On Women Hating Their Bodies

Biological and psychological underpinnings

It’s very rare to find a woman without body issues. That is not to say that they do not exist; they are just exceptional rare. It’s much, much easier to find women who hate their bodies or are generally dissatisfied with their appearance. Among the aspects women are most self-critical of, weight stands out as an arena in which women seem to find endless sources of frustration in their quest to shrink enough to disappear. Psychologists have gone so far as the coin the term “normative discontent” to explain the idea that it is NORMAL if you are a female to be unhappy with your weight (Oliver-Pyatt, 2003). Where did this come from? Why are women so preternaturally affected by their weight?

Every article I have read about this issue has villainized unrealistic expectations perpetuated by airbrushed ads and representations of women in popular media as the driving culprit behind this body image epidemic in developed countries. While I definitely agree unrealistic portrayals are a big factor, the origin of this pressure to begin with clearly isn’t that simple. Studies on the relationship between media exposure and body dissatisfaction have, in generally, demonstrated a correlation between the two, however, the strength of the correlation has varied from study to study and with the type of media exposure. I think there is something more, a deeper correlation between women and hatred of their bodies, that has a biological skew and has been exacerbated by modern cultural trends; I wanted to explore the issue from this biological lens as I think this perspective has been largely ignored and overshadowed by an overemphasis on external factors.

The link between cultural trends and female body issues fails to take into account the nature of these culture trends themselves, namely that cultural trends have increasingly tended toward ideal characteristics that contradict with female biological propensities. I personally think that THIS is the more important factor: the fact that the ideal female body type as it stands today is at odds with that which women are biologically and evolutionarily predisposed toward. Biologically, women are predisposed to carry on some fat; estrogen and other hormones overrepresented in females propel us toward fat reserves around our hips and thighs in order to increase our ability to successfully carry our young to term. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when the ideal woman was, to put it quite bluntly, rubenesque, cultural expectations matched female biological predispositions. Men favored women who were larger and heavier set as this implied health, privilege, and an overabundance of sustenance and nourishment. My theory is that, if the cultural trends were toward this rubenesque figure, we would not see the same self-hatred that we do today, because women would not be working at-odds with their bodies but rather cooperatively with them.

However, the cultural landscape today, which emphasizes an unrealistic skinny ideal, means that girls grow up constantly at-odds with their bodies and the biological tendencies that materialize most aggressively during puberty. The number one wish of girls aged 11-17 who were given 3 magic wishes for literally anything in the world was “to lose weight and keep it off” (Kilbourne, 1994). This is, simultaneously, terrifyingly depressing and perfectly understandable. Evolutionarily, women who could keep fat reserves (read: had slower metabolisms) and thus survive pregnancy and childbirth were selected for over those who were skinnier and less able to keep fat reserves. Evolutionarily and biologically then, factors are pushing women toward a body type they do not want; thus, many females are in a constant struggle against their bodies and grow up with an antagonist versus a cooperative relationship with their bodies. Contrast this to the male experience, where at the very least the modern male ideal of being toned and muscular is supported by the work of androgens in the body such as testosterone. This is not, of course, to discount the pressures males face in today’s society, since as many have noted, they are great indeed, but more to point out that the female experience can be framed as* an antagonist experience against their bodies in a way that is *distinct and unique to women.

My theory is that women who internalize this antagonistic relationship with their bodies early on develop an immense dissonance between the desires of their mind and the dispositions of their body, causing self-loathing and greater willingness to punish or inflict physical harm to a body they feel does not cooperate with them. I do not think that women as a whole are directly predisposed to eating disorders and body image issues but rather those that experience this dissonance and antagonism against their bodies are, especially when this factor is coupled with early or frequent exposure to other external risk factors such as the deification of thin supermodels in mass media. However, the reason that mass media is able to GET* *to women and fuel them in their drive toward this unattainable skinniness to the degree that it is able to, is, I think, more fundamentally that it is able to play on this tension between body and mind that already exists among women from an early age. The antagonism of the female mind and its desire to match up to this cultural ideal of Twiggy versus the physical realities of her body and her biological propensities is the first harbinger of a desire for greater control, which escalates until it reaches an uncontrollable state in the cases of eating disorders. The desire for control is one often-cited underpinning of anorexia: as Rob Hoerburger summed up in a 1996 New York Times Magazine feature about the first highly public case of anorexia, Karen Carpenter: “If anorexia has classically been defined as a young woman’s struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world — her voice and her mother’s love — were exclusively the property of her brother Richard. At least she would control the size of her own body.”

Female body issues escalate because of an antagonism between women and the biological propensities their bodies push them towards. In a vicious Pavlovian cycle, many women are conditioned to distrust and wage war against their bodies rather than interacting cooperatively with them. This, when working in conjunction with heavy external pressures from society and peers, is able to play off deep-rooted psychological antagonism between mind and body, and disproportionately push women to the edge.