Do you believe everything you see? Or rather, do you buy everything you are sold? The media is a powerful thing, and unless you’ve been living in a cave, it’s pretty much unavoidable. TV, billboards, magazines, those signs on the side of the bus – they’re everywhere, 24/7. And they’re always selling something. As much as I’d love to believe that we don’t buy into it all – the diet pills and the waif-y models – we must, because otherwise the selling would stop.
Well there is a new movement against all of that – Time magazine calls it body activism, or a type of civil disobedience against the nasty media. High school and college girls have been participating in a program called the Body Project, with a high success rate at preventing eating disorders. They talk about and critique the images they have been sold, but here is the intriguing part: they have to come up with some type of nonviolent act against the media they disprove of, like leaving body-love notes in the diet books at a bookstore or writing letters to Mattel about Barbies. Since I’m always one to stir up some good trouble, I had to try it for myself. On a recent afternoon shopping trip, I pulled out my pen and notepad and headed to Barnes & Noble. I wrote out just a few notes, like “You are too beautiful to waste life dieting,” and when the coast was clear I snuck over to the Diet section (btw – I’m not sure why I was sneaking around, since it’s obviously not illegal. It just felt like I was breaking some sort of code, like “The Media” is the Godfather that’s always watching). Anyways, I decided to find the trashiest diet books possible, and was shocked to find how easy it was. They were everywhere – the “Fat Flush Diet,” the “Hot Latin Diet,” the “Skinny Bitch Diet.” None of them sounded healthy or normal, or very nice for that matter. It was a little sad to think, Are we that desperate to be thin that we are going to buy into something that doesn’t even sound healthy? And what does the Skinny Bitch know that I don’t? So if you need a reality check, I would definitely recommend this exercise. It’s eye-opening to see what we have been buying into. But what do YOU think Fab Gal? Is the media to blame for our negative body images? What have you been sold that you really don’t want to believe in? Most importantly, how do we change it? I’d love to hear from you FGs, and as always I can be reached at fabgalsite@gmail.com. xoxo The Fab Gal Check out the article in Time, Taking on the Thin Ideal Labels: body activism, fab gal, media, Time |
Great idea about the notes. Did you actually leave them in the books?