Yesterday, the blog Jezebel discussed a recent segment that ran on ABC’s Good Morning America:
Good Morning America recreated the 1940s experiment in which 63% of African-American children given identical white and black dolls said they’d rather play with the white doll and 44% identified more with the white doll.
The original Jezebel post and the GMA video can be found here.
That made me remember a video that I had watched over a year ago, directed by a young African American girl, who ran the very same experiment and also filmed lots of interviews of fellow African American girls, discussing self image, body image, and discrimination. It was far, far more powerful and emotional than the GMA video. I highly recommmend watching it:
Illusionists, step aside. Let’s focus on some “realists.”
In this clip, prominent bloggers discuss the effects pregnancy had on their bodies and their self-image. Their words are surprisingly candid, especially in a cultural climate that idolizes motherhood and stresses the importance of “getting your body back ASAP” (see this previous post about US Magazine’s obsession with new moms and dieting).
Actors, models and television personalities are accustomed to leading on-air lives in soft focus. But with the advent of all-digital television next month, the stage is set for unforgiving high-definition broadcasts, and even everyday people want to look airbrushed to perfection.
In our hyper-magnified world where HDTV, HD camcorders and point-and-shoot cameras with auto-airbrushing functions are becoming the norm, a blemish here, a pockmark there or even a wisp of a wrinkle is unacceptable.
In theory, the sharper images transmitted over high-definition digital television mean the skin has to look almost perfect. Which is to say that it has to look natural, fresh and dewy, not powdery and masklike as it did in the analog days.
A couple of years ago Peggy Orenstein wrote an article for the New York Times magazine entitled “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?” about the rise of the Disney Princess line of toys. It left an indelible impression on my mind, long before I started to work on this film. A must read for mothers, grandmothers, and anyone who is going to raise a girl.
An excerpt:
There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine. And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone, be very thin and dress right.” Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business.
Stepping inside the Barbie store is a true immersion experience.
Girls can shop for clothes, have their nails and hair done, peruse the latest dolls and buy Barbie accessories such as wristwatches, two-way radios and play laptops. Entry is free, though admission to the Casa de Barbie, the fantasy-land in the rear, is about $10. A manicure runs about $6, hair braiding costs as much as $20, and an elaborate “Barbie Full Style” hairdo can set Mom back $38.
An amazing way to teach young girls concepts of beauty, thinness and consumerism!
Speaking of onslaught (see yesterday’s post): the spring issue of Ms. Magazine carried a powerful article by Caroline Heldman on self-objectification:
A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girl’s perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been recognized by social scientists as self-objectification—viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the male gaze. Like W.E.B. DuBois’ famous description of the experience of black Americans, self-objectification is a state of “double consciousness … a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
