This is an essay I wrote for English (it’s not fully finished yet), there are some refrences to pictures but I didn’t include the actual pictures here. I promise it’s not boring, and I would LOVE constructive feedback!!
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From before I even remember learning what beauty meant, I wanted to be a princess. I wanted a prince charming, a happily ever after, and the beauty that seemed to lead to all of those things. I watched hundreds of hours of Disney movies as a young girl, and all princesses looked the same. In my mind, I had to look like they did in order to be like them. Villains had large noses, undefined waists, and practically spilled out of their clothes. Villains were evil. Therefore, to be a princess and to be beautiful, I had to be as skinny as possible to look like they did. I knew that that was the only way I could be pretty since the age of about six or seven. If someone had asked me what I wished for most in my life, I would have said to be seen as beautiful, and in my mind that was synonymous with skinny.
I am 150 pounds. My thighs touch sometimes when I walk. My stomach is not perfectly flat. I have bones and muscle and fat, and my body is built like a normal human, not like a cartoon character. It has taken me years to get to a point where I felt comfortable enough in my body to talk about my weight as though it’s normal and okay. I have struggled with my body image and self-esteem from a very young age, probably since about second or third grade. I would compare myself to other girls my age, constantly wishing I wasn’t so tall, that my arms were skinnier, that I just looked more “normal”.
Things had been relatively manageable throughout middle school, but that drastically changed when I entered high school. I began to skip lunch, feeling uncomfortable eating in front of my friends. I watched the way they called themselves “fat” after having a piece of chocolate and devised a set of rules that I had to follow regarding food. Soon I wasn’t only skipping lunch, but I was skipping dinner as well. My parents weren’t sure what to do about my new problem. They sat down with me to watch me eat meals, but I still wouldn’t eat what my body needed.
Figure 2 is a picture I took right before homecoming of my sophomore year. After taking this picture, I sat on the ground and cried for twenty minutes, debating whether or not I should pretend to be sick to stay home because that was how self-conscious I felt about my body. In the picture I had a couple tube tops around my waist to try and hide the fact that I had lost even more weight. The plan was to leave the house without my parents noticing anything wrong, and then to take them off and safety pin my dress so it actually fit me. I absolutely hated myself and was doing all I possibly could to lose weight. I was also dealing with self-harm urges. The turtleneck under the dress wasn’t just a fashion choice, but was deliberately to cover my arms so that my parents wouldn’t notice new scars.
I began to get incredibly sneaky around food and would tell my parents I had eaten at friend’s houses or out at restaurants to avoid eating with them. When they started catching on, and made me eat at home, I would put food in napkins or push it around the plate to make it look like I had eaten. At the worst of my eating disorder, I would even pocket food or scrape food under my fingernails to avoid eating it.
At this point I had already been to mental health facilities to deal with other issues such as suicidal ideation and self-harm. My parents weren’t new to my fragile state of mental health,
they just didn’t know how to deal with this particular problem.
I ended up in and out of treatment facilities, constantly being monitored and watched to make sure I was getting enough nutrients. A facility that helped with my depression and anxiety would neglect to watch food intake. And vice versa, a facility that monitored how much food I was getting often didn’t pay attention and I would be able to engage in self-harm behaviors without being caught. I ended up bouncing between facilities, because as one problem got better, the other would get worse.
Looking back at pictures, I was visibly sick. I was frail and had lost a dangerous amount of weight. At one point I had lost almost 10 pounds over the course of a couple days. All my clothes that used to fit were now too big, and I had to use shoelaces as makeshift belts so that my jeans would fit. I would constantly wear pants and long sleeves to hide scars that I was ashamed of. I was hungry all the time but would never eat enough. I was tired, cold, and felt like I was going to faint every time I stood up. I was starting to lose large amounts of hair from the malnutrition. And yet I still didn’t think I was thin enough. And I needed to be thin because that was how I would be pretty.
At some point I ended up in the hospital for heart problems. I wasn’t eating enough, so my heart was beating too slow sitting down, but would dangerously increase when I stood up. I spent months in an inpatient facility, most of the time with something called a nasogastric tube, also known as an NG tube (Figure 3). An NG tube is a tube that goes up through your nose, down your throat, and into your
stomach. It was used to deliver my body a nutritional supplement since my meal completion still wasn’t enough for what my body needed.
Figure three is one of the few times I was allowed outside of the facility, because I had gotten special permission from my parents since I needed to go to the dentist. While there, I ran into a friend from school (far right), which was the first time I had seen a friend in months. I was incredibly self-conscious about the NG tube, but thankfully she didn’t mention it.
I spent Thanksgiving of 2023 in a psych ward. Christmas, New Years, my birthday, and Valentines Day were all spent in an inpatient facility. I was only allowed to visit with my parents once or twice a week, but I called them any time I could. I felt lonely and isolated, as well as just angry at the healthcare system. I didn’t think I needed to be in such an extreme facility, because I didn’t feel sick enough. Even at the worst of my eating disorder, I didn’t feel sick enough.
I was living in a hospital, with a tube being used to feed me, severely underweight, and I still didn’t feel sick enough. I could see the pity that nurses looked at me with. “Just eat”, one of them told me, trying to encourage me to go home, not understanding why I would have rather died then eaten the plate of food that she put in front of me. Figure 4 is a page I wrote in my journal when I was extremely overwhelmed with eating and decided to write out all the thoughts that were going through my head.
My rules were sacred to me. I used them to decide what was safe and okay to eat. And usually, the rules only left low calorie but filling foods such as cucumbers, watermelon, or egg whites, so that I could feel full, but not gain any weight. Because gaining weight was the worst thing in the world to me. Worse than almost anything else I could think of. There were times where I’d even have nightmares about gaining weight.
In my personal experience, media played a relatively large role in the development of my eating disorder. I was constantly comparing myself to people and influencers online. I would search up digitally altered photos as inspiration, even though I knew that they weren’t real. I used cartoons such as the figures of Disney princesses as the ideals of what I needed to look like.
I went as far as to create collages of pictures that I cut out of magazines as inspiration. These pictures often included models with thin arms, digitally altered waists, thighs that didn’t touch, or the skinniest cartoon characters I could possibly find. I also searched for people who were recovering from eating disorders such as anorexia to study their bodies and what they looked like at the worst of their eating disorder.
As a therapeutic activity, I tore up and destroyed most of the more triggering collages that I had, but Figure 5 is an example of one that I decided to keep to show how far I’ve come since then.
These behaviors were extremely unhealthy and detrimental to my emotional, physical, and mental well-being. Nothing ever felt good enough for me. I carried a notebook around where I recorded the calories of food that I ate throughout the day. At the worst of my eating disorder I was eating maybe 100 calories a day, all from vegetables. Food just made me feel so gross, to the point where I was chewing gum to avoid eating. I drank hot tea and used it warm my hands, since I was always cold. I was constantly shaking and trembling from cold and from weakness.
Even at treatment I would compare myself to other patients. I would constantly be watching how much the other girls were eating and feeling guilty if I ate more than them. I would also compare my recovering body to someone who was still deep in their eating disorder, leading to feeling guilty or ashamed that I was recovering while others weren’t. Mainly I was devastated that my body no longer looked sick. Even now I have trouble with comparison, but it was especially bad when I was in an environment with girls who were so underweight that they were medically unstable. It’s a hard balance to find, because while I used to be in that category of medically unstable, it became increasingly hard to stay on the path of recovery while I watched dozens of girls starving themselves. What gave me the right to get better, while other people were obviously worse off than I was? I watched girls arrive who had lost more weight than I had, who had more scars than I did, who had to go to even more extreme facilities than I had, leading to an overall feeling of guilt that made me feel as though my problems were insignificant. As though I had to be the worst person there with the most extreme problems in order to feel like I deserved to get help.
I would do anything to go back in time and tell my younger self that her weight did not determine her worth as a human being. That it was okay to eat a tasty snack or have dessert just because she felt like it. Unfortunately, it not only took me years to understand this, but I am still working on completely believing it for myself.
Girls all across the world are being taught that their bodies are the only thing that really matters, and they should do anything to be perceived as beautiful by the male gaze. These are real problems, with real consequences that need to be addressed.
Literature Review
Studies have shown that “almost a third of girls under the age of 6 worry about being fat or overweight” (Weebly). You can see this even in children’s movies, specifically within the Disney princess franchise. Almost all characters have the same exaggerated figure; a large head, large eyes, unrealistically slender neck, thin arms, thighs that don’t touch, a non-existent waist, and incredibly small feet. On a realistic person, these proportions would look ridiculous, and yet they are still seen as the ideals of beauty, despite being completely unachievable. You can really see this illustrated in Figure 6, because after seeing a more realistic version of the character Ariel, looking at the original is absolutely shocking because you can vividly see the contrast between the two, and how outrageous the original is.
This franchise also encourages harmful stereotypes, especially in the older movies. The movie “The Little Mermaid” essentially tells girls that you can abandon your family, give up your passions, and that you don’t need to talk for someone to love you, you just have to be pretty. In fact, boys will probably prefer if you don’t talk, so you should just stay quiet and let them admire your beauty.
Many studies have been done on eating disorders and their prevalence in girls and young women. Specifically, in regard to the media. The New York Times posted an article discussing the complexity that comes with eating disorders and the media. They talk about how “[t]here are certain posts and certain content that may trigger one person and not another person” (Conger) and how complicated it can be to decide what should be taken down and what should stay up.
A good example of this complexity is the videos created by a woman named Eugenia Cooney. She is a 30-year-old influencer on YouTube, and primarily posts content about her favorite fashion trends or makeup tips. The content itself is not the problem, it’s the fact that Cooney is dangerously underweight, and she is often accused of glorifying and promoting eating disorders. Most of the comments on her videos have nothing to do with the content and are instead pleading with her to get help or medical treatment. It got so concerning to her followers that “[o]ver 53,000 people signed a petition in January [of 2023]” (Conger) that asked social media platforms to remove her content. YouTube refused, claiming that her content did not break any of their rules or guidelines. Her content is regularly used as “thinspiration” to people with eating disorders. Thinspiration is a shortened version of the term “thin inspiration” that describes the types of content that people who have eating disorders usually engage with as ideals of what they need to look like to be considered thin.
The National Library of Medicine has done research around media such as modeling, actresses, and advertisements. They have shown that “women’s magazines contained 10.5 times as many diet promotions as men’s magazines” (Spettigue) meaning even more exposure to unhealthy behaviors and habits. Even more concerning is how common it is to having body image issues from an extremely young age. Their study also showed that “the number one wish of girls aged 11–17 who were given three magic wishes for anything they wanted was ‘to lose weight and keep it off’” (Spettigue). While social media and media in general does not automatically lead to an eating disorder, it certainly doesn’t help.
“[T]he media glorif[ies] slenderness and weight loss” (Spettigue**)**, to the point that even girls as young as 5 or 6 know that in order to be seen as pretty, you have to be skinny. These stereotypes and ideals are so deeply ingrained in our culture that once you start looking for them, it’s impossible not to see them everywhere. Most advertisements are digitally altered so the women look unrealistically perfect. Most models have the same extremely skinny body type, and those who aren’t that size get criticized for being ‘overweight’. In almost every cartoon or tv show, the protagonist is beautiful and skinny, while the villains have features that we have been taught are ‘ugly’ and have more realistic proportions that are portrayed as ‘wrong’ or ‘fat’. Influencers push diets, workouts, and trends that point our focus on being as thin as possible so we can be pretty. Women are celebrated for losing weight, and shamed when they post content that celebrates their bodies for being able to do the things they love.
Going more in depth, beauty standards are often extremely contradictive. For example, women must be skinny, but also have curves. They must be confident in their body, but they can’t be self-absorbed or narcissistic about it, they also have to be humble. They have to be lean and strong, but not have too many muscles. They should be tall and have long legs but shouldn’t be taller than the boys. Women should wear makeup, but not too much otherwise it looks trashy. If they wear anything too tight, they’re called trashy, but if they cover up, they’re called prudes. There’s literally no way to win.
Field Research Methods
For my research I decided to send out a survey with both multiple-choice questions, and one long answer question. I collected data from fifty teenage girls, mostly between the ages of 12 and 18. My survey consisted of 4 multiple choice questions that asked about the participants body image and how they related to women portrayed in the media. The scale was 1 to 5, 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree. The survey showed that 50% of the girls I surveyed strongly agree with the statement “I often compare my body with others in my life”. The results of this survey were not surprising to me, but nonetheless were incredibly sad. Not only is the average 4.12 for comparing yourself with others in your life, but the average for the statement “I do not believe that the media accurately portrays women’s bodies” was 4.14, indicating a strong agreement with the statement. However, what I found the most interesting were the long answer responses. My open-ended prompt was “what has society taught you that beauty is?”. I was more interested in societal norms and expectations rather than individual ideas. 44% of respondents included the word “skinny” in their response, but the word itself was used over 25 times.
Multiple responses reflected the themes that beauty is unachievable and impossible, especially because it’s conflicting and constantly changing. One girl responded with “beauty is pain…and if we aren’t pretty, we aren’t wanted”. Beauty for women seems to constantly be defined by the male eye. Another response that really impacted me was the response of a girl stating, “I am an object of male satisfaction, and to fail at that, I am a defect of a woman”. It seems as though society has taught all of us that the only way to be wanted is if you’re pretty. And that the only way to be pretty is to be tall, have clear skin, long hair, symmetrical features, and be as skinny as possible while still maintaining curves where it’s deemed important.
Something that was touched on briefly in the responses was also the idea that “beauty is something that can only be fulfilled by Western/white features”. As a white woman, this isn’t something that even occurred to me, simply because I benefit from the privilege of not having to worry about certain things. This response added a whole new layer of depth to my understanding of how we see beauty. Features that we are taught are “pretty” often tend to be more Western, such as small noses, light hair and eyes, and fair skin. Honestly, I think that that’s absolutely ridiculous. You shouldn’t have to look like Barbie to be considered pretty or wanted.
I struggled with more of the weight side of things, but this response gave me a lot of insight on the idea of if there’s only way to be seen as beautiful, but you’re not white, then there’s no way that you can ever be beautiful. This isn’t something I can personally relate to, but this response helped me imagine the feelings of hopelessness and almost failure at never being able to reach an unreachable standard.
A question I wish I had asked is “Do you consider yourself beautiful?” as well as another long response question that asked if the participant agreed with what society had taught them, or if they have their own idea of what beauty is. For example, personally society has taught be that in order to be seen as pretty, I must be skinny, blonde, athletic, have long hair, wear makeup all the time (but not too much), and have clear skin. That’s simply what the media has told me though. My own idea of what beauty is is a lot different. I believe that people shine from the inside. I have never once picked a friend based on their weight or the way they look. I find everyone beautiful in their own special and unique way. That’s what makes us human, is that we’re all different and yet we’re all beautiful.
Adding this question could have provided more insight into whether or not girls are buying into the ideals that society is trying to sell us. Another interesting point to look into could be the question “Do you think you’re beautiful?”. Often, we are told that we need to be humble and quiet. We shouldn’t be narcissistic or self-absorbed, which means that calling yourself beautiful often leads to a lot of backlash.
It might be interesting to compare the answers to that question with the question “Do you find your friends beautiful?”. People in general tend to not extend the same compassion and understanding to themselves that they do to friends and family. Personally, I could tell my friends things that are extremely logical and obvious to me, but it’s near impossible for me to apply the same things to myself. I would like to further explore that idea of what we think about others compared to what we think about ourselves.