Author: Kelly Neukom
Ninety-one percent. That’s the amount of American college women on diets. It gets even worse: 46 percent of nine-to-eleven year olds are on one too. Why are almost half of the nation’s fifth graders concerned about being fat when they haven’t even reached puberty yet?
This question is what director and writer Darryl Roberts tries to answer in his documentary America the Beautiful, which explores the country’s unhealthy obsession with beauty. The film was shown at Oxy on March 6, hosted by the Active Minds Club and the ICC.
The movie began with a group of men sitting around talking about beautiful women. “Thank god for cloning,” one said. “Once we can do that, we can run the hot ones off like Model T Fords and get rid of the nasty ones.”
The movie only got more shocking from there. The film followed the rise and fall of the model Gerren, who started out as a fresh young face sought after by Tommy Hilfiger and Marc Jacobs only to be cast out by the industry at the age of 14. Some model companies even went so far as to call the six-foot, 130 lbs. (a 17.6 BMI) Gerren “obese.” In less than two years, her modeling career was over.
Her story was intercut with other issues like the media’s role in encouraging female self-loathing. When Roberts confronted the editors of magazines like Cosmo Girl and Seventeen about using ads with dangerously thin models, the responses were hardly encouraging. “If we changed, we wouldn’t make as much money,” the Cosmo Girl editor-in-chief said. “I don’t want to make people feel bad; I just want to make a buck.”
These editors (as well as an MTV employee) insisted that it wasn’t the media’s fault that women feel so pressured to be thin-they’re simply reflecting a cultural trend. This theory was debunked by Dr. Anne Becker, a Harvard sociologist who Roberts interviewed for the film. Becker said that in 1995, before the island of Fiji had access to television, “big bodies were considered beautiful” and there were no reported cases of bulimia on the island. In 1998, after having TV for three years, 11 percent of women had forced themselves to throw up-about the same percentage as a country like America. “Millenia of tradition were gone in an instant,” Becker said.
America’s apparent obsession with beauty has even reached the level where not being attractive enough can cause a woman to lose her job. In 2000, a female Harrah’s employee was fired for refusing to wear makeup. She sued the company, but the court found in favor of Harrah’s and didn’t believe the woman was let go unfairly. Harrah’s then changed its employee handbook to make it mandatory for all female employees to wear makeup because it was a part of “good grooming.”
Even the American animals aren’t safe. There now exists pet-yes, pet-cosmetic surgery, including testicular implants. “How is he going to be looked at by other dogs if one is bigger than the other?” one dog owner said.
One encouraging thought came from Roberts’s interview with Eve Ensler, writer of The Vagina Monologues. When Ensler visited a remote village in Africa, she was talking with a woman that lived there and asked the woman if she liked her body. The woman looked at Ensler in a confused way and said, “Of course I like my body! Why wouldn’t I like my body?” Ensler admitted she didn’t like her body because it wasn’t thin or beautiful enough. The African woman told her to look at two trees they were walking by. The woman said that both trees were beautiful, despite looking completely different, and that the same could be said about women’s bodies.
During a Q&A after the movie, Roberts said he first thought of the idea for the documentary when he saw a new report about a photographer that had murdered his model girlfriend. “He was saying things like, ‘She’s so beautiful that if I can’t have her, nobody can,'” Roberts said. “I couldn’t believe someone would throw their life away like that. But then I thought, ‘Have I ever done something like that?'”
He had. When he was smitten with a particularly beautiful woman named Babette, he bought a red-and-black Jaguar because those were her favorite colors.
Roberts wondered how much this obsession with beauty affected women, so he interviewed 200 of them to see. Out of 200 women, only two of them said they considered themselves attractive.
Roberts said men can help women feel good about themselves. After seeing a woman almost die after a voluntary plastic surgery operation, Roberts said he went home and called every woman he knew to tell her that she was beautiful just as she was. He then called every man he knew to tell him to call every woman he knew and tell those women the exact same thing.
“Men have influence over how women feel about themselves,” Roberts said. “We men need to step up and reassure the women in our lives. We need to take back their self-esteem from the advertising industry.”
America the Beautiful will be released nationwide on April 25.
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