A recent study at East Tennessee State University found that if you want to get women to stop using tanning beds, warning them about the risk of skin cancer isn’t nearly as effective as warning them about the risk of age spots and other forms of damage to their appearance. The study found that this warning – that tanning might make you less beautiful – was effective even on women who were addicted to tanning, or who were tanning to counteract depression.
In other words, the women in the study were more concerned about avoiding ugliness than about avoiding potentially deadly cancer.
In their commitment to beauty over health, these women aren’t alone: Last year, the Girl Scouts Research Institute surveyed 1000 teenage girls and found that 47% of them thought that "the fashion industry body image looks unhealthy.” 28% said that catwalk models look “sick.” But 48% said they wished they could look like catwalk models.
To state the obvious, but we have a problem. When women are more frightened of wrinkles than of cancer and girls aspire to look sick, we have a problem.
That problem is that our culture is obsessed with female beauty. So obsessed that even though they know it’s not healthy, women starve themselves or expose themselves to harmful UV light to achieve the color and shape they’ve been told is beautiful. That definition of beauty is impossibly narrow, and as these studies show, the pressure on women to achieve it is dangerous, even deadly.
So what can we do about it, this gap between what we know and what we do?
We can start by questioning the idea that being beautiful is a woman’s top priority, and that it’s so important that it’s worth risking our health. We can reprioritize in a practical way, by spending our money on books, museums or charitable organizations, rather than on beauty products. We can stop suffering for beauty, by refusing to endure painful waxing or starvation diets. And we can appreciate ourselves, and each other, for the beauty that’s harder to see, but much cheaper to maintain. There’s no tanning bed in the world that can give you that kind of glow.
Chloe Angyal is a contributor to Feministing.com
[...] emeritus of EW Chloe Angyal recently wrote a post and recorded an online TV clip for GritTV about how women and girls alarmingly prioritize beauty over health, and what we can do to change [...]
By What’s Beauty? « Equal Writes on June 21st, 2010 at 10:39 am
[...] The report by Chloe Angyal made me think about how we enculturate and educate an entire group of children (girls) to take standardized “beauty” into consideration over and above taking personal health risks into consideration. [...]
By How do girls become women who are “Committed to Beauty over Health” « Schooling Inequality on June 22nd, 2010 at 2:26 pm