This morning, a group of teenagers took to the airwaves on BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour to discuss a campaign they recently began to promote body confidence. Molly Horner, Lucy Freer, Megan Guest and Alison Coates of the Joseph Rowntree School in York recently wrote to local retailers to encourage them to use realistic, un-airbrushed pictures of women to promote their clothing ranges as a way of combatting low self-esteem.
It is undeniable that young women are bombarded with advertising imagery of unattainable figures that do not equate to the reality young women’s bodies. What makes this campaign laudable is that it formed part of a school project in citizenship – as The Guardian's Jane Martinson recently argued ‘school is the new frontline for feminism,’ and projects such as this, which catch young women before they are inculcated with a culture that values them for the sexuality rather than their achievements can only be applauded.
However, whilst I hugely admire these young women actively rejecting the way our society tells them they should look, body confidence campaigns in themselves are not new. From Dove’s Real Beauty campaign through to the government’s Campaign for Body Confidence spearheaded by Equalities Minister Jo Swinson, women are encouraged to embrace their natural, curvy, womanly shapes that seem to be at odds with the usual perfect body types that dominate the media – androgynous fashion models, or pneumatic glamour models and porn stars. The reality is that despite this, young women’s relationships with their bodies are getting worse, not better despite these empowering campaigns.
Why is this? Is it perhaps because magazines aimed at young women have a schizophrenic relationship with the way they descry the pressure women are under, whilst promoting products using perfect, unrealistically thin models airbrushed to perfection? We must ask ourselves if we can really expect young women to hear the whispered voices that tell them that they should be proud of their achievements, not their physical appearance, when the roar of the media illustrates otherwise.
Mainstream stars such as Beyonce Knowles have begun a recent trend to reclaim the word feminism, stars who are proud to be strong, independent and financially secure women. This is a step forward in dispelling feminism’s reputation as a ‘dirty word’ in mainstream media, however it seems depressingly ironic that Beyonce felt the best place to declare herself as a feminist was in a men’s magazine whilst dressed in her underwear. (For which she came under huge fire by feminist jounalists and bloggers.)
Whilst wary of pressing the term ‘role model’ onto someone who hasn't necesarily set herself up to be one, a woman such as Beyonce, who young women and girls look up to, continues to disseminate these mixed messages. How are young women to embrace feminism, when influential women such as Carla Bruni have said that feminism is now redundant as ‘all the battles have been won’?
Beyonce’s implicit suggestion that empowerment can come from the power of being desired feeds into the disturbing trend of the over-sexualisation of young women and girls, as promoted and descried by The Daily Mail, seemingly unaware of the dichotomy. The Mail’s fascination with Dakota Fanning, for example, who at age 14 is purported to be ‘embracing her womanly curves’, is frighteningly similar to the countdown clock The Sun had to the day Charlotte Church turned 16 and ‘legal.’ In a post-Leveson landscape, it seems terrifying that no campaign seems able to stop the Daily Mail juggernaut that appears designed to get young women hating their bodies before they even begin to develop, as attested to by the fact BBC recently reported a rise in eating disorders amongst the under 10’s.
Last month, at the launch of the Woman’s Hour Power List, former editor of The Daily Express Eve Pollard expressed the opinion that women’s influence had been eroded in the media, as there is now only one female editor of a major newspaper, Sarah Sands. With the rise in sexualized and violent trolling of outspoken women on sites such as twitter, or in the comments section below any article by a woman that declares a feminist agenda, it is ever more important to have strong women in the media who can make effective editorial decisions not to promote an inculcated sense of self-hatred. But this is not all: there is also a real need for female collective responsibility not to consume magazines and newspapers that propagate these kinds of images.
What seems to have true power in changing opinion, is when women (and men) come together to form a mass campaign, rather than individual splinter groups with, by their nature, limited influence. Lucy Holmes, a young woman who has spearheaded the ‘no more page three’ campaign has harnessed the power of social media and crowd petitioning website change.org to urge Dominic Mohan to end the outdated and sexist practice of young women bearing their breasts on page three. Sites such as change.org and 38 Degrees harness the power of this collective responsibility in promoting real change, and Lucy’s campaign has now reached 100,000 petitioners.
If you feel strongly about this issue, please support Lucy’s campaign. If we want to change the way women are portrayed in the media, we must all be part of this movement. Sign the petition HERE.
Courtney Cooke is Funny Women's web editor. Follower her on twitter @funnywomencourt
Pictured: Beyonce, campaigners Molly Horner, Lucy Freer and Alison Coates
