Model images affect esteem of all women: study

Airbrushed ideal is 'very potent' -- and not just for those who are overweight or body-sensitive

Shannon Proudfoot
Vancouver Sun; CanWest News Service
Monday, April 02, 2007


The confidence of every woman -- not just those who are overweight or inclined to scrutinize themselves -- takes a hit when they're exposed to magazine images of ultra-perfect models for just a few minutes, a new study reveals.

The results surprised even the author, Laurie Mintz, an associate professor in the department of educational, school, and counselling psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The fact that women's body image suffers when confronted by glossy airbrushed beauties is obvious to anyone who flips through a magazine, she says. But she didn't expect to find that everyone is equally susceptible.

"That says these images are very potent, even more than I realized," Mintz says. "No matter how close or far one is from this unrealistic ideal, women still don't feel that they're close enough."

It's a scenario familiar to Julie Cafley, 32, an executive assistant in Ottawa. She's watched with dismay as one friend -- one of the most intelligent people she knows -- contemplated breast augmentation surgery and as another's pre-school daughters inspected their rear ends in the mirror. But she admits those media images get under her skin, too.

"Despite the fact that I'm an educated person who knows that media affects us in many different ways, it's almost stronger than that," she says. "The fact that I can intellectualize it, that's fine, but when I flip through Elle magazine, I still feel worse as a woman."

The study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Sex Roles, gauged the body esteem of 93 volunteers by asking them to rate their feelings about various physical attributes, including their hips, weight, noses and muscular strength.

The researchers confined themselves to European volunteers because there would have been too many variables at play if they were dealing with different ethnic and cultural influences between participants and models.

The volunteers looked at 10 magazine ads -- half looked at ads that contained no people in them, while the rest got five ads that prominently featured female models, most of them half-naked -- and their feelings were measured again.

The first group's body esteem remained virtually unchanged by the model-free ads. But the women who spent a few minutes staring at images of impossibly perfect models showed a "statistically significant" drop in confidence across the board, regardless of their size or inclination to judge themselves based on appearance.

"Just like we have those warnings on cigarette packs, it would be nice to put a little warning on Seventeen magazine," Mintz says. " 'Warning: Viewing these images is bad for your body esteem.' "

She suspects men are plagued by the same insecurities when confronted by ideally proportioned models of masculinity, though the effect is probably less dramatic because society focuses more intensely on women's looks. Since advertising isn't going anywhere, the only way to "inoculate" people is through media literacy, she says.

Schools recognize this, with most Canadian school boards incorporating some sort of media education into their English, health or social studies curricula, says Warren Nightingale, media education specialist with the Media Awareness Network.

"The beauty that's represented is nowhere near the reality we deal with in our lives," he says. "The key is ... to get young people thinking critically about what they're seeing."

Many experts believe it's a lesson young people need to hear from an early age. According to the National Eating Disorder Information Centre, 30 per cent of girls aged 10 to 14 are dieting, says Shari Graydon, author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You, and symptoms of anorexia have been found in girls as young as five.

"The advice coming out of the study is that women who want to feel good about themselves should avoid spending time in the company of the scrawny fashion models who too often populate women's mags," she says.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007