Crossposted from Tumblr with minor edits

[obstinatecondolement]

Content warning for body image talk and discussion of how media representations influence self image for people who are underrepresented in that media or who are unlikely to see people who look like them depicted positively or at all.


It’s so weird that the images we’re shown, over and over, most often are of people who represent a very tiny minority of the population in terms of the bodies they have (let’s say approximately 99th percentile for height, 1st percentile for body fat percentage, almost exclusively white people, people of color are disproportionately light skinned, almost exclusively people without visible disabilities, disproportionate representation of people who do not wear glasses, disproportionate representation of people who do not have male pattern baldness... and even then it is their Literal Job to maintain a diet and exercise regime that no one who was not being paid to do it and who didn’t have a team helping them could maintain and then on top of that have frequent botox and other cosmetic procedures of a quality that is not going to ever be available to the vast majority of people so that they Age Gracefully) and then, quite naturally, people who grow up surrounded by those images end up thinking that their own bodies are not normal, because they never see anyone who looks like them represented as beautiful or desireable, if at all.

Like… I was just thinking the other day that I don’t think I have ever seen an image of a person with an outie belly button except in a few celebrity maternity photoshoots. Otherwise, I have only ever seen them in real life. And (based on a cursory Google) around 10% of people have navels that stick out instead of in. That is more than five times the number of natural redheads that exist worldwide, but Hollywood is too fucking craven and cowardly to show me a slightly different kind of body to the one that it considers ideal.

Literally every kind of body is a normal body and every kind of body is weird (and wonderful), but you wouldn’t know that from the movies, where wearing glasses is a character design choice and not something 64% of the adult population of the world does and if a scene includes two people whose heights are very different that that’s supposed to be the point somehow and usually it’s supposed to be a joke about how one, or more, of these characters’ bodies are not normal.

And like… let’s expand that a little. How much worse is this alienation when you are not white? When you have a visible disability? When you are visibly trans or intersex or otherwise have secondary sexual traits that are not considered the norm for people of your gender? When you are elderly? When you are fat? When you have scars?

I’m obviously not breaking any new ground here, but sometimes it strikes me just how deeply ironic it is to hear people talk about how movies are obsessed with gritty realism these days, when every mainstream Hollywood movie seemingly takes place in world where 99% of human variation doesn’t exist.

Comments

[flamingsword]

WORD.

[obstinatecondolement]

Thanks!

[sixbeforelunch]

It's definitely a problem. The media has given us a deeply skewed idea of what the average person looks like, and it really messes people up.

[obstinatecondolement]

It reminds me of that thing where if women talk 30% of the time in mixed gender group conversations the perception is that they are talking more than half of the time (I might be slightly misremembering this, but the general thrust of it is that people, regardless of gender, perceive the percentage of time that women speak in mixed-gender conversations to be higher than it is). Our perception of what is realistic vs what is actually realistic is so warped.

[sixbeforelunch]

I saw a similar statistic once that said that if Black people make up more than 30% of a crowd, people will think that they are the majority. I think brains automatically overweight things that stand out to them. It's why if you've been raised on a steady diet of white male action heroes, if you get a year when two movies come out with female action heroes and one of them is Black, people are suddenly talking about it like it's an avalanche.

[obstinatecondolement]

It's just so wild to me that we can live in the real world but then fail to recognise something as being actually realistic vs what we more typically see represented in media. That we so drastically misinterpret the evidence of our own eyes. Like, okay, none of us live in a world where mainstream media reflects the full scope of human diversity in a way that corresponds to the actual distribution of that diversity in real life, but we do also live in real life! It's so strange that that isn't more influential! I guess we really are Pan narrans*, as Terry Pratchett would say.

*

"The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee."

[sixbeforelunch]

I'm not trying to excuse the media by any means, but given the extent to which people--especially privileged people--can self-select their peer group IRL, it's not always a given that they will see diversity outside of the media either. When I visit my parents in update PA, I generally do not see one single person who is not of European descent the entire time I'm there. Even in diverse areas, people tend to clump up with other people like them. On paper I live in a very diverse area, but if I had enough money to live in a bougie gated community, I could absolutely avoid seeing anyone who wasn't rich and (probably) white unless they were a service worker of some kind. Media is definitely a problem, and like I said I don't want to give the impression that I'm letting it off the hook, but it's good to keep in mind that in some areas, it's far more diverse than what people see in their every day life.

ETA: I should clarify that I meant it can be more diverse in terms of race/gender/sexuality than what some people are seeing. In terms of your original post about how it totally over-represents thin, attractive, young bodies, I think that totally holds no matter where people are.

[obstinatecondolement]

That certainly is also true. I live in a country that is significantly more racially homogeneous than the U.S. and I didn't realize how egregiously mainstream media misrepresented the real racial demographics of America, especially in large metropolitan cities like New York and L.A., until I was well into my twenties

[rigormorphis]

Ooh, this is a good post. I've been thinking about the issue of what kinds of people are considered "regular looking" a lot for the last while, literally just from my own perspective living in my city (the tl;dr is that I'm fat, visibly trans and visibly disabled, and it's interesting to note how different parts of me become hypervisible in different contexts) and your point about Hollywood's supposed gritty realism is such a good one.

My brain is also trying to offer up some thought about how Hollywood including any body type that doesn't fit into that (very narrow, statistically rare, barely attainable) standard is treated as a political statement in and of itself, but I can't quite make a coherent point out of it. Instead I'll just say: making the very presence of some bodies inherently political also sucks!

[obstinatecondolement]

It really sucks that some bodies are seen are inherently political! We're all just people and we all exist in the real world. Why is it not political for an episode of Friends to show a subway car that's entirely, or almost entirely populated with white people in a show set in New York City, but there is no non-political reason to include realistic number of background actors of color in crowds shots in a silly sit-com and the latter is inherently pandering?

I was researching weight lifting competitions for little people once, for fiction writing research, and I stumbled across a fluff piece from a local news station about a guy who was a power lifter and whose girlfriend was a Black trans woman. If that couple existed in a story people would kvetch at length about how unrealistic and political it was, but they are just two people who exist in the real world. Belonging to multiple marginalised populations is statistically a lot more likely than it is to be non-disabled, white, gender conforming, cishet Christian man of average height with class privilege who is a native speaker of English, monolingual and lives in the country of his birth where he is a citizen. Like... that's a minority! And the people within that minority who are blockbuster actors are a minority of a minority who also are disproportionately tall, thin, muscular, symmetrically featured, etc., etc. It is absolutely political that we think that's what all men should look like.

[brokenmnemonic]

I've learned to treat my memory as vague and unreliable territory, but IIRC I read an interview years ago when Buffy was airing, where SMG was asked about her diet and fitness regime (because obviously, every female actor has to be asked about their weight and diet habits) and she commented that it toook a lot of effort to stay in shape for the show, both from her and from her chef, dietician and exercise coach.

One of the reasons I like Vera and like Dalziel and Pascoe as tv shows were because they actually had overweight people in the roles of effective, successful detectives. As far as Hollywood's concerned, for my entire life people who look anything like as far as me have either been comic relief at best or degenerate villains at worst.

[obstinatecondolement]

Body type as visual shorthand for personality and morality in fiction is just... so bad in so many ways. I was talking about Anne McCaffrey over on Tumblr regarding this kind of thing and how she frequently represented her most immoral, lazy and self indulgent characters as being bigger people, which was really weird given that McCaffrey herself was not thin. She seems to have had unhappy thoughts about her own body, given what she said (again, according to my memory of something I read years ago) about a line in her author bio in an interview. The line was, "My hair is silver, my eyes are green and I freckle. The rest is subject to change without notice." She clarified in this interview, that I half remember, that "the rest" was the "bulk" that she "carried around." I'm 99% sure the words I've put quotes around are exact quotes, but I couldn't swear to it under oath. It's sad to me that she seemingly didn't even think of her own body as being like... entirely her body, so much as some baggage that she, a temporarily embarrassed thin person, had been imposed upon to carry.