Searching for the perfect body.....................

My investigation of what research literature says about the psychological well-being of dancers and body imagery began a few weeks ago. My purpose was to discover recurring themes, which will provide guidance and evidence for what topics my inquiry question will examine.

My line of inquiry is essentially, “Can improved health education for dancers make a positive change to the body culture and lifestyles of female dancers?”

Using words such as “body image”, “dancer”, “psychology”,  "females" in the search engines  I found articles in a variety of academic journals: Journal of Dance Education, Research in Dance Education, Journal of Dance Medicine and Science, Dance Research Journal, Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Journal of Sport Behaviour, and Research in Sports Medicine. While reading articles from these academic journals, I kept a list of themes explored in those articles. It has taken me several weeks to actually read and digest the findings of all those articles.

Here are the themes that repeated most frequently:

ANXIETY. BODY IMAGE. DEPRESSION. EATING DISORDERS. INJURY. MALADAPTIVE PERFECTIONISM. MIRRORS. PERFORMANCE. PSYCHOLOGY. SELF. STRESS.

All the research indicates that self-image is inextricably linked to body image, especially for young females and in particular in activities such as dance, athletics, gymnasts etc as these are body centred. All the articles describe and explain the convoluted issues that many women and most girls battle in adolescence, including the ability to conform to a media-driven ideal of beauty. What is clear from the previous research conducted in this subject is that mass media and the prevailing culture’s views are an ever-pervasive influence on body image and self-esteem. Often we blindly accept the images and messages that the media gives us.

This blog discusses some of the issues researched in those articles as I absorb as much background information as I can to inform my inquiry question. I think if I can understand why the dance industry puts such demands upon the dancer to have a certain body aesthetic then I can begin to try and understand what is required of us as dance practitioners to change things for the future and promote healthy dancers.

Most articles that I found discuss the negative side of media influence on body imagery. It is interesting to start by understanding how we have come to this current position through history to the acceptable standards of modern day body image in women.............................

The idealization of slenderness in women is often viewed as the product of an historical evolution that has occurred over the past century. Within Western industrialized cultures, there have been many changes over the years in the body shape and size that is considered attractive and healthy, especially for women. It is possible to trace a cultural change in the ideal body from the voluptuous figures favoured from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century, to the thin body types favoured today.

Historically, the westernized image of the perfect body has changed dramatically, especially with regard to females. Over the past century different body images have been projected by western culture and promoted as standards for fashion and sophistication.

The era                                                             The look
1890s                                            Plump, voluptuous
Early 20^th century                                  Corseted, hour-glass
                        1920s                                     Flat-chested, slim-hipped, androgynous
                 1930s and 1940s                          Full-bodied, with emphasis on legs
        1950s                                              Voluptuous and curvaceous
              1960s to date                                Thin, un-curvaceous (waif-look)

Slimness is seen as a desirable attribute for women in prosperous Western cultures, and is associated with self-control, elegance, social attractiveness, and youth. The ideal female shape is epitomized in the "impossible, tall, thin and busty Barbie-doll stereotype”.

Slimness came to exemplify unconventionality, freedom, youthfulness, and a ticket to the “Jet-Set” life in 1960s Britain, and was adopted as the ideal by women of all social classes. Miss America winners were slimmer and taller in the 1960s than in the previous decade, with an increase of about an inch in height and a weight loss of about 5 lb by 1969. This trend occurred across Europe and the USA. Studies of the portrayal of the female body in the media have reliably found that models became thinner and thinner between the 1960s and 1980s.

Very little has changed in the last forty years. Since the 1960’s, idealized models of beauty such as waif-like women have been  in movies, magazines, television, and the cosmetic and fashion industries. As one article points out, "while beautiful women are slimmer, average women are heavier than they were in the 1950s. Thus the discrepancy between the real and ideal is greater. This discrepancy creates our plague of eating disorders". Girls are trying to achieve impossible beauty standards that are produced through much media trickery - photo cropping, airbrushing, composite bodies, and body doubles. This ideal is achieved by a representative few (Body Shop, 1997), "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do".

The cultural idea of what is beautiful has changed over the years. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, who wore a size 16 at one point in her career, was considered the epitome of sexiness and beauty. Contrast this with more recent examples such as Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston from the television show Friends, who are considered beautiful. They wear a size 2 . While models and celebrities have become thinner, the average woman is heavier today. This makes an even larger difference between the real and the ideal.

Like the rest of society, dancers’ appearances have also changed over the years. In the 1930s and 1940s, ballerinas were considered thin at the time but, as can be seen in photographs, looked very healthy. These dancers were definitely thin, but they looked healthy. They had breasts, hips, and curves, and actually looked womanly. Since dancers have generally been slimmer than ideal, these dancers becoming even thinner for today’s ideal is a problem. As one renowned ballet teacher saidt: “It is a reflection of society, everything has become more streamlined” (Benn & Walters, 2001).

The research already available shows that whilst over the past four  decades the prevalence of eating disorders in western culture has doubled, during the same period, mass media has increasingly progressed thinner representations of the female body. This trend for thinness as a standard of beauty became even more marked in the 1990s than it had been in the 1980s. In the 1980s, models were slim and looked physically fit, with lithe, toned bodies. Time magazine, in August 1982, argued that the new ideal of beauty was slim and strong, citing Jane Fonda and Victoria Principal as examples of the new ideal of beauty. In Britain and the USA, the slim, toned figure of Jerry Hall epitomized this ideal.

The 1990s saw a departure from this trend with the emergence of “waif” models with very thin body types, perhaps the most famous of these being Kate Moss who has a similar body shape to Twiggy from the 1960s.

The late 1990s saw the rise of “heroin chic”; that is, fashion houses made very thin models up to look like stereotypical heroin users, with black eye make-up, blue lips, and matted hair.

In a Newsweek article of August 1996, Zoe Fleischauer, a model who was recovering from heroin addiction, told the interviewer that models are encouraged to look thin and exhausted: "They [the fashion industry] wanted models that looked like junkies.
The more skinny and f——ed up you look, the more everyone thinks you’re fabulous".

In the late 1990s, the model Emma Balfour publicly condemned the fashion industry for encouraging young models to take stimulants to stay thin, and for ignoring signs of heroin addiction and US President Clinton denounced “heroin chic” in the wake of fashion photographer Davide Sorrenti’s death from a heroin overdose.

In 2000, the Women’s Unit of the British Labour government were so concerned about the potential effects on young women’s health of representations of magazine and other media images of “waif” models that they convened a meeting to discuss the potential links between eating problems and these media images. This Body Summit prompted a flurry of articles discussing the potential link between thin images and young women’s body image and eating, most of which suggested that magazines and newspapers needed to review their practices.

However, irrespective of this moral panic in the early 2000s, the extremely thin Western ideal has been maintained. In addition, digital modification of images in magazines now means that virtually every fashion image is digitally modified.


Body image is defined as the way in which people see themselves in the mirror everyday: the values, judgments, and ideas that they attach to their appearance. (Benn and Walters, 2001) argue that these judgments and ideas come from being socialized into particular ways of thinking, mainly from society’s ideas of what beauty is, shown especially in the current media and consumer culture.
The average person is inundated with 3,000 advertisements daily (Kilbourne, 2002). In these advertisements, women are shown in little clothing and in stereotypical roles. These women are not real (Kilbourne, 2002). They have been altered by computer airbrushing, retouching, and enhancing, and in many cases, several women are used to portray the same model (Kilbourne, 2002).



Susan Bordo (2003) notes that digital modification of images means that we are being educated to shift our perception of what a normal woman’s body looks like, so that we see our own bodies as wanting because they do not match an unrealistic, polished, slimmed, and smoothed ideal:

" These images are teaching us how to see filtered, smoothed, polished, softened, sharpened, rearranged. Digital creations, visual cyborgs, teaching us what to expect from flesh and blood".

Overwhelmingly the articles I researched agreed that

the social pressure to conform to the slender ideal is greater on women than on men

many women in Western societies are dissatisfied with their bodies, particularly their stomach, hips, and thighs

 most women would choose to be thinner than they currently are and tend to overestimate the size of key body sites, irrespective of current size

questionnaires and interviews have found a similar pattern of dissatisfaction in British, Canadian, US, and Australian women

 feminist approaches to understanding women’s dissatisfaction suggest that social pressure on women to strive for the slender, toned body shape that is associated with youth, control, and success encourages the objectification of the body and the disproportionate allocation of energies to body maintenance.

Through the ages, women have undergone pain to attempt to conform to the current ideal. This is evident in relation to practices such as foot binding and the wearing of restrictive corsets, whereby women suffered discomfort and immobility in the name of particular fashions. In Western society today, we have replaced these practices with strict diets (which can weaken and debilitate and manifest in eating disorders and ill health) and cosmetic surgery (in which women undergo painful and potentially dangerous procedures) to try to attain culturally defined, attractive, slender body shapes.

Dance and fashion have much in common. Both are body-centred. Both involve performance, display and self-expression. They also share an obsession with weight and body-image.

"Since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, female dancers and fashion models have presented near-identical symptoms of damage, with failure to live up to extreme physical ideals resulting in drug and medication abuse, mental health problems and even death from starvation. Three models (Eliana Ramos, Luisel Ramos and Ana Caroline Reston) have all died as a result of eating disorders and Allegra Versace, 20-year-old fashion-student daughter of designer Donatella Versace, revealed  she had been struggling with anorexia 'for many years'", one article reports. Many dancers only "fess up" to eating disorders when they retire from performing as it is still viewed as a form of weakness.

Almost everyone credits George Balanchine, the renowned dancer, teacher, and choreographer, with the current aesthetic of ballet in the West, referred to by most as the “Balanchine body,” or the “anorexic look” (Gordon, 1983). He has promoted the skeletal look by his costume requirements and his hiring practices, as well as the treatment of his dancers (Gordon, 1983). The ballet aesthetic currently consists of long limbs, and a skeletal frame, which accentuates the collarbones and length of the neck, as well as absence of breasts and hips (Gordon, 1983, Benn & Walter, 2001, Kirkland, 1986). Balanchine was known to throw out comments to his dancers, such as: “eat nothing” and “must see the bones” (Kirkland, 1986, p.56).

If Balanchine  created this aesthetic, other choreographers have followed and adopted it as the norm. Mikhail Baryshinikov, star dancer and former director of American Ballet Theatre, did not tolerate any body type but the Balanchine one (Gordon, 1983). During rehearsal and without any warning, he fired a corps de ballet member because she was too “fat” in his opinion (Gordon, 1983). He said that he “couldn’t stand to see her onstage anymore” (Gordon, 1983, p.150). Fortunately, management intervened and the dancer was rehired. However, Baryshinikov and the rest of his management were known to have had meetings with their dancers in order to emphasize the importance of weight loss (Gordon, 1983). Obviously, dancers need to be fit and trim in order to be successful in their occupation, and no one should argue that staying fit is not helpful in order to see a dancer’s body line; however, it is the extreme skeletal goal that is cause for so much concern.

 

 Through this latest research I think I can now see where the trends come from historically and how this impacts onto the dance industry through the fashion and film industry.  The difference for a dancer from typical media and society pressure to be skinny is that  being thin is a requirement to pursue their careers. Just as musicians have their instruments, dancers have their bodies. Because of the constant focus on the body, body concerns are extremely common among female dancers. For non - dancers, body image problems may not be as severe because they are not required to wear skin-tight leotards and tights everyday and to stare at their bodies in the mirror for extended periods of time.

How do all of those themes interact with one another to create a healthy or unhealthy mental state for a dancer?
How do those themes relate to one another?
 Is there an overarching theme that intertwines them all? And how does this affect the dancer and how they justify their reasons for obsession with body image?

 The next step in my research is to answer that latter question through analysis of my latest questionnaire results and the current research I have conducted.

And, of course, answering one question leads to further questions.
What is the overall theme that I need to explore?
What does the existing academic research say about that theme?
What is lacking in the existing research and thus needs to be explored further through new research?

As I answer those questions, I will continue blogging about what I find.

References:

http://www.wesleyan.edu/psyc/mindmatters/volume01/article05.pdf

Body Image - Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women, and Children  - Sarah Grogan

http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/naigle/index.htm

http://people.ucalgary.ca/~egallery/volume2/small.html

Benn, T., & Walters, D. (2001). Between Scylla and Charybdis. Nutritional education versus body culture and the ballet aesthetic: the effects on the lives of female dancers. Research in Dance Education, 2 (2), 139-154.

Kilbourne, J. (2002). The naked truth: Advertising’s image of women. Presentation to Principial College (Elsah, IL). 14 February, 2002.

Kirkland, G. (1986). Dancing on my grave. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company.

Gordon, S. (1983). Off balance: The real world of ballet. New York: Pantheon.