Teen Body Image Angst, The Book
There are times when I wonder if the female body isn’t part of some vast evolutionary speedup. In less than a generation, the girls I know seem to have acquired all these new body parts to worry about.
A glance at any teen magazine is a new anatomy lesson. Eyes are now subdivided into half a dozen distinct areas from brow to lash, each of which needs to be thinned or thickened, shaved or shaded. Teeth demand brightening as well as straightening. Thighs have grown cellulite. Lips require “plumping.” Arms bulge for biceps. And every unmentionable inch of the body seems to need perfume of one kind or another.
Of course it’s not your bodies but the beauty industry that’s on this evolutionary rampage. It’s rather like the trend in medicine. As general practitioners splintered into an array of subspecialists, the beauty market splintered into products for every inch from scalp to toenail, acne to elbow.
The difference of course is that medicine changed to make patients feel better. The beauty industry changed to make customers feel worse.
Anyone who spends time with teenage girls knows that they aren’t narcissists. Narcissus, after all, wasted away before a pool of water while constantly admiring his image. Teenage girls are drowning in words like “I hate my body. I hate my looks. I hate myself.”
It is this despairing mantra that Joan Jacobs Brumberg explores in “The Body Project.” Her book, subtitled “An Intimate History of American Girls,” is the third in a triumvirate of works about the crisis in the lives of adolescent girls.
First, Carol Gilligan identified the moment when girls in our culture lose their authentic “voice” and self-confidence. Next, Mary Pipher explored this psychological reality of female adolescence in “Reviving Ophelia.” Now, Brumberg has filled in the blank, saying that a girl’s relationship to her body is “at the heart of the crisis of confidence.”
Her delightful and painful history ranges from the days when girls were tied into corsets to the days when girls are corseted by internal voices demanding model-thin perfection. It crosses the century from an era when girls rarely mentioned their bodies at all to an era when the body has become their “project.”
Allowing us to eavesdrop on a wonderful assortment of teenage diaries, she compares the self-improvement plans of a late 19th century adolescent to a late 20th century girl. The first girl resolves “not to talk about myself or feelings. … To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversation and actions. … To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
The second girl resolves to “try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”
In barely a hundred years, a girl’s identity had attached like Velcro to her appearance.
“The Body Project” is not a lament for the good old days. Brumberg tells the history of everything from menstruation to virginity, from mirrors to training bras, from petting to eating disorders. But she has no nostalgia for the era when 60 percent of high school students in Boston were totally unprepared for menstruation.
Nevertheless she is aware of the tradeoffs we’ve made. Girls who once were held under the Victorian umbrella of protection are “freed” into “a consumer culture that seduces them into thinking that the body and sexual expression are their most important projects.” Girls once repressed and chaperoned to adulthood are now more independent and vulnerable in a society sexualizing them at a younger age.
While enlivening the history, “The Body Project” draws the crucial connection between bad body images and bad choices, between how girls feel about their bodies and what they do with them.
“Girls who do not feel good about themselves need the affirmation of others,” Brumberg writes, “and that need, unfortunately, almost always empowers male desire. In other words, girls who hate their bodies do not make good decisions about partners or about the kind of sexual activity that is in their best interest.”
What is missing today, after a century of change, says Brumberg is “an intergenerational dialogue” between women and girls. Her book is a fine text for such a conversation. It makes us think seriously about a world in which teenage misery is described all too seriously as a bad hair day.