A sinister web of sex and perfection
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/09/2007The yearning to look flawless is fuelled by celebrity television and glossy magazines, but the internet now poses an even greater danger, warns Judith Woods
Your 13-year-old daughter is up in her bedroom with her best friend, trying on clothes. They are alternately shrieking with laughter and groaning in horror as they pose in front of the mirror.
 | |
As you pass the door, you overhear them rating each other on a sliding scale of "beautiful" to "ewww". You smile at their adolescent high spirits and potter off to make a cup of tea.
Now imagine your daughter posting her picture on to a website and assessing her thighs, breasts and tummy under the headline "How sexy am I?".
Imagine that the website invited other readers, complete strangers, to rate her, too – and her reaction if the results didn't quite match up with her expectations.
Unthinkable? If only.
Up until Wednesday, this interactive page was up and running on the website of young girls' magazine Bliss, and was mysteriously removed after a report by Women In Journalism (WIJ) criticised the way in which young girls were being encouraged to feel ashamed of their developing bodies.
Other online publications for children drew criticism, too; Sugar, for using a picture of a 13-year-old boy, submitted by his girlfriend, "because I think he's buff", and Mizz (target readership: 10 to 14) for inviting users to "rate our hotties" and give marks out of 10 to pictures of boys.
Few right-thinking parents would disagree that such web content is an utterly inappropriate sexualisation of children.
But in many respects, it's simply another sign of our rather tawdry times, the continuum of a culture in which lads' mags like Nuts are inundated with women eager to post photos of themselves on the "Assess My Breasts" web page, and the average TV makeover is more likely to involve intimate close-ups of rhinoplasty and buttock implants than a touch of sparkly mascara and a new hairdo.
If publicity-hungry adults have no qualms about being filmed during colonic irrigation or liposuction surgery, and the term "sexy" is routinely applied to everything from cars to Daz washing powder – which has also been rapped over the knuckles for showing its suggestive adverts during children's progammes – how on earth are our youngsters supposed to know where the boundaries lie?
"Bliss had always been on the edge of challenging what parents think their daughters should be reading, and that's partly why daughters like it – my own included, when she was in her early teens," says Professor Jane Wardle, head of clinical psychology at the University of London.
"My instinct would be that it's the more confident girls who would send in their pictures for rating, but if they receive a poor response it could affect their body image, and adolescence is the worst possible time to have their confidence undermined by something like this.
"Nothing about this sort of reductive approach, where girls are judged solely on their appearance, sounds good to me. The question is whether these girls regard it all as a bit of nonsense, and shrug it off as they would do a horoscope, or take it seriously and feel upset about it."
But these days, even for pre-teens, image is all. Reared on a diet of celebrity television and bombarded with showbiz-obsessed magazines, where the camera lenses dwell lovingly on the apparent perfection of airbrushed beauty, the pressure to look flawless is greater than ever before.
According to photo specialists Snappy Snaps, the explosion of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace has prompted a 550 per cent increase in requests for their digital touch-up service. Skin blemishes can be removed, teeth straightened and lips made poutier with a few clicks of a computer mouse.
The fact that almost half of all 10- to 15-year-old girls apparently want to appear on a reality television show suggests we are turning out a generation of paranoid narcissistic exhibitionists, whose preoccupation with their appearance is not only unhealthy, but reflects their assumption, even at 14, that beauty equals success.
After all, what kind of loser would want to dream of being an engineer when you could be on Big Brother, wearing a different bikini every day, with a covershoot in Heat for afters?
But girls who fixate on their swimwear are liable to be left high and dry in later life. A famous study carried out in the US in 1998 saw researchers ask college-age girls to try on either a swimsuit or a sweater, assess their appearance and then perform mathematical tests. Those asked to wear swimsuits performed significantly worse, suggesting that self-conscious girls have less mental energy to devote to problem-solving.
But how to turn back the tide of peer-promoted body fascism? When it comes to body image, women – and girls – are their own worst enemies.
Just look at the competitive dieting that appears to have been triggered in LA with the arrival of Victoria Beckham; her new best friend, actress Katie Holmes, who was scarcely hefty to begin with, is a shadow of her former self.
But reality rarely plays a part once girls become convinced they are overweight. A study by the Schools Health Education Unit this summer found that among girls aged from 12-15, their biggest worry was their appearance. Half of 14- to 15-year-olds believed they needed to slim, although only 12 per cent were overweight according to their bodymass index.
At the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, where the gilded myths of celebrityhood are laid bare and the clinical roll-call reads like a night at the Baftas, consultant psychiatrist Dr Natasha Bijlani says children need parents and teachers to build their self-confidence so they can feel good about themselves, regardless of what their peers – or anonymous internet users – say.
"There's so much pressure on young girls nowadays that many of them aspire to an ideal that it's impossible for most of us to attain, and feel a failure if they don't achieve it," says Dr Bijlani.
"They want to be famous and some are so preoccupied by their looks that they miss out on academic opportunities, normal relationships and veer dangerously towards eating disorders, by dieting, starving themselves and storing up enormous health and psychological problems.
"When girls go online asking others to rate their looks and seeking approval from people they've never met, the root cause is low self-esteem."
On a positive note, a cheer has gone up among parents at the news that London Fashion Week banned under-16s, and the realistic possibility that in future years, size zeros may be relegated to the sale rack in Gap, rather than haunting the runways like trussed-up, walking cadavers.
Let's hope such moves have not come too late. Even girls too young to spell anorexia are suffering from it and bulimia is, worryingly, on the increase among pre-teens.
"We know of a girl as young as eight with anorexia," says Susan Ringwood, chief executive of the eating disorders charity Beat. "We know that girls' magazines and the wider media don't cause eating disorders, that it's more complex than that, but they are a factor that influences girls and women."
In the good old days, it was a brave parent who looked in their teenage daughter's diary, for fear of what they might find – or of being caught. These days cyberspace is a far, far scarier place.
So next time your daughter and her friends are up in her room, prancing about in their latest Top Shop ensembles, don't bother checking up or listening at the keyhole. Just quietly go to the phone socket and disconnect the internet.
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario