‘Fitspiration’ gives women blues

The ideal female body type is getting even harder to attain, writes Frances Bozsik and Brooke L Bennett

DAY after day, we’re so bombarded with media messages that rarely we stop to think about what they’re telling us to think, do or feel.

Much has been written about the unrealistic beauty standards women have been held to.

Female actors, models and TV personalities are overwhelmingly thin, which has had a detrimental effect on the eating habits and selfesteem of countless women.

But in recent years, we’ve noticed something else: media targeting women have featured models who are not only exceedingly thin, but muscular.

As psychologists who study body image issues, we wanted to test whether women are aware of this trend – and whether they’re aspiring for this look themselves. Fiji to Western television. Before the study, island inhabitants had preferred larger female figures, seeing them as a sign of health. But following the introduction of Western television, the researchers found that women were much more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviours such as vomiting and restrictive dieting, in a quest to appear thin. women working out or in poses highlighting muscle groups like the abdomen or buttocks.

In promoting muscularity, these images seem to be promoting healthy exercise. But analyses of the text accompanying the images found they often include guilt-inducing messages that focus on body image (ie,

“Suck it up now, so you don’t have to suck it in later”).

In fact, one study has shown that an overwhelming percentage (72%) of these posts emphasise appearance, rather than health (22%). It’s an appearance that’s not only muscular, but also thin. and attractiveness. The winners had become thinner and more muscular over the 15-year span.

In a second study, we wanted to examine whether women had begun to prefer this thin, toned body type. So we presented 64 undergraduate women with images of thin, muscular models.

In the other, the muscle tone and definition were digitally removed, leaving the model to be only thin. Participants rated them on thinness, muscularity and attractiveness, and on how typical they were of media images.

Results showed participants could detect the difference in muscularity in the images and rated all as typical of media images. Asked to identify which image they preferred, participants overwhelmingly chose the thin and muscular image over the thinonly image. body image of female viewers.

Just like the previous studies on media images that promote thinness, seeing thin, muscular women can lead to a negative mood and decreased body satisfaction. It is the addition of muscularity to thinness that has this impact; if women see other women who are fit but not thin, then we don’t see the same effect.

It seems the quest for a toned body adds just one more thing to strive for – another layer of pressure for women. Not only do they need to restrict caloric intake, but they also need to add a muscle-building exercise routine.

Because there’s a deceitful aspect of rhetoric surrounding “fitspiration” – with benign implications that it’s simply all about being healthy – we fear that our culture may be in the midst of a more toxic promotion of an ideal female body that only leads to more dissatisfaction. – The Conversation

Frances Bozsik, PHD candidate in clinical health psychology, University of Missouri-kansas City.

Brooke L Bennett, PHD candidate at University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Hawaii.