The role of the media

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148 HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
conscious of your weight?’ The research has shown that, although those individuals
with eating disorders show greater body dissatisfaction than those without, dieters show
greater body dissatisfaction than non-dieters and women in general show greater body
dissatisfaction than men.
Therefore, body dissatisfaction can be conceptualized as either a discrepancy between
individuals’ perception of their body size and their real body size, a discrepancy between
their perception of their actual size as compared with their ideal size, or simply as feelings
of discontent with the body’s size and shape. However, whichever conceptualization is
used and whichever measurement tool is chosen to operationalize body dissatisfaction it
seems clear that it is a common phenomenon and certainly not one that is limited to those
few individuals with clinically defined eating disorders. So what causes this problem?
THE CAUSES OF BODY DISSATISFACTION
Much research has looked at the role of social factors in causing body dissatisfaction
in terms of the media, ethnicity, social class and the family environment. In addition,
research has explored the role of psychological factors that may translate the social
factors into actual body dissatisfaction.
SOCIAL FACTORS
The role of the media
The most commonly held belief in both the lay and academic communities is probably
that body dissatisfaction is a response to representations of thin women in the media.
Magazines, newspapers, television, films and even novels predominantly use images of
thin women. These women may be advertising body size related items such as food and
clothes or neutral items, such as vacuum cleaners and wallpaper, but they are always
thin. Alternatively, they may be characters in a story or simply passers-by who illustrate
the real world, but this real world is always represented by thinness. Whatever their
role and wherever their existence women used by the media are generally thin and
we are therefore led to believe that thinness is not only the desired norm but also the
actual norm. When, on those rare occasions a fatter woman appears she is usually
there making a statement about being fat (fat comedians make jokes about chocolate
cake and fat actresses are either evil or unhappy) not simply as a normal woman. Do
these representations then make women dissatisfied with their bodies? Some research
suggests that this is the case. For example, Ogden and Mundray (1996) asked men and
women to rate their body dissatisfaction both before and after studying pictures of either
fat or thin men or women (the pictures were matched in gender to the participant).
The results showed that all participants, regardless of sex, felt more body satisfied after
studying the fatter pictures and more body dissatisfied after studying the thinner
pictures. It was also shown that this response was greater in the women than the
men. Similar results have been found for anorexics, bulimics and pregnant women
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