Essay 854

From USA Today…

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Race doesn’t reflect on women’s poor body image

By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY

Contrary to popular belief, white and non-white women are about equally unhappy with their looks, according to an analysis of 98 studies published in the July issue of Psychological Bulletin. It is the largest U.S. research ever done on feminine body dissatisfaction.

“A lot of theorizing and myths,” along with small studies, have emphasized white women’s poor body images, says psychologist Shelly Grabe of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Minority women, it has been thought, enjoy more sensible, forgiving expectations for body shape. But Grabe and co-author Janet Shibley Hyde find little evidence of that.

There’s no significant difference between whites, Asian-Americans and Hispanics in how dissatisfied they are with their bodies, they say. And there’s no difference between whites and blacks over age 22.

White teens and college-age women do feel somewhat worse about their looks than blacks this age, the studies show. “This is the age group bombarded with ads and media messages about the ideal feminine shape: a tall, thin white woman,” Grabe says. “So white women this age may be affected.”

But as it becomes increasingly difficult to be reed-thin, older white women may compare themselves less to the media ideal and feel better as they are, she says.

TV viewing during high school affects how college coeds feel about their bodies but in different ways for whites and blacks, says University of Michigan psychologist L. Monique Ward.

In her studies, the more TV a white girl watched, the worse she later felt about her body. Watching shows with mostly white casts didn’t affect black girls’ self-images, but seeing TV shows with largely black casts improved it, possibly because a fuller range of sizes are shown, Ward says.

Body-satisfaction scores hardly tell the full story, says Deborah Schooler, a psychologist at San Francisco State University. Latino teens score more satisfied than whites in some studies, but they have the same rates of eating disorders as white girls, she says.

“We’re treating a lot more black, Hispanic and Asian women with eating disorders,” says psychologist Ann Kearney-Cooke, director of the Cincinnati Psychotherapy Institute and author of Change Your Mind, Change Your Body. In her nearly 25 years of experience, minority patients were a rarity until about a decade ago. “They’re buying into values of the upwardly mobile, and that means an ultra-thin ideal.”

Women of different races have much more similar body satisfaction levels than the two sexes, Kearney-Cooke says.

“Men are less satisfied with their bodies than they used to be, but they’re nowhere near as unhappy as women, and they’re not willing to try extreme dieting or vomiting, as women do.”