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Each of us is born male or female, but not masculine or feminine. Our bodies are transformed into recognizably masculine or feminine bodies through various cultural disciplines and practices. If both women and men are culturally disciplined, how does patriarchal domination incorporate itself into our cultural practices to create the docile bodies of women? In American society, there is currently an emphasis on excessive thinness of women and girls. This obsession with the slenderness of female bodies which advertising both creates and perpetuates is an essential part of the struggle aimed at restricting and immobilizing womens lives within patriarchy.
In Susan Bordos anthology titled Unbearable Weight, she examines the body as a text of femininity. Bordo writes that we learn what femininity consists of and how to achieve it directly through bodily discourse Loss of mobility, loss of voice, inability to leave the home, feeding others while starving oneself, taking up space, and whittling down for the space ones body takes up--all have political meaning [for women] under the varying rules governing the historical construction of gender. Women are disciplined to feed others, not the self. They develop an other-orientated emotional economy. Bordo argues that female appetite for food is a metaphorical expression of female hunger for power in the public sphere and in the bedroom. It follows then, that controlling womens appetite for food is related to limiting their movement and power in general.Bordo attributes this ideological belief to Victorian times when showing women eating was a representational taboo, and celebrations of female sexuality used images of women eating explicitly, lustily, and joyfully. The images that media surround us with most often agree with our cultures gender ideology. Men are almost never shown spending time on cooking. Almost all food advertisements show a woman (visible or implied) who has prepared the food being shown. Women are shown nourishing others, almost never themselves. It is actually suggested that women receive gratification through feeding others. When women are shown self-feeding, their eating is portrayed much differently than male eating. In food commercials aimed at women, words or phrases such as innermost cravings or obsession are used. Their eating is usually shown as private and as a fulfillment of some deep emotional needs. For women, the emotional comfort of self-feeding is rarely turned to in a state of pleasure and independence, but in despair, emptiness, loneliness, and desperation. Commercials will often show women turning to food for solace, especially if they have been emotionally wounded by a man in their lives.The ideal feminine body that advertising gives us today is one that is absolutely tight, contained, bolted down. Being thin is not enough. One must be firm also. Obtaining the ideal body becomes a matter of self-control. Thin women are obviously in control, having mastered the intense discipline of dieting and exercise. It is the fat women who are not in control. Fat has become associated with laziness and a general lack of self-discipline.
This effect produces one perfect image. How can any woman achieve such entirely impossible standards of attractiveness? Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much energy, time, and money on achieving these standards. Dieting entails a disciplining of the bodys hungers. Appetite must be monitored at all times, and will-power suddenly becomes essential. The body is the enemy. Since the innocent need of the organism for food will not be denied, the body becomes ones enemy, an alien being bent on thwarting the disciplinary project. Anorexia nervosa, which has now assumed epidemic proportions, is to women of the twentieth century what hysteria was to women of an earlier day the crystallization in a pathological mode of a widespread cultural obsession. Eating disorders have most definitely become a trend among women and girls as we become increasingly conditioned to lose weight (be in control), yet conditioned at the same time to be the best consumers we can be (allow ourselves to lose control). This double bind tells us we should lose control at the mere sight of desirable products yet keep our well-managed self in which all is kept in order despite the contradictions of consumer culture, ...the difficulty of finding homeostasis between the producer and the consumer sides of the self...bulimia embodies the unstable double bind of consumer capitalism, while anorexia and obesity embody an attempted resolution of that double bind. Anorexia is an extreme expression of self-control and denial. Obesity is, as Bordo states, an extreme capacity to capitulate to desire. Bulimia illustrates the actual double bind women find themselves in--expression of an uncontrollable desire which is often a part of belonging to a consumer culture (evident in the bingeing episode), in addition to the heavy control exercised after a bulimics bingeing which is a product of the imposed shame and guilt when the slender ideal is not recognized (evident in the bulimics vomiting episode, excessive exercising and laxative purges).
What the consumers are not told is that ninety-eight percent of those who lose weight through diet products such as pills, shakes, etc. gain the weight back including additional weight. The advertisements only tell us that You can never be too rich or too thin, and Starving and suffering got you into shape. The diet industry deliberately perpetuates dangerous attitudes about food and body image because it is profitable for them to make women feel terrible about their bodies, and the majority of women do feel this way. It has been documented that women in our culture are entirely more affected and tyrannized by the slender ideal than are men and by the beauty ideals in general. It is also well-documented that the prevalence of eating disorders is astoundingly higher among girls and women than among males.
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Advertising has served as a disciplinary force in the lives of women. Advertisers create images that dictate cultural trends indicative of the time. In the current disruption of gender roles, there seems to be a cultural uprising against womens increasing power. The uprising is noticeable in advertising. The dominating image of the painfully thin woman in advertising remains the ideal for American women. The grim truth is that attaining the slender body of today is not realistic for most women. Our bodies are not naturally shaped like those of twelve-year old boys. Eating disorders are on the rise, and the relationship women have with food is becoming an increasingly dangerous one. In order for patriarchy to continue to thrive, womens mobility must be limited. Is there a better way to limit a person than to starve them? Recognizing that the present ideal of slenderness has not always been the case at all times or in all cultures is the beginning of a new definition of our bodies. For centuries, women have shaped their bodies in accordance with mens needs and desires. Our lives have been immobilized in the process. In order to combat the pervasive effects of advertising on womens body images in our male-centered culture, our self-definition is essential. We must reinvent our bodies in a way that does not limit them.
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