Adbusters: Women’s Health

This is why I love working with teenage girls.

I just casually flipped through the copy of “Women’s Health” magazine my roommate recently acquired. I am horrified. This month’s issue features “The Perfect Body Diet,” a statement which in itself is so horribly offensive and dangerous to women’s health. Morbid curiosity led me to read about this diet. To my horror, the regime it prescribes allows for under fifteen-hundred calories per day.

This is five-hundred calories short the recommended daily intake for a healthy woman. Five-hundred calories is about the amount of a whole-grain turkey sandwich, with a side of yogurt and maybe a fruit. In other words, this diet skips the equivalent of one entire meal per day.

It should have come as no surprise to me that a woman’s “health” magazine is encouraging self-enduced starvation. After all, the advertisements that fund the magazine, along with the fashion, nutrition and fitness industries the magazine supports, all endorse starvation diets. I know this well, which is why I usually don’t read these magazines. This is also why I rarely buy clothes first-hand, and to some extent why I don’t have an antenna on my TV (so I don’t watch commercials): I want to have as little as possible to do with industries that promote the destruction and commodification of women’s bodies.

Nonetheless, the magazine was right there, and I had to read it. And to some extent, it influenced me. For a second there, I actually felt guilty that I eat three balanced meals a day. With just a little effort, the article told me, and a little discipline, I could be thin and “perfect.”

I work at an acting school that trains teenagers for the film and television profession. The kids I train are preparing themselves for commercial auditions - ahead of them awaits casting directors speaking frankly about their body “type,” agents telling them to lose weight, and dealing with losing parts to less talented, but ‘better’ looking contenders. My heart breaks for them on a regular basis, and I often struggle with the ethics of my own role. Is it dishonourable of me to be sending them out into this horrible industry? Or are they better off learning from me how to respect themselves, how to uphold their personal integrity, how to be strong and honourable artists in the midst of such a nasty business.

It has taken a lot for me to feel comfortable with my body, to recognize the pressures to be thin for what they really are: manipulative, destructive plots by advertising companies to perpetuate the myth of Woman-as-Commodity. It takes so much strength out of me to block out these messages. Sometimes I am unsuccessful. This article this afternoon really fired me up. I never want to get used to how offensive articles are like this. I never want to not be appalled by them.

As artists we have the power to rewrite popular aesthetics. We have the power to question, invert, satirize beauty myths, to refuse to conform to them. The tagline for this stupid magazine is: “It’s good to be you.” The irony of this statement, ironically, inspires and provokes me to be, unashamedly, myself.