Body image problems -not so new, perhaps

I don't doubt that there are a lot of people many of them young who have emotional difficulties which are related to the attitudes of peers, parents, and what they pick up of such attitudes in the media they access. And I am truly concerned that there are young children who feel really badly about their bodies. We, as a society, need to consider how best to order our life together to minimise this kind of message becoming something that leads to self-harming. It was on the BBC news this morning and also here -
Girls aged five worry about their body image, say MPs | Society | The Guardian and follows the publication of a parliamentary report.

One of the report's authors says: "It's clear there's something seriously wrong in society when children as a young as five are worrying about their appearance, based on the messages they are seeing all around them. The findings of the report are shocking – body image has become more important in our culture than health and children are mimicking their parents' concerns about appearance. We all have a responsibility to act now to bring about the attitudinal and behavioural change that's necessary to prevent damage to future generations"

What I would like to question (and I've not yet read the report which may deal with this) is whether this is more an intensification of something that has been going on for a long time. Perhaps the new thing about it could be how 'predatory' it has become. I mean predatory in the sense of a targetting by advertisers and other opinion formers of younger people with age-inappropriate stuff.

What makes me think that it isn't so new in principle is my own experience. As an 8-year old boy I can distinctly remember two interacting issues being a part of my life. One was reading comics of the superhero genre; especially Spider-Man. The other issue was that I was very thin (mostly as a result of having thin bones). The problem I had with these two things together was that I was taking in images on a regular basis of male bodies which were well muscled, though not body-builder beefy, and graceful (lovingly drawn?) This male body shape filled my imaginative space and what I take to be my mimetic instinct drew me towards a desire to be something like that image. But it was never going to happen -I realised eventually but before it did too much damage to me physically or mentally (some may question this!) that I was simply not made of the right basic physical architecture to have a body like that. I spent time in my own head working on compensatory thinking and coping mechanisms.

I realise that not every child is able -for a variety of reasons- to do what I did or to do it effectively. And perhaps the saturation of our cultural environment with such images makes it just more statistically likely that the coping threshold of a greater proportion of children will be breached.

Add to that peer pressure: my experience again was being about the thinnest kind of body type possible while remaining healthy attracted quite a lot of negative comment from peers and could occasion being bullied. Add to that my inability to tan and reddish hair and I had some really quite unpleasant insults and negativity thrown my way. I believe that this did dent my self-esteem and I compensated by finding things that I could do better than most and by realising (which stood me in good stead in later study) that there was an arbitrariness to the values placed on various aspects of appearance and that I could choose to value things about myself even if lots of other people didn't appear to appreciate them. Again, I don't think that this is a strategy that may be easy for many nowadays.

I suppose what I'm hypothesising is that body image concern amongst young people are not uncommon but that this makes it more important that we don't make something so prevalent and intimately personal yet socially visible more difficult to navigate through to reasonably healthy conclusions involving self-acceptance and being able to make healthy choices. We need to make a cultural intervention which works on several fronts. I would agree that tackling the torrent of images poured into public spaces and media would be one thing. However, I'd also say we need to be prepared to coach people to be able to reprogramme their own valuings of body images and their own self-acceptance. Then there is the issue of encouraging and enabling social environments of acceptance, valuing of difference, respect and care for others. To many kids the taunts of peers are a big thing -we should not belittle the hurt and harm they can do.

This much is congruent with Christian concerns.
However, I wonder too whether we should consider the maimed crucified body as a theological resource here too? The prophetic words 'He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.' (Is.53.2) were applied by early Christians to Jesus. The incarnation was not marked by great beauty or 'comeliness'. Maybe that doesn't go quite as far as saying that the Incarnate One had body image problems, but it is to say that he may not have exacerbated them for others or alienated the not-so-comely like most of us are in fact. We should note, though, that in experiencing rejection, betrayal, taunting and so forth, he did experience the kinds of things that those who are denigrated for their bodily 'imperfections' experience. ...