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Showing posts from 2020

Does my bum look big in this? How mothers’ negative body talk can influence their daughters' body image

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Body image concerns can develop early in life. Girls as young as five are dissatisfied with their appearance, are afraid of becoming fat, and express a desire to be thinner (Davison, Markey, & Birch, 2000; Lowes & Tiggemann, 2003) . Sadly, these concerns often increase with age and are associated with harmful weight-loss behaviours, such as dieting and excessive exercise (Paxton et al., 1991; Stice & Shaw, 2002) . The parent-child relationship is a primary source of influence on development during childhood. For girls, mothers are important role models of eating behaviours and appearance-related attitudes. While it may seem normal and harmless for mothers to make negative comments about their own appearance or to engage in weight-loss strategies, their daughters may vicariously learn these attitudes and behaviours. Girls may model their mother’s behaviours and learn to place great value on the importance of being thin. Research has found links between mothers’ self

Who is at high risk of body dissatisfaction?

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Bullying has been in the news, not least because it was Anti Bullying Week in the UK last week, so it's a good time to revisit this great post from Kirsty Lee from 2018 (and check out  https://everydaylookism.bham.ac.uk/ )  Do you feel dissatisfied with one or more parts of your body or appearance? If so, you are not alone. In fact, body dissatisfaction is so widespread that it has been given the label of normative discontent . Although girls and women are most affected by body image issues, boys and men are increasingly dissatisfied with their body . Negative feelings about our bodies are therefore common, which is a problem in itself and raises important questions about why this is so prevalent across society. However, for some people, normative discontent turns into abnormal preoccupation. By abnormal, I mean negative beliefs, thoughts, and behaviour that affect the ability to function on a daily basis, significantly reduce quality of life, and increase the risk of early mortal

The Prevalence of Orthodontics and Aesthetic Demands among Thai women

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Why don’t you choose to wear braces to enhance your teeth? You would look better after getting your braces off!  You should find a way to reduce the size of your face!  You have such a short chin! Why don’t you consider having it surgically enhanced or undertaking orthodontics? These questions/statements were drilled into my mind before I ended up wearing dental braces mainly for aesthetic purposes. Peer pressure and demanding beauty standards brought orthodontics to my attention. It was such a painful three-year period wearing braces along with eight tooth extractions and speech and eating difficulties. Afterwards, apart from my heightened self-confidence to smile and speak, my facial appearance also improved. However, I still need to wear a removable retainer for the long term. I asked my mother why my father does not need to get his teeth fixed despite his short chin. She responded that females, unlike males, are hugely judged for their looks. As Gill (2007) writes, in comparison to

Too dark skinned to win Strictly: Alexandra Burke, race hate and why love still matters

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As it is currently Black History Month, it seems a good opportunity to revisit this brilliant post from Shirley Tate from 2018.  In 2017, I was approached by a fashion editor on a UK broadsheet for comments on why Alexandra Burke was consistently voted against by the great British public watching Strictly Come Dancing . I did not watch Strictly at the time and told her that I could not help her. Being persistent, the journalist shared with me a Guardian newspaper report on research that showed that Alexandra was voted against every week even though the judges gave her great points and comments on her skills as a dancer. Responding to the journalist again in the light of this research, I said that Alexandra was too dark-skinned to win Strictly because ballroom dancing is still seen as a white dance form by the public. This meant that only bodies racialized as white or that were ‘mixed-race’, light skinned and normatively feminine (which accounts for Alesha Dixon’s triumph) could ever w

My Journey to Wholeness with Hair Loss

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I’ve gone on quite a journey with my hair. From having afro hair down to my back in my university days, to several straightening perms, reverting to my natural hair, losing most of it to alopecia after various traumatic events, and eventually shaving off what was left of it.   Each phase of my hair journey has been closely accompanied by a state of mind of its own. From feeling invincible about my hair, as I could chop it all off and in a few weeks have a full head of hair again, to hopelessly peering in the mirror every morning to see if any hair follicles had resurrected overnight or if any new strand of hair had come up for air! Hair is a great part of a woman’s identity. As I continue on my hair journey, I seek to understand why women (in general, as I am sure there are a few exceptions) feel incomplete if their hair is not the way they would love it to be. The confidence a woman exudes (especially for the African woman) when she has just had her hair done, is not the same as when

How being in nature promotes healthier body image

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The idea of nature acting as “tonic” for urban society, with the potential to promote physical health and well-being has a long history [1]. In the early modern period, for example, greenspaces – such as the Place Royal (now Vosges) in Paris and the royal parks of Greenwich, St. James, Hyde, and Richmond in London – were opened to the public as a way of providing social and physical rejuvenation for town-dwellers. By the mid-nineteenth century, as many of Europe’s cities became overcrowded – in London, it was estimated that one in every four tenement flats was overcrowded in 1848 – open spaces and greenery became all-purpose medicines to cure a range of illnesses [2]. In the early part of the twentieth century, these ideas were taken up by the garden city movement, who viewed nature as the most direct way of reducing the health problems associated with urban overcrowding. Writing in Garden Cities of Tomorrow , Ebenezer Howard launched his vision for a series of ideal towns [3]: sel

Objective Ageing?

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  We are interested in ageing in material objects and in people. Norms of beauty are relevant here; beauty is persistently associated with youth and newness and this has affected our relationship with our own ageing (particularly in the West) and also with objects. These associations are important because aesthetic obsolescence of objects leads to dissatisfaction, detachment, and early disposal which has significant environmental and societal impacts. Whilst entrenched Western norms, which perpetuate unattainable youthful perfection, reinforce ‘skin deep’ attitudes to ageing resulting in poor self-esteem and an increasingly ‘invisible’ older population. In this article, we start to tease out and connect strands of thought, drawing on transdisciplinary constructs of ageing within the contexts of people and objects. Although the relationship between people’s attitudes to the appearance of their own physical ageing and their possessions has yet to be extensively explored (Scarre, 2016), e