Girls, Bodyshaming and our media…

I’ve done a lot of youth work with teen and pre-teen girls over the latter half of my life (because scarily I’m old enough to have been doing youth work for half my life now). I started at 16 as a trainee Guide leader in an inner city Guide unit, and went on to become a Youth Advice Worker, a Community Education worker, and in later years while working for a charity I went into schools running lessons on pregnancy to dovetail into the Scottish Sexual health and relationships education curriculum. And over time, I’ve become increasingly convinced of my feminist beliefs.

In a world of sexting, snapchat, facebook and kids getting access to phones younger and younger, things have changed radically for teens since I was one myself. I remember vividly what it was like to be a teenager. And I am insanely thankful that digital cameras were not something we had access to. Because I know in a fit of giddiness during sleepovers (which I firmly believe should be renamed ‘awakeovers’) or when we first began experimenting with alcohol – there is stuff that I’m sure we would have posted on something like instagram for a laugh.

Amongst my friends and I – many of us suffered from poor body confidence and eating disorders as we grew up. I still remember all the girls’ magazines telling us about what we should and shouldn’t wear, our mothers reading up on crash diets in trashy women’s magazines. The boys in our class read magazines with scantily dressed women and gave ideas on creative positions for intimate couple activities. And as time has gone on, the actors on television have got skinnier and skinnier. It’s not just women who are being objectified on body image (though I’d argue it’s still far worse for women). The magazines and newspapers have got more judgmental on body shaming women. And last year after overhearing one too many conversations amongst my Guides calling themselves ‘fat’ or confessing that they didn’t want to try an activity for fear of looking silly we did a programme produced by WAGGGS called Free Being Me. One of the first sessions required me to go find some magazines aimed at their age group so they could analyse the visual content of them. I was utterly appalled when I picked up a magazine called Top Model clearly aimed at 8-11 age group which had an article teaching girls how to judge people based on what they were wearing. I had long stopped buying magazines myself – I have strong views on gossiping and refuse to help a market that uses gossip to sell their product – so it had been a while since I had really looked. I remember standing in the supermarket feeling sick. Because that magazine was aimed at my friends’ daughters.

So you can imagine my rage and disgust when someone posted a news article about this American magazine aimed at a similar age group teaching girls about how to pick the best swimsuit for their body shape.

What 8 year old girl has developed a body shape?! And why should they care what they are wearing when they go for their swimming lessons, or play in the ocean with their family and friends in the summer?!

I was enraged. And concerned.

But most of all, I want to know how the heck I can change this awful body shaming society girls and young women are growing up in. A day later, this clip of an interview Melissa McCarthy (who I love, love, love from Gilmore Girls) appeared on my YouTube homepage.

The whitewashing, the ageism, the photoshopping, the judging a person on fashion choices over ability to do a job. I’m trying to think of all the ways I can give them opportunities to see how the world really should be over how it is portrayed in media of all forms.

Because I think it starts with the adults…

(Belated) Quote of the Week 23 – Fight the battle

The last few months I’ve worked with my fellow leaders to support the Guides through a programme called Free Being Me. Our grand finale was to have the girls work with a photographer (my friend, Anneleen – who just had one of her photos published in the New York Times don’t ya know!) to design their own self portraits that reflect who they are as unique individuals as well as being sisters through Girlguiding.

Throughout the time doing Free Being Me the girls learned how to critically reflect on messages in the media, dealing with negative comments spoken over them, how to encourage friends and family members to be more confident in their own skin. They shared secret encouraging messages that they left in jars for each other during our meetings, had a wall of pictures and quotes they found encouraging and/or inspiring – and they shared it all with the public a few weekends ago.

When two of the girls were preparing a poster to explain about what they’d done during Free Being Me and their exhibition they wrote this (and I might add this is THEIR words, no leaders prompted anything – as we were busy trying to get a laminator to work and figure out double sided sticky tape respectively)

“We’ve created this photo exhibition to help other people understand what we‘ve learned – that beauty within is more important than what you look like on the outside. There is too much pressure on girls to look a certain way in today’s society – our message is that everyone is beautiful in their own way. Doing our ‘Free Being Me’ badge has helped us to expose the beauty myth for what it is and learn that there’s far more to life than conforming.“

A friend and fellow blogger posted a fun thing on facebook, asking several questions and everyone gave their answers in the comments. One of the questions was ‘If there’s one thing you could change about your body in an instant, what would it be??’ I wanted to cry as I saw answer after answer popping up on my feed. ‘Weight…baby belly…all the fat…weight…weight…‘

A few years ago I wrote a post on my old blog about learning to accept my body’s ‘quirks’. They are just part of what makes me – me! They make me recognisable. I had to laugh when my friend told me she recognised my back going up an escalator because “she recognised the hair”.

But that’s not all what makes me who I am. It’s when I dance around the kitchen singing along to the How I Met Your Mother theme tune. It’s being at work and once again managing to cover my chest in coffee or cream cheese scrubbing things at the end of the day. It’s not being able to understand how someone could get stuck in an airport with no phone because why wouldn’t you make sure you had a charger AND travel adaptor in your hand luggage when you travel. Along with a spare change of clothes “just in case”. Or how I’ll get the giggles at way my ballet teacher explains things. Or how I’ll whoop and cheer very loudly for my friends. Or why I’d rather be in a book shop than a clothes shop. And how much I hate going to night clubs…

The world is constantly trying to tell us what we should look like, how we should run our families, how we should enjoy spending our time and money.

Sometimes it matches up with who you are, and other times it will totally go against it.

Be yourself. It’s the best person you can be.

The world is better with you being YOU.

And to keep being yourself is a worthy battle to keep fighting for.