Social pressure makes women ashamed of their bodies

Posted at 7:00 AM Apr 16, 2010

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By Andrea Grimes

Brace yourselves.

Nay, steel yourselves.

For science has made great advances today. We have learned something of such a magnitude, approached with such daring chutzpah, that truly, the world may never be the same: Women feel bad about their bodies because society pressures them to be thin. It's science!

I gotta give the folks at Brigham Young University props on this one.

Even the most seemingly well-adjusted women still have issues with their body image, a new study suggests. The results show women who have a normal perception of body image based on psychological screening tests still have brain scans that reveal they are concerned about getting fat.

"Even though they claim they don't care about body issues...their brains are showing that it really bugs them to think about the prospect of being overweight," said study researcher Mark Allen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The pattern of brain activity is similar, though not as strong, as that seen in women with eating disorders such as anorexia, the researchers say. On the other hand, brain scans of men included didn't show any indication that they were concerned about body image.

Here is where I would typically get my panties in a wad because scientists love to postulate about hormonal imbalances and various brain chemical whacknesses that make women silly creatures who care about lame things like body image. But my panties are not wadded! In fact, my panties are relaxed and smooth, like a kind of champs elysees of panties:

The contrasting results between the sexes is likely due to the social pressure women feel to be thin in today's society, and not due to a biological difference, the researchers say.

"It's not really a male-female difference, so much as it's the social pressure that surrounds men and women," Allen said.

I love it. A neuroscientific study that doesn't immediately jump to specious biological explanations that naturalize and essentialize culturally constructed behavior. Oh, happy day.

But let us not get too excited. This was an extremely small study of just 19 people aged between 18 and 30. But the methods seem somewhat sound to me:

The study involved 10 normal-weight women and nine normal-weight men between the ages of 18 and 30. Both groups were shown images of people with different body shapes (either fat or thin) that matched the subjects' gender. With each image, the subjects were asked to "imagine someone is saying 'your body looks like hers/his." This all occurred while the subjects had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

When women looked at images of overweight individuals, their brain scans showed a spike in activity in a region thought to be involved in self-reflection and evaluation of self-worth, called the medial prefrontal cortex. Anorexic and bulimic women also show increased activity in this region when they look at images of overweight individuals, Allen said, but their brain activity is more pronounced.

I mean, I'm so thankful that they at least studied the behavior of both men and women--unlike these people or these people--that I can barely contain myself. Interestingly, the same researchers have found spikes in similar brain activity in body-builder men.

"[That's] interesting because they kind of have that same social, cultural mindset that many young women do -- this over-concern with being fit and being trim -- so they were really affected by those fat images," Allen said.

Overall, the results should caution women about the risks of crossing the line from concern about body image into a full-blown eating disorder, Allen said.

Well thanks for that awesome tip, Allen. I'll be sure not to get an eating disorder now that I have your warning. But I'll let that lame advice slide, because Allen does say that they need to do further research to find out if their conclusions are actually scientifically sound. Imagine, a scientist who wants to get things right!

The current study cannot distinguish whether the spike in brain activity was due to negative feelings about being overweight, or simply the fact that these normal-weight women needed to picture themselves in a different way when they were asked to imagine themselves as fat.

In other words, researchers might see the same spike in brain activity when overweight women look at images of thin women, because picturing themselves as thin requires that they alter their self-image. In order to tease out an answer, future studies will need to include overweight women.

See, I love this. I love that they're like, "Well, yeah, but maybe these results could mean something else, because the brain is super-complicated." I would like to know, however, what this study considers "overweight," and who they're showing these individuals pictures of to gauge their reactions on the MRI.