 2008, ‘the Bill Henson affair appears to have been resolved in an appropriate and welcome manner’ (cited in Marr from The Australian, 2008, p. 131). From an edgy beginning in sociology text books of the 1970s to an upwardly mobile term that radiates cultural capital, ‘moral panic’—and especially ‘child sexual abuse moral panic’—has become code for the intolerant tabloid emotions of the moralising masses, rampaging menopausal vigilantes in council states, vulgar man-hating feminists, the mindless authority of the state, bleating Christians and sundry ‘holier-than-thou-f*cktards.’3 One simply does not suffer from ‘vulgar’ child sexual abuse moral panics when one is a sophisticated, socially progressive and responsible, neoliberal, middle-class subject.
In brief, the ‘regrettable period’ in question followed a complaint about a photograph of a naked thirteen-year-old girl on the invitation to Henson’s private opening at the elite Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. For several weeks after the police temporarily confiscated Henson’s photographs on May 22, 2008, on the grounds that they might represent child pornography, the Australian mass media was involved in a debate about censorship, art and child pornography. Immediately after the new Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd commented that Henson’s photographs were ‘absolutely revolting,’ members of the Australian Creative Taskforce reprimanded Rudd in a petition, warning him that the Henson child sexual abuse moral panic would create ‘untold damage to our cultural reputation.’4 As Henson’s lawyer flippantly put it: ‘The subtext of my opinion was, don’t be the laughing stock of the world’ (in Marr, 2008, p. 121). Indeed, numerous media articles, opinion pieces in major newspapers, Australian and British blogs declared that a child pornography censorship moral panic was threatening the very foundations of Australian democracy. Celebrating an aesthetic appreciation of Henson’s shadowy photographs of limp, melancholic naked girls with hairless vaginal folds and budding breasts became a way of being seen as a cool, rational, cosmopolitan Australian.
Getting Real Page 11
