ANT 2000, Intro to Anthropology, Week 7-8, Spring 2004

 

Sex Roles and Status

 

Case:  Image of Women in Advertising

Question:  What is the reason for the obsession with thinness among American girls   and women?

Researcher:  Jean Kilbourne

 

“Slim Hopes” is a video presentation of a lecture by researcher Jean Kilbourne that explores the impact of advertising on our cultural images of ideal beauty and body type.  Kilbourne’s work also offers a new way to think about the causes of demoralizing and life-threatening eating disorders.  (The VHS video “Slim Hopes” is available in the film section of the Green Library, 5th floor).

 

Kilbourne observes that:

- 11.3% of college women have bulimia nervosa, a serious eating disorder.

- 80% of 10 year old girls are currently on diets.

- 50% of adult American women are currently on diets.

- 98% of dieters regain the weight lost and more.

- The diet industry, almost non-existent 30 years ago, is now a $33 billion industry.

- Just 5% of American women are genetically able to obtain “the ideal body type,” 

       associated with that of models in the beauty and fashion industry.

 

Media images, which routinely show only the ideal body type, perpetuate the cultural standard of “unattainable thinness.”  Sometimes, the model for a product is not even a real person, but a computer generated “perfect” image.  Many movies and television shows actually use “body doubles,” who stand in for the less-than-perfect lead actresses.  An example of this is body double that was used for Julia Roberts in the movie “Pretty Woman.”  Food advertisements often normalize bingeing or other eating disorders.  The tobacco industry also targets women by promoting the idea that cigarettes will keep them slim. 

 

According to Kilbourne, thinness today is the moral equivalent of the traditional virgin.  If today’s “good girl” is thin, the overweight woman is the “bad girl.”  Women who say “no” today are saying “no” to food.  Food has become a matter of morality and self-control. 

 

The video/lecture is divided into seven main parts:

1.      Impossible Beauty

2.      The Waif Look

3.      Constructed Bodies

4.      Food & Sex

5.      Food & Control

6.      The Weight Loss Industry

7.      Freeing Imaginations

 

 

 

Applications:

 

  1. Research Careers:
    1. Women studies
    2. Cross cultural study of sex roles and status.
  2. Policy and Marketing Careers
    1. Public interest organizations and activism on behalf of

of women’s and gay/lesbian rights.

                  2.   Marketing and advertising, using social science insights.

 

 

Recommended Readings:

 

  1. Jean Auel, Clan of the Cave Bear (and other books by this author).
  2. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.
  3. Merlin Stone, When God was a Woman.
  4. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process.
  5. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future.
  6. Dan Brown, The Da Vince Code.
  7. Paavo Airola, Are You Confused?
  8. Film, Quest for Fire (available a select Blockbuster stores)