Body Image

Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women and Children

Sarah Grogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000475470
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Fully revised and updated, Body Image 4th Edition provides a comprehensive summary of research on body image in men, women, and children drawing together research findings from the fields of psychology, sociology, and gender studies.

The new edition presents all the latest research on body image including work on technology and body image, interventions to reduce body dissatisfaction, and links between body image, BMI, and clothing availability. Including data from interviews and focus groups with men, women, and children who have spoken about body image and its impact on the rest of their lives, the book explores a range of important contemporary issues, including the effects of social media and selfie-taking on body image, the work of activists and academics who are trying to change how the fashion industry presents women's bodies, and new work investigating impacts of whole-body scanning technology and game-play avatars on appearance concern. Reflecting the direction of research on body image from a range of disciplines since the previous edition, the book also includes an increased focus on body image in men, looking at studies on pressures to be more muscular and toned, and evaluating the possible impacts on health-related behaviours such as exercise and body-related drug use.

The only sole-authored text in the field, and integrating work from several disciplines, this is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, sociology, computing science, sport and exercise science, and gender studies, with an interest in reducing body dissatisfaction in men, women and children.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100041-1

Body image research has seen a significant increase in academic and popular interest in the twenty-first century. In academia, researchers from a number of disciplines have become interested in factors that affect people’s experiences of embodiment, and the impact of body image on behaviour. The significant rise in referrals for cosmetic surgery, concerns about unhealthy eating and drug use to reduce weight, and an increase in the use of drugs designed to make men and women more muscular have inspired researchers to try to understand the motivations behind these behaviours, and more general experiences of embodiment. Recent theoretical developments have enabled us to understand and predict body image and appearance concerns with greater confidence than previously, and new research into body image is developing in disciplines as varied as medicine and clothing/apparel. This chapter reviews some of the developments that will be addressed in future chapters.

1.1 History

Interest in the psychology and sociology of body image originated in the work of Paul Schilder in the 1920s. Prior to Schilder’s work, body image research was almost exclusively limited to the study of distorted body perceptions caused by brain damage. Schilder developed this work to consider the wider psychological and sociological frameworks within which perceptions and experiences of body image take place (e.g. Schilder, 1950).

Until the 1980s, most psychological investigations of body image were conducted with young women, largely because body image research in psychology had its roots in clinical psychology and psychiatric work focusing on eating disorders. Unfortunately, this reinforced the ideas that the psychology of body image was only relevant to young women, and that the construct only encompassed weight and shape concern. Although these issues are important, body image and its consequences are of relevance to men and women of all ages, and the concept incorporates more than just concern about shape and weight.

Since the 1980s, we have seen a significant shift in focus in favour of broadening the participant population in body image studies to incorporate boys, men, girls, older women and men, and the expansion of “body image” into a multifaceted construct that includes much more than weight and shape concern. There has also been a huge surge of interest in body image research within psychology. In 2004, Thomas Cash noted that there was an escalation of body image and body (dis)satisfaction citations in the PsychINFO database, rising from 726 in the 1970s to 1,428 in the 1980s and 2,477 in the 1990s (Cash, 2004). This trend has continued, and the success of the research journal Body Image, which was first published in 2004, attests to the importance of this area of research within psychology.

In 2012, Thomas Cash edited an Encylopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance, which provides a summary of research on body image and related areas, mostly written from a psychology perspective (Cash, 2012a). This text, which runs to two volumes and contains 117 in-depth articles, summarizes work published internationally and demonstrates wide-ranging developments in this area. Perhaps most significantly, this Encyclopedia shows conclusively that body image research in psychology in the twenty-first century has moved significantly beyond its original foundations in studies of young white women who had problematic relationships with food to encompass men and women of all ages with a range of views and understandings of their bodies.

The sociology of the body became an established discipline in the 1990s, when Bryan Turner (1992) coined the term “somatic society” to describe the newfound importance of the body in contemporary sociology. The success of the UK-based journal Body and Society, set up in the mid-1990s, demonstrates the high level of interest in the role of the body in sociology and related disciplines, and the journal continues to publish research focusing on embodiment and critical approaches to the body. In the 2000s, work in Fat Studies has focused in particular on fat embodiment and obesity politics. In Australia, sociologist Deborah Lupton has investigated the sociocultural bases for the unacceptability of heavier bodies in Western cultures, and in the second edition of her provocative text Fat (Lupton, 2018) she challenges negative ideologies around shape and weight, discusses fat activism and the size acceptance movement, and focuses on the lived experience of fat embodiment. Samantha Murray (2016) explores the moral panic over the “obesity epidemic”, and the intersection of medicine and morality in stigmatizing heavier bodies, investigating the politics of embodiment and the social construction of “fat” bodies, exploring some of the challenges in being a “fat” woman in contemporary Western society. The success of the US-based journal Fat Studies launched in 2012 evidences the surge of interest in this research area. This journal, edited by Esther Rothblum, “seeks to challenge and remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat body” (Rothblum, 2021).

There has also been a significant increase in popular interest in body image in the twenty-first century. Articles on the dangers of dieting, and critiques of the use of skinny models in advertising, are more common now than in the twentieth century. There have also been high-profile international initiatives on promoting positive body image, such as the Dove® Be Real Campaign in 2020, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image in the UK which explores how to improve body confidence in collaboration with advertisers, the fashion industry, and media. However, fashion and lifestyle magazines continue to carry airbrushed images of young men and women with slender, toned bodies, and popular media such as tabloid newspapers continue to run articles critiquing the bodies of celebrities, which somewhat calls into question the suggestion of any significant change in cultural pressure to be slender.

A key change in our understanding of body image in the 2000s has been the development of work on positive body image. Historically, research on body image had been largely skewed towards a focus on negative body image, but the last fifteen years have seen a surge of interest in understanding a range of positive body image constructs including body appreciation, body acceptance, and the broad conceptualization of beauty (Tylka and Wood-Barcalow, 2015; Tylka and Piran, 2019). These new developments have enabled a more complete and holistic understanding of body image, including the development of additional scales to measure positive aspects of body image.

Another notable change in the twenty-first century has been an increased academic interest in factors influencing the desire for muscularity and muscle tone in men, women and children. Researchers from across the globe have developed an understanding of the motivations for, and experiences of, increased muscularity for men, women and children, including drug use in children and women as well as in men. This work has involved the development of measurement scales that can be used to assess drive for muscularity in women and children. Research on body image in children, especially boys, has also been an area of significant growth in the twenty-first century with a focus on developing ways of trying to help children become resistant to the internalization of thin/muscular cultural ideals. Interest in body image in the clothing/apparel area has also grown, and researchers have focused on structural discrimination against people who do not conform to slender ideals through restriction of available clothing sizes. Recent work has focused in particular on social media influences on body image, and interventions to reduce body dissatisfaction and promote positive body image. Also, philosophers have focused on ethical issues around beauty ideals; in Perfect me: Beauty as an ethical ideal, Heather Widdows (2018) examines how beauty ideals have changed over time, and addresses the potential harms of pressure to look “perfect”.

1.2 Definitions

In The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, Schilder (1950) argued that body image is not just a perceptual construct but also a reflection of attitudes and interactions with others. He was interested in the “elasticity” of body image, the reasons for fluctuations in perceived body size, feelings of lightness and heaviness, and the effects of body image on interactions with others. He defined body image as:

The picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves.

(Schilder, 1950: 11)

Since 1950 researchers have taken “body image” to mean many different things, and have moved beyond Schilder’s primarily perceptual definition to focus on weight satisfaction, size perception accuracy, appearance satisfaction, body satisfaction, appearance evaluation, appearance orientation, body concern, body esteem, body schema, body perception, body appreciation, body acceptance and more. In an attempt to incorporate the key elements, the definition of body image that will be used in this book is:

A person’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about his or her body.

This definition can be taken to include psychological concepts, such as perception and attitudes towards the body, as well as experiences of embodiment. It can also be taken to encompass both positive and negative aspects of body image. Perceptual body image is usually measured by investigating the accuracy of body size estimation relative to actual size. Attitudinal body image is assessed by measures of four components: global subjective satisfaction (evaluation of the body); affect (feelings associated with the body); cognitions (investment in appearance, beliefs about the body); and behaviours (such as avoidance of situations where the body will be exposed). Psychological measures of body image tend to assess one or more of these components, or measure global or site-specific satisfaction/dissatisfaction (Thompson et al., 2012).

Although all aspects of body image will be discussed in this book, there is a focus on trying to understand the factors that influence body dissatisfaction in men, women, and children. Body dissatisfaction is defined here as:

A person’s negative thoughts and feelings about his or her body.

Body dissatisfaction relates to negative evaluations of body size, shape, muscularity/muscle tone, and weight, and it usually involves a perceived discrepancy between a person’s evaluation of his or her body and his or her ideal body.

1.3 Theoretical perspectives

Although much early work on the psychology of body image was largely atheoretical, there are now several established theoretical perspectives that aim to assist our understanding of the various influences on body image. Some of these will be reviewed briefly below to contextualize the remainder of this book.

1.3.1 Sociocultural perspectives

Sociocultural theories of body image propose that societies have body shape ideals which are communicated (though media, family, and peers) to individuals, who internalize them, resulting in body (dis)satisfaction (see Tiggemann, 2011; 2012). Perhaps the best known of these models is the Tripartite Influence Model (Hazzard et al., 2019; Schaefer et al., 2021; van den Berg et al., 2002) which proposes that media, peers and family are all key sociocultural channels for the transmission of body ideals. This model assumes that body ideals tend to emphasize the desirability of slenderness and muscularity for women and men respectively, meaning that the reference point for judging attractiveness becomes unrealistic, leading to perceptions of relative unattractiveness and body dissatisfaction. Recent studies support the validity of the Tripartite Influence Model for understanding body image in women (Hazzard et al., 2019) and men (Schaefer et al., 2021).

1.3.2 Cognitive-behavioural perspectives

One of the most influential paradigms within body image research has been the cognitive-behavioural perspective espoused by Thomas Cash (Tylka, 2019). In 2002, Thomas Cash presented a cognitive-behav...