This guest post is a response to a... well, I will let Shona and Glen explain it.
Today the BBC and Telegraph reported that a Psychologist, Dr Aric Sigman, has used the run up to the Easter teachers’ unions conference season to promote his idea for a role for boys in addressing the poor body image of girls. This idea involves introducing classes in schools where older boys explain to girls what it is they find attractive in girls:
“It would be helpful for them to explain that what they find attractive is not just physical qualities but also qualities like caring, the sound of a girl’s voice and her body language.
“Boys don’t have in any way near as rigid a view on what an attractive figure should be and they value many other physical qualities, including eyes, hair, and body language.”
There are so many things wrong with Sigman’s suggestion that it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s break it down:
1. The assumption that male desire is desired by girls and women
The entire basis of Sigman’s rationale is a common but drastic misconception that girls’ and women’s poor body image and disordered eating is due to a misunderstanding with regards to what boys and men find sexually attractive. This assumption is understandable to an extent, from a man in a society where women’s reasons for existing are usually represented through a male-centric lens, from Eve being created from Adam’s rib to every film that fails the Bechdel Test. However, the reality (like all social phenomena) is a much more complex interplay within and between:
Social structures (i.e. capitalism’s use of women’s unpaid reproductive labour – cooking, cleaning and caring)
Culture and ideology (i.e. media representations of femininity)
Individual factors (i.e. experiences of bullying or abuse, or biopsychosocial sensitivities)
Attempting to teach girls a marginally-expanded definition of desirable femininity through the lens of the male gaze could be hugely counterproductive. Many girls begin to develop eating disorders around puberty and one explanation for this is fear and anxiety associated with the sexualisation that comes with developing a sexually mature body. Furthermore, eating disorders are higher amongst girls who have experienced sexual abuse, and sexual harassment of girls by boys has become normalised as ‘teasing’ in many schools. Now in the context of these factors – imagine again the effect that Sigman’s intervention could have on girls. The fact is that most women and girls are not interested in the sexual attentions of most men and boys. This assumption ties into a wider discourse that defends street harassment as complimentary, and measures the plausibility of women’s rape allegations by their appearance.
2. Appealingness as a source of self-worth
A second assumption of Sigman’s intervention is that girls can gain self-worth or resilience against poor body image and eating disorders through seeing themselves as appealing to boys. First of all, this is simply inaccurate, and many interventions to improve body image resilience focus on encouraging self-identification and -affirmation of one’s positive characteristics not about body shape, size, or appearance (i.e. kindness). In fairness, Sigman does mention some non-body characteristics which boys might mention they find appealing in girls, but the ones he does mention are heavily gendered (i.e. caring) – more on that later, first let’s focus on the two core problems with this approach:
Firstly, it casts girls’ self-worth as contingent on male approval. This promotes an external locus of control – encouraging girls to seek external validation, and putting the power over their self-esteem firmly in the hands of boys and men, who outside of Sigman’s classroom context are unlikely to cast their objectification of girls’ bodies in a consistently positive light. This in turn creates girls and women who are more receptive to advertising subtexts which imply ‘no one will love you unless you buy our product’ – a profitable but harmful side-effect of Sigman’s approach.
Secondly, the focus on girls’ attractiveness and appealingness to boys as a source of self-worth undermines the possibility of girls building pride and self-confidence in otherwise positive characteristics which boys either don’t recognise as important, or find actively threatening or unappealing.
Focusing on the approval of boys as a path for girls to build positive body image and resilience against eating disorders is a poison chalice.
3. What’s ‘attractive’, why, and why is that a problem?
The things that Sigman lists as possibly non-body-shape related characteristics that boys might find attractive in girls are all, by their very nature, problematic. The very act of picking out characteristics like a shopping list, rather than treating people as whole, is steeped in consumer ideology. Desire is also mediated socially, culturally and structurally, and is tied up with prevailing norms of what is valued in terms of masculinity and femininity (and sexuality, race, and class). So what do we end up with in Sigman’s intervention? Well, boys might find girls attractive for their “caring, the sound of a girl’s voice and her body language” or their “eyes, hair, and body language” – we can read into this a perpetuation of several sexist norms which are incredibly unhelpful ideas for girls to internalise any more than they already do:
Women as carers – the ones who are expected to the emotional labour and self-sacrificingly support others’ development at the expense of their own
Women as soft, passive, and submissive – talking softly (and so are easy to ignore, interrupt, or talk over in meetings) and being physically accommodating, taking up as little space as possible
Women as “naturally” beautiful – spending a lot of time and money trying to accentuate their features in a way that is subtle enough to be imagined natural (beauty standards are also often steeped in racism due to histories of colonialism)
Furthermore, if we leave girls self-worth up to boys to determine based on their own socially-mediated desires, what things might be excluded? Girls have many characteristics from which they should derive pride and self-worth which boys may find unattractive; a lot of these characteristics are considered unattractive because they fall into the ‘masculine’ side of the gender role binary, and to some degree girls who exude these characteristics could present a masculinity threat to some boys who feel they are not as capable of embodying these aspects of the gender role.
Some ‘masculine’ coded characteristics, potentially unattractive to boys, include intelligence, independence, physical strength, and unruliness – all things in which girls should take great pride, and which will help them grow into women who have exciting, fulfilling and productive lives. The masculinisation of characteristics conducive to wellbeing and liberation encourages girls to actively avoid developing themselves in these areas, for example we see teenage girls ‘dumbing down’ in school in a way that teenage boys just don’t – the long term effect of girls not being encouraged to develop their strengths regardless of the opinions of boys is an alarming thought, and its role in upholding unequal gender relations is surely significant.
4. Heteronormativity
Finally, we have the issue of heteronormativity. This is really very low-hanging fruit with regards to criticising Sigman’s intervention, but it must be mentioned. A significant minority of the girls and boys involved in any such intervention would be homosexual, and even in the context of more and more children coming-out at an early age, many of these teenagers are likely to still be in the closet, and potentially subject to experiencing a degree of internalised stress at attempting to ‘pass’ as straight during and following these sessions. Furthermore, girls who don’t attempt to perform femininity and teenagers assigned female who do not identify as such, might be subject to additional internal distress or external bullying and harassment due to the gender and sexuality norms deeply embedded in the ideology of Sigman’s intervention.
In the Telegraph article, Sigman is quoted as saying "Men are often surprised to discover how even the most intelligent, capable, rational and empowered women can be laid low by body dissatisfaction. Many of us just don't get it." Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Sigman is on the money here – he just doesn’t get it. A lot of boys and men just don’t get it. Sigman has undertaken to find a solution not to the actual problem(s), but to his biased and erroneous misunderstanding of the problem, and in doing so has come up with an intervention which could cause actual harm. The path to addressing girls’ body image problems should instead involve listening to girls and women, looking at evidence from critical research in this field, and working towards structural, cultural, and interpersonal solutions to a culture which perpetuates and profits from toxic femininities.
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| This is Shona. Couldn't find a picture of Glen. |
Shona and Glen are post-grad students researching Marxist sexual politics and body image respectively. They work together at a university in Leeds and talk about feminism loads.
