03.03.2016

Ugly truth about feeling ugly

Our society encourages low self-esteem and unhealthy attitudes towards food, writes Commissaress - and the results are not pretty

Last week was UK Eating Disorder Awareness Week - which was dutifully ignored by my school and went virtually unnoticed by my peers.

This would be forgiven if dedicating a week to raising awareness of eating disorders were some relic of a past, in which such disorders were more prevalent than they are now. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The statistics I found while doing my research for this article are rather sobering: some 1.6 million people in the UK are estimated to be directly affected by eating disorders (but, according to some estimates, the real figure is closer to four million); the number of people diagnosed has increased by 15% since 2000 and the number of men by 27% (although men still make up just 25% of diagnoses); only 47% of patients are eventually classified as having completely recovered, and social media is making everything a whole lot worse.¹

Not that I needed to do any research to reach these conclusions: I am in year 10 at school, which is for students aged 14 to 15, and 15 is the most common age at which girls are admitted to hospital for eating disorders.² Every time I go to school or to a party or do any sort of socialising with people my age, there is some sign of unhealthy relationships with food and body image - whether it is one of the ubiquitous ‘Ooh, my stomach/thighs/face/whatever look(s) huge’ comments, or guilt about eating a few too many Doritos and the affirmation to go out running tomorrow morning, or the conversation with which we teenagers are all too familiar. It goes something like:

‘Oh my god, I look like a fat cow!’

‘No you don’t, you’re gorgeous! Have you even seen my sausage legs?’

‘What are you talking about? My legs aren’t even sausages, they’re doughballs. You’re like a size 8!’

‘I’d kill for your legs! And actually I’m a size 10. I’m so fat …’

And so it continues, beyond the infinite.

As you might expect, the internet provides no respite from this. Instagram and Tumblr are awash with, if not boards, posts and websites explicitly meant to induce eating disorders (called ‘pro-ana’ or ‘thinspiration’), or images of ostensibly perfect people living ostensibly perfect lives. On the internet, you can erase all your flaws; however depressed or uninspired or lonely you might be feeling on the inside, however often you might look in the mirror and feel ugly and worthless, you can build yourself a shell by editing your selfies with a dozen different filters, creating a beautiful Instagram which shows off your bikini body and minimalist apartment and designer bags and hiding or blocking out anything you don’t want to see - or you don’t want others to see.

The result is that social media - and particularly the newer platforms like Instagram, which are used more for self-promotion than for social connection - paint a totally inaccurate picture of people’s lives, so teenagers (and children and adults too) therefore start to think, very much mistakenly, that everyone else’s life is better than their own. The natural next step is for us to try to improve or take better control of our own lives and appearances, so that we too can be ‘goals’.³ In some cases, striving to be thin can be a way to do this.

Shared behaviour

Although it is extremely important for society to become more aware of eating disorders and just how severe the problem they pose actually is, I am not exactly focusing on eating disorders in this article, though the behaviour which I am discussing can, as far as I know, be applied to sufferers as well.

True, I by no means have a totally healthy relationship with food and my appearance - I count calories sometimes, am very familiar with body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), body fat percentage and similar mechanisms for ascertaining weight health, hardly ever feel satisfied with how I look and have to force myself to go two days without make-up every week so as not to become dependent on it. However, while I know several people who have had eating disorders and have read a few books and articles on the topic, I have never had a disorder myself and do not want to pretend that I know how it feels or am any sort of expert. Secondly, if we as a society do increase our awareness of the severity of this issue, there is a danger that we may forget about everyone else: those of us who do not have an eating disorder and are definitely not going through such a painful ordeal, but who still constantly feel social pressure to fit beauty standards, to be slim but ‘hourglass-shaped’ and busty (for women) or muscular (for men), and constantly feel that they are not meeting these standards.

Let us look at these people in a bit more detail. From my experience, the majority of teenage girls fall into this category, and the statistics seem to agree with me: according to a Schools Health Education Unit study, only 33% of teenage girls say that they feel good about themselves and two-thirds think that they are too fat.⁴ Such people may not make themselves extremely thin or binge and purge, but they - worryingly, given how common they are - share some behaviour with some sufferers of eating disorders. They might develop a habit of comparing themselves to other people (their friends, celebrities, people who show up in their feed on social media) and aspire to look ‘as good’ as they do. They might try to make themselves look a certain way that matches up to the size and features which the media tells them, either overtly or covertly, are desirable. They might buy products, like ‘slimming’ clothes, ‘skin-perfecting’ creams or even the latest pitiful fad: ‘beauty drinks’ (!), aimed at helping them to comply with perceived standards. Or they might strive to look ‘better’ as a means to gain control over or improve their lives, or a particular aspect of their lives.

These observations lead me to an uncomfortable conclusion. In all of this behaviour, common to almost all of the people with low body confidence whom I know (I would, of course, need to carry out a study to verify my conclusions, but I spend too much time being an inmate of the GCSE prison to do that), there are reflections of some of society’s basic features. I do not think that anyone would dispute that consumption and competition are two lynchpins of social and economic organisation today. We also live in a world in which people’s judgements of one another and themselves are informed to a great extent by roles: social expectations and obligations based on gender, race, sexuality, age and any number of equally arbitrary characteristics a person might have.

And, despite a risible amount of pretence to the contrary, people have very little control over their lives: we are forced through education, generally forced to pursue a career which we do not enjoy because the alternative is poverty and boredom, and forced to act and even think in a certain way in order to be accepted and to ‘succeed’. Thus we can see that the body confidence crisis of our generation is quite possibly a reaction to the processes of categorising and ascribing obligations to people, pitting them against each other, robbing them of autonomy and conditioning them into conforming and consuming: processes which have become rampant.

If this is the case, it will unfortunately take a lot more than banning size-zero models and sticking positive affirmations in school toilet cubicles to solve this problem. The tendency of both those with eating disorders and the non-disordered but unconfident majority to compare themselves to others, try to regain control over their lives and feel obliged to buy products and fill roles is symptomatic of the chronic competition, consumption, conformity and chaos which are making people’s lives a misery right now.

As usual, government leaders and campaigners who want to fight eating disorders and negative body image need to look beyond the surface of the problem and see the endemic root causes. But those of us who realise how destructive these root causes are should be broadening our critique too - to cover not just the economic shortcomings of the system, but its effects on behaviour, on sense of self, on psychological health. Because there is reason to believe that these effects could be seriously harming lives, and getting worse as we speak.

Notes

1 . www.anorexiabulimiacare.org.uk/about/statistics.

2 . Ibid.

3 . www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goal&defid=8300187.

4 . www.educationworld.com/a_news/report-social-media-blame-low-self-esteem-young-women-2903645.