Module 3………………………. It’s all a bit GAGA

but baby I was born this way !?

I arrived home from Greece 2 weeks ago after having a fantastic time for the last 6 months doing a dancing/singing contract. Since being back as well as catching up on sleeping, having a hot, bubbly bath and eating home cooking I have been doing a lot of research, reading and planning towards my 3^rd and final module!

Having been Lady Gaga for 6 months as part of a tribute show I do feel a bit “gaga” trying to get my head around everything again. One thing I did realise whilst living in Greece  -  it wasn’t easy to always find internet connection to complete the end of Module 2 and I had a few technical issues and last minute panics. Therefore I want to try and get ahead with this module in between contracts as I disappear again to Lapland soon for a Christmas contract and then who knows where so I need to try and make a plan of how I am going to tackle Module 3 so I don’t experience the same panic if the deadline date looms and I’m somewhere off the radar again. 

My first task was to review my feedback from Adesola, I realised that my question of inquiry is too broad. I have opened so many routes and asked so many questions that it is going to be hard to answer all my questions in time and with enough detail.

I had so much research for Module 2 that I have already answered some of my inquiry and this will not leave me much investigation throughout this final module.

The options Adesola gave me were:

• What narratives do people tell themselves in order to justify their 
  health /eating habits?
• How have these narratives been affected by teachers and peers?
• Have these narratives changed at any point in their career?

These will give me a specific inquiry instead of a more general one as the area I want to research centres around how female dancers can influence change within the industry to focus less on body image and why and how we are influenced in the way we perceive the image of the dancer.

I have also decided I need to use a more specific piece of literature for my review too so that I can get more detailed research which will help me answer my inquiry but also help with the review itself. This is mainly what I have been doing since I was last in the BAPP arena -  reading and researching articles  -  there is so much helpful literature to read.

I am currently working on a survey which is more specific to these new ideas and questions.  I need detailed questions and not just general ones. This is to help me formulate the answers I need to write a good final piece on my inquiry question. I also want to make a detailed list of which practitioners I am going to use and how I will collect and collate my findings. 

I really appreciated Adesola’s feedback and it has really helped me understand exactly what I need to focus on this next module. I do have a tendency for going off at tangents and need to keep things under control to focus specifically on my one question. My excuse is it’s such a fascinating subject that I feel very passionately about and with the observations I made and some of my work experiences during my summer contract even more  relevant to me, I feel, in my professional practice. Although I had little time to do much else I did make some interesting observations and entries in my journal and I’m sure some of the ‘Corfu Collection’ will appear in my articles before very long!!

I’ve also been researching relevant articles and reading up on my chosen topic so I’m sure I can feel some blog entries looming for discussion and opinions on body image issues with my fellow BAPPers.

As part of my review of where I am to date and a constructive look at my feedback I have also made a plan and timetable which I can review and update as I go along but that has realistic timescales that I can achieve and will keep me on course and will help me evaluate where I am in BAPP terms (not geographically of course).

This first blog was sparked by a discussion I had with my boyfriend about how media and magazines brainwash women into believing that 'if you are not stick thin you are unworthy, unloved and unsuccessful'. How does the media influence how we think and feel we should look? 

Whilst reading my Cosmo, he asked me, 'why do you read those magazines?' I answered, 'because I like looking at the fashion and beauty tip pages'. His opinion was that such magazines teach women that everything is wrong with themselves and their lives - that they don't have the right hair, right body, and right clothes so why would you read something that strips you apart and destroys your self-esteem. 

Afterwards I thought this would make a good blog entry as this has a lot to do with my inquiry so I decided to do some research and look at some articles on the internet which discuss how the media is brainwashing us into a false sense of hope and direction when really we should be proud of the individual person that we are. Can you imagine a world where everyone looked exactly the same? 

Women constantly struggle with body image. We are concerned about our weight, about whether our size and shape is acceptable to others, failing to accept ourselves and, too often, this can result in struggling with an eating disorder. If we are at all like the vast majority of women, we expend a great deal of energy comparing ourselves unfavourably with what our culture says our size and shape "should" be. After all, it's pretty hard to feel okay about your body if you're a size 14 when size 12 is considered a "large" size—although 70% of women wear size 12 and up. This is not to diminish the reality that obesity is a major health risk in our society. We're not even talking gross over-weight here. It's just the reality vs. our mass fantasy. Therefore, it's no wonder so many women are obsessed and often depressed about their bodies.

This is especially hard for female dancers.  Everyone knows that dancers strive for an ideal look: tall(ish), lean, toned (but not obscenely muscular), strong, and stable. Yet among all of this, you're expected to be delicate and graceful or angular and hard-hitting, depending on what you're being asked to do. Impossible? Probably! How do we improve our body image and prevent or combat “imagined ugliness" when we can't reach the "perfect body" as it is perceived by society?

It made me happy and somewhat relieved that whilst I was researching I found so many articles where women were trying to erase this 'perfect' image from the media and many Hollywood actresses are "coming out" about their eating disorders which I think confirms that the "desired look" is not achieved naturally in many cases and many models, dancers, actresses do risk their health to try and conform to these unrealistic demands of the industry.

One such Hollywood name is Lisa Ann Walter who starred in films such as The Parent Trap, Shall we Dance and Killers;
      extract from her web site.....................

                "Is it any shock that the creator and executive producer of Oxygen's Dance Your Ass Off attended her first Weight Watchers meeting at 12, struggled with bulimia throughout college and spent decades submerging herself in crazy workout regimes and weight loss schemes to nab roles in films such as The Parent Trap, Shall We Dance and Killers? The insanity doesn't end there: comedian Lisa Ann Walter, 46, has had a nose job and boob job(s), used Botox, Restylane and Juvederm, had chemical peels and succumbed to laser cellulite treatments (though she thankfully draws the line at labia reduction). All this, done in an effort to ditch what she calls "the American woman's birthright to obsess over every tiny thing that I think is wrong with me."

In her book "The Best Thing About My Ass Is That It's Behind Me", the mother of four chronicles her bumpy, cellulite-packed ride from Hollywood's Size 0 ideal to unabashed acceptance.
The books flap lures readers in:
"Learn how she went from body dysmorphic to sassy-asstastic in only 25 short years of dieting, thousands of dollars in 'procedures'... and one pair of industrial-strength Spanx."

However many are still influenced and magazines choosing to use cover models who look like they are 6 feet tall and weigh 90 lbs, have perfect skin and hair are still the norm. Are we caught in the web of unrealistic expectations of what is beautiful? In today's media dominated society, it can be very easy to get caught up with your imperfections. We are continually bombarded with ridiculous body images imposed on women by the media, fashion industry, and Hollywood.

I found that a recent survey in 'People's Magazine' which featured an article titled "Searching for the Perfect Body". The article includes a poll of women, asking how many are influenced by the unrealistically thin images of Hollywood women today. Not surprisingly, 80% of those polled admitted that the images of women on TV, in movies, and in magazines contribute to insecurities about their own body image. So insecure in fact, that, according to the People poll, that 93% have tried to lose weight, 34% have had or would consider cosmetic surgery, and 34% said they would be willing to try a diet even if it posed a slight health risk. Fortunately, it was pleasing to read that most of the women polled were wising up!


 

I believe that women should embrace the attributes and assets they have been born with and just accept ourselves for who we are. I was discussing this subject with an ex dance friend of mine and we were discussing a college where we have mutual friends and she told me that, "if you're not anorexic, bulimic or doing drugs then you don't fit in!!!!!" How shocking is that?? A college where having an eating disorder is the norm rather than the exception. This friend had given up her hopes of a career in dance and become a solicitor as she was "sick and tired" of trying to get the perfect body to meet the requirements of the dance world and decided to accept her more curvy natural figure and stop the constant diets and sacrifices to try and achieve an unrealistic goal. Sad. I remember her from the festivals of my childhood and she made the finals of the Miss Dance of Great Britain Competition!!

Problems with body size and shape have been around in the dance and entertainment field for many years. Iconic women of ballet such as Margot Fonteyn, Anna Pavlova and Moira Sheara to name a few would not get on in the ballet/dance industry of today. If you look at their photographs they were still slim but had normal shape.

Isn't it about time that this image was challenged and dancers were chosen on talent rather than just on their body statistics? I remember auditioning for Royal Ballet as an associate dancer at the age of 13, the application form asked for my mother and father's weight, height and other statistics and it even went down to my Grandparents too and this was for them to decide whether I would have the suitable body type to be a ballerina! It didn't matter how well I performed I had been cut within the first 5 minutes when I walked in the room whilst they stood us in lines of 4 or 5 and circled us individually. How demoralising is that for a young teenager who has dreams of performing?

At one audition I attended for vocational training, we were all weighed before we auditioned and the principal told us , "I am looking for marketable products!"

It pains me so much that how you are perceived on the outside dictates whether you are correct for a casting or role? This week a leaflet advertising Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' "Top Hat" has been adapted for the stage and is to have a 'soap' TV star who just happened to win Strictly Come Dancing playing the lead role which was immortalised by Fred Astaire. This is the influence the media is inflicting upon the performance industry which leaves trained performers disheartened and deflated.

The media is slowly taking over every aspect of our lives, crushing people's confidence and self-esteem, turning everything and everyone into marketable products. We as female dancers need to rebel against these images that are constantly created and promote our own individuality and uniqueness, a realism for the modern world and the future which will hopefully inspire and reform the industry.

Another article I reviewed suggested that parents who were worried about their daughters and eating disorders should discourage them from reading glossy magazines that portray underweight women as glamorous which is the very point my boyfriend was trying to make to me. He has actually contributed to me feeling better about my body image as he loves my body as it is and I do feel more confident about my body now than I ever have.

Emma Healey, the operations director at Beat, an eating disorder charity, said in one article I reviewd;  "The contradictory messages going out are hugely confusing  - where on one page of a magazine there's a bikini diet and on the other an article about how to feel good about yourself.
At the heart of eating disorders lies low self-esteem. Continually being measured against some kind of bizarre 'gold standard' that we see in magazines and on television, is damaging."

Veteran actress, Helen Mirren joined the attack on the use of "horrifically thin" young models in the fashion industry, saying it is jeopardising the health of teenage girls when she introduced her 6ft young niece to modelling agencies who all rejected her telling her she needed to lose weight in order to meet the aesthetic demands of the industry.
"I blame my own sex vehemently on this," she says. ''It is women who run the magazines and women who editorialise and women who make the decisions. A lot of the girls are horrifically thin and of course they have a problem. Mostly, the industry chooses to turn a blind eye". 

Various authors have concluded that print media, particularly magazines aimed at young women, have powerful effects on their readers, serving to foster and maintain a "cult of femininity" and supplying definitions of what it means to be an attractive woman.
Women’s magazines are read by a large proportion of women (about half the adult female population of the UK) with each copy seen by many women (on average, each copy of Vogue is read by 16 women in Britain, since magazines are often shared among friends and are widely available in the waiting rooms of doctors, dentists, and hairdressers.

We live in a world of stick thin models and emaciated celebrities. Magazine covers show articles such as; "Best and Worst Beach Bodies" and "Too Fat for TV", were two I noted this week. Weekly tabloids feature stories on who has lost the most weight and who needs to cover up. Television ads celebrate the greatness of diet pills; energy drinks can speed up your metabolism, and the newest diet that will help you lose ten pounds in two days. The idea that 'thin is in'  is everywhere, and is hardly escapable from the advertising industry. And although the messages are damaging and often untrue, women suffer the consequences of constant exposure to overly thin models and movie stars. Dancers are no different in that exposure and the pressures from society but they also face added pressures that they will not be selected for a role or job if they do not meet the ideal. 

In the 1980s, Marjorie Ferguson (1985) used content analysis to study a random
selection of copies of Woman’s Own, Woman, and Woman’s Weekly between 1949 and 1974, and 1979 and 1980, looking for dominant themes, goals, and roles.
She also interviewed 34 female magazine editors about their roles, beliefs, and professional practices, and about how they perceived the impact of social change upon their magazines and audiences; and 97 journalists, artists, publishers, and managers about
their perceptions of the editorial process, publishing organizations, and the market context of women’s periodical production. She interpreted her data in relation to the writings of Durkheim on the sociology of religion. She argued that there are interesting parallels between
the practices promoted by women’s magazines and the characteristic elements of the religious cult:
"I have argued that women’s magazines collectively comprise a social institution which serves to foster and maintain a cult of femininity. In promoting a cult of femininity these journals are not merely reflecting the female role in society; they are also supplying one."


These ads do not encourage women to embrace their own shapes, but rather to work hard to attain a low weight and toned body. There are a few ads that try to honor ‘normal’ looking women—the most notable was Dove’s  ad campaign in 2009 that featured everyday women in their underwear. But there is no way that after seeing skinny models over and over again, one company can really make a difference in how women feel about their bodies. More needs to be done to cancel out the hundreds of ads women see everyday that basically tell them they are not good enough and do not meet the required standard.

Because diet products (a market that brings in billions of £'s annually), slimming clothes and magazines touting weight loss are so prevalent in our society, young girls and women have little chance of escaping messages that promote a negative body image.

More and more horrific facts come up when you research the effects of overly thin models in advertising. According to Healthyplace.com, over 80 percent of 10-year-old girls have dieted,and currently, 50 percent of women are presently dieting in America. Women everywhere are exhibiting signs of hatred towards their body, continually fueled by being exposed to ads featuring bodies they can never obtain.

Young women are extremely vulnerable to developing eating disorders—millions are suffering from illnesses like anorexia or bulimia, and their quest for the thinnest bodies are only furthered by ads with 90-pound models. The hardest part is that these ads are everywhere—even if women avoided magazine ads, the message to be thin is broadcast on television, radio, the Internet, and outdoor billboards.

While the fashion industry has taken minimal steps in using healthy models, not much action has actually taken place. Overly thin models were banned from catwalks in Brazil in 2006, but the outrage that took place from models that are ‘naturally thin’ dissuaded many designers from featuring healthier models in their shows. The United States has tried to encourage the industry to use plus size models (usually the still-thin size 4 or 6) or average looking women; however, there still hasn’t been much of a change. Magazines like Vogue and Elle have tried to showcase healthy models, but no matter how many stories they do about wanting to change negative body image, the ads that run alongside the articles still display extremely gaunt models.
The web site I researched states; "Because this is a billion-dollar industry, change would most likely be a long time in coming, but it is a necessary change that our culture needs to go through…women’s lives are at stake".

Here are some disturbing facts and figures I found during my research:

Youth facts and figures (taken from the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination, website, www.cswd.org )           

          1)    42% of first, second and third grade girls want to lose weight.
[Collins, M. "Body figure perception and preferences among preadolescent children." International Journal of Eating Disorders 10 (1991), pp 199-208.]

            2)      45% of boys and girls in grades three through six want to be thinner; 37% have already dieted; 7% score in the eating disorder range on a test of children's eating habits.
[Maloney, MJ, McGuire, J. Daniels, Sr., and Specker, B. "Dieting behavior and eating attitudes in children," Pediatrics 84 (1989) pp 482-487.]

             3)      46% of nine- to eleven-year-olds say they are sometimes or very often on diets.
[Gustafson-Larson, A. M., and Terry, R. D., "Weight-related behaviors and concerns of fourth grade children." Journal of the American Dietetic Assoc. 92 (7)(1992), pp 818-822.]

              4)    70% of normal weight girls in high school feel fat and are on a diet.
[Ferron, "Body Image in adolescence in cross-cultural research" Adolescence 32 (1997), pp. 735-745.]


               5)      Over half of the females age 18-25 studied would prefer to be run over by a truck than to be fat, and two-thirds would choose to be mean or stupid rather than fat.
[Gaesser, Glenn A., PhD. Big Fat Lies: The truth about your weight and your health. Gurze Books, 2001. ]


             6)       A survey of college students found that they would prefer to marry an embezzler, drug user, shoplifter, or blind person than someone who is fat.
[Gaesser, Glenn A., PhD. Big Fat Lies: The truth about your weight and your health. Gurze Books, 2001.]


           7)        The death rate for eating disorders is 5 to 20%.
[American Psychiatric Association, "Practice Guidelines for Eating Disorders." American Journal of Psychiatry, 150(2) (1993) pp. 212-228.]


           8)        Americans spend $50 billion annually on diet products.
[Garner, David W., PhD, and Wooley, Susan C., PhD. "Confronting the Failure of Behavioral and Dietary Treatments for Obesity," Clinical Psychological Review 11 (1991), pp. 729-780. ]
                    $50 billion is more than the Gross National Product of more than half of all the nations in the world, including Ireland.


Some really scarey facts and figures there I think !!!???? Really ? Would you rather get run over by a truck than be fat ? That so many young people think that way is really sad and a testament that perhaps all this has gone far enough and it's time for change ?!

I am currently pursuing some of the questions raised in this blog with professional practitioners to conduct my own poll to get a current analysis of how dancers feel and I would be interested in anyone who can give me the benefit of their own personal experiences and hear your thoughts on body image in the female dancer and the quest for "perfection".

How much does your body fit the image of what a "perfect body" should look like?

Have you been influenced by your peers and the role the media plays?

Shouldn't we be devoted to redefining "real beauty"? I'd like to believe it is achieveable to change attitudes, what do others think?

Is it an impossible dream for the future?

Whether she’s dressed as a mermaid in a wheelchair or has machine gun fire shooting from her tatas, one thing is clear: Lady Gaga makes no apologies for who she is. While the music icon might not be considered conventionally pretty, she owns her look and she makes no apologies for it, and her songs encourage young girls and women to do the same.

In her own words;"When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year old girl. Then I say, ‘You’re Lady Gaga, you get up and walk the walk today.’”

Gaga is all about self-empowerment, whether you’re gay or straight, black or white, heavy or thin.

In the words of the Lady herself,
"I'm beautiful in my way, cos God makes no mistakes, don't hide yourself in regret, just love yourself and your set 'cos baby we were born this way!" 

References

Searching for the perfect body -         http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/eating_disorders/46745

Talking Body Image -      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-goldman/body-image_b_878132.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1564628/Helen-Mirren-attacks-horrifically-thin-models.html

http://erin-konrad.suite101.com/body-image-in-advertising-a80175

Council on Size & Weight Discrimination, website, www.cswd.org