An April 11 BBC article reported that, according to a poll of more than 5,000 women, only 1 in 50 is satisfied with the appearance of her body. The news story went on to state that close to 1 in 3 women is concerned about her body “every waking minute,” the average British woman will worry about her body once every 15 minutes, and more than 50 percent believe that they would have a better life if they had a better body; all of these statistics according to the aforementioned survey.
Little information garnered by this survey is novel, but a connected BBC article from 2005 does offer readers an interesting way of thinking about eating disorders. Titled “Brain theory of eating disorders,” this story expanded upon a recent study done by Japan’s Hiroshima University, which studied that brains of 13 men and 13 women after asking the subjects to read particular words having to do with body image, such as “heavy.” The study found that when women were exposed to negative words concerning body image, the region in their brains which reacts to threats was stimulated. That same brain region in the male subjects was not activated to any notable extent when reading the negative words, leading the researchers to conclude that the way in which different sexes process information may explain why women are 10 times more likely than men to develop an eating disorder.
Thankfully, more than a year later, it does not appear that the Hiroshima University’s study has garnered much interest in the scientific or medical world. In the first place, a study consisting of 26 subjects can hardly be considered an appropriate sample size with which to make medical assumptions for the entirety of humanity. However, beyond the potential problems with the scientific process of the study, it is also important to recognize that these researchers completely fail to include in their study any mention of the social or cultural factors leading to eating disorders.
The researchers say their results potentially show that the brains of men naturally process unpleasant words in a cognitive fashion, whereas women process unpleasant words in an emotional fashion. This theory is already flawed, however, because the researchers fail to consider the fact that women have been trained by societal cues to react more strongly and personally to issues involving body image.
The fact that media have become so much more accessible and ingrained into the lives of most citizens means that whereas women were once only exposed to stick-thin images of the female body in movies and on magazine covers, women are now exposed to messages about their bodies on multiple occasions every single day. A woman cannot turn on her television for more than two minutes, nor turn to virtually any Web site (MSNBC.com, webmd.com, the Google homepage) without seeing an advertisement urging her to lose weight. These advertisements are absolutely directed at women rather than men; featuring photos of women, and often a statement such as “improve your body, improve your life.”
Weight loss ads are nuggets of information that tell women that personal satisfaction and happiness is unattainable without the body of the woman pictured, usually wearing a huge pair of jeans and pulling them away from her now-miniscule body, in order to explain the huge smile on her face. Did the Hiroshima University researchers really expect that the brains of women would not react emotionally to words such as “heavy” and “fat,” when women world wide are shown constant visual evidence that overweight women are unhappy?
Men, of course, would be able to react more rationally than emotionally to negative words concerning body image, because they are given multiple cues that overweight men have the ability to easily lead happy, healthy lives. The genre of fat-men-skinny-women sitcoms, for instance, has shown a generation of men that they can be successful and sexually attractive while maintaining a hefty body size. Weight loss products rarely are rarely peddled to men, and when men are the target of “get in shape” commercials, such advertisements tend to emphasize the strength men will attain once they lose weight, rather than the unattractiveness brought on by fat. Also, in terms of visual messages, the men in weight loss ads tend to be severely overweight, whereas the women in similar ads are only 10 to 20 pounds over their desired body weight. Men therefore receive the message that a little padding around the edges is acceptable. Women, on the other hand, learn that anything besides complete weight control is unacceptable.
Again, with such high standards set for women, it’s no wonder emotions run high around words that have come to connote ugliness, undesirability and unhappiness. It is dangerous, however, to assume that inherent differences in brain function are responsible for those emotional reactions in women.

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