Culture and its Role in the Construction of Womens Body Image

Culture and its Role in the Construction of Women’s Body Image: Methodical vs. Individualistic

The definition of body image refers to an individual’s subjective evaluation of her size, weight, or any other aspect of physical appearance; a highly personalized experience (Linda Ridge Wolszon 546). The modern West places great emphasis on individualism, which claims human existence as separate from society, stressing both self-interest and human rights. Current research concerning body image is combined with individualist ideology that leads to confusion and dilemmas. After conducting research on this topic of body image, I argue that a hermeneutic, or methodological principle of interpretation, should be taken which can help us distinguish the relationship of the individual to culture, which in turn will help clarify the cultural and ethical aspects of women’s struggles with body image.

Within the past ten years, the rise of eating disorders has gotten more public attention. This spark increased scientific research geared toward explaining and responding to this disaster. It is now widely recognized that body image dissatisfaction, broadly defined as strong negative feelings about the body, are persistent among women, especially concerning weight and dieting. Merely being a women in our society means feeling too fat (Wolszon 542). Survey data indicate that three fourths of normal weight women in the United States feel fat, more than half of adult women in the United States are on a diet, and on study showed that nearly 80% of fourth grade girls are watching their weight (Shelly Levitt 64).

At first glance, it appears that body image researchers have not just focused on the individual. Nearly every researcher in this field acknowledges the essential role that cultural norms for appearance play in the development of one’s body image. They have even gone as far as recognizing the gender differences in appearance norms in our culture. Men are held to a standard of a moderate, muscular built that generally matches the size and shape of the average man, but women are compared to a cultural ideal that has thinned beyond belief (Wolszon 545). The Miss America contestants have become so thin that most are fifteen percent below their recommended weight for their height, a sympt...

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...ns of human purpose.” Obviously, these insights didn’t appear outside the cultural context, as an individualistic researcher might suggest.

Critics might argue that hermeneutic thinkers give in to social practices that are demeaning. This is not the case. Although they accept their dependence on cultural narratives, hermeneutic theory does not make one to feel vulnerable against shallow visions of what one might think is the “good life” that are definitely everywhere in today’s consumer-orientated society. As summed up earlier, we do not gain our freedom from cutting ourselves off from culture, which is almost impossible anyway. Rather, we create “situated freedoms” by involving ourselves in cultural narratives. I will leave you with a thought for the future: “Cultural traditions, no matter how oppressive, are not invariant structures of history that exist outside our active participation in them. It is by emphasizing the meaning of those traditions, by recovering ideals and aspirations in them, or joining into the controversy and debate to revise those traditions that we define ourselves, teach our children, and participate in history” (Wolszon 554).