When you wake up in the morning, are you 100% satisfied with the person you are? Not solely with what you’ve accomplished, but more specifically, your personality, physical appearance, and overall demeanor. Living in a world that is obsessed with weight and physical appearance, it seems impossible to be one hundred percent happy and satisfied with who you are. Media outlets such as advertisements, marketing, pop television shows/movies, and celebrities create and continue to structure our society. It is becoming increasingly dangerous to have such a high preoccupation with weight and physical appearance. Issues of body dysmorphia, plastic surgery, eating disorders, and other severe actions to conform to societal expectations of body image is becoming increasingly popular and for some, seem like their only option to truly be “pretty” or “handsome”.
While scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed last week, I stumbled across a video shedding light on the self-objectification of women. A woman named Amy Pence-Brown sought out to a market in Boise, Idaho and conducted an interesting experiment with the people shopping in this small town market. Amy, with the intention of spreading self-love and self-appreciation, walked out to the market at a time in which there was heavy shopper traffic. She then took her clothes off, remained in a black bikini, blindfolded herself, and held markers in her hands. In front of Amy, a board read, “I’m standing for anyone who has struggled with a self-esteem issue like me, because all bodies are valuable. To support self-acceptance, draw a <3 on my body.”
Over the span of her time blindfolded at this market in Idaho, individuals passing took the time to fill her body with positivity and self-love phrases. By the end of her experiment, her entire body was covered with hearts and self-acceptance expressions of encouragement.
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| Amy Pence-Brown |
Situations such as Amy’s, work towards changing our views of what is “acceptable” and truly work to form unity amongst us all. Furthermore, Amy is working towards her own self-acceptance, as she tells us that she too recognizes how difficult it is being a woman in this time period.
A study by Jackman, Williamson, Netemeyer, & Anderson (1995), supports not only Amy’s inability to live daily with 100% self-acceptance, but also understanding that that view is something many people in the 21st century feel as well. In this study, researchers took fifty female athletes, recruited from college sports teams that are known for emphasizing and encouraging a “thin” physique. There were 18 swimmers, 6 tennis players, 4 basketball players, 7 volleyball players, 9 gymnasts, and 6 track athletes. The researchers then gave them 30 sentences on paper that could be answered in either a positive or negative light, as well as an additional 20 clear-cut neutral sentences displayed through a tape recorder. After the experiment, researchers found that a high number of those high weight pre-occupied group rated “the disambiguated sentences favoring a negative or fatness interpretation” (353). Researchers were able to state that obsession with body size and one’s pre-occupation with weight may be primarily determinant on fashion and how it reinforces their concerns regarding weight and societal expectations.
Amy works to eradicate this social construct revolving around insecurities and being the "perfect size 2 model". Reinforced through the study discussed above, we can see that we, as a society, have a long way to go to eliminate stigmas of “fatness” and increase self-love and self-appreciation.
References
Jackman, L. P., Williamson, D. A., Netemeyer, R. G., & Anderson, D. A. (1995). Do weight-preoccupied women misinterpret ambiguous stimuli related to body size?. Cognitive Therapy And Research, 19(3), 341-355. doi:10.1007/BF02230404
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