Women's Union Promotes Body Awareness
By Cory Forsyth
A&F Associate

In support of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, the Women's Union (WU) hosted Room With A View, an exhibit presented by Health Education Outreach (HEO) about body acceptance and eating disorders. The exhibit consisted of a half-dozen posters with collages of magazine images, several science fair-type cardboard triptychs of statistics and other disordered eating messages, and four posters with information on some of the most common disordered eating activities: Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, binge eating, and compulsive exercising.

The magazine collages put the familiar skinny women's bodies we see every day in the magazine racks into a new context where the focus was put not on the perceived beauty of the women, but on the way their images are used to define ideal body shapes.

Ironic juxtapositions, for example the text "crash diet" glued over the image of an emaciated woman, served to underscore the sacrifice of health to unrealistic standards of beauty. A particularly disconcerting series of images, apparently taken directly from a magazine article, showing the withering away of various film stars (such as Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, and Selma Blair) in the past few years, suggests that there is still a sustained movement by the media toward skinnier rather than healthier bodies.

Most of the posters were created by HEO, but several of the exhibits were designed and created by other campus groups, including women's groups from Scripps and Pitzer.

The WU designed a poster of some arresting statistics about eating attitudes in America today. According to the poster, 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat, most fashion models are thinner than 98% of American women, and 25% of American men and 45% of American women are on a diet on any given day.

Sarah Rich '03, coordinator of the WU's National Eating Disorders Week effort along with Jo Oleet '05, said she "[hopes] that the exhibit will be a jumping-off point for people to start to think about and talk about issues surrounding disordered eating and body image." She continued, saying, "I hope people will start deconstructing those images that they have of what a perfect body is, of what people should do to achieve the body and weight that they want."

Oleet expressed her desire that the week's activities foster discussions about eating disorders and body image, and hopes that the exhibit can educate people about "the continuum of eating that exists between healthy eating and severely disordered eating," noting, "not everyone is at one of those poles."

Another poster encouraged students to "talk to [their] friends in a calm and caring way about specific things you have seen or felt that made you worry" if they are concerned that a friend may have an eating disorder. The poster further cautioned concerned students to keep in mind that if it is the case that a friend truly has an eating disorder, he or she may need professional help.

Room With A View successfully portrayed the pervasiveness of negative body image messages with its collages of magazine images showing what for most people are unattainable bodies and using them as standards of beauty. "These images are internalized and people think that if they work hard enough they can attain them. Weight is something that people assume they're going to deal with on their own," Rich said, "but really it's a societal issue. Our society has normalized disordered behaviors and is allowing them to continue."