British celebrity Katie Price (R) on the red carpet before the start of the Vienna State Opera Ball in Vienna, Austria, 11 February 2010. Robert Jaeger/EPABlaming 'Jordan syndrome' doesn't really cut it.!!
Our obsession with women’s weight and attractiveness manifests in different ways in the media, including being sold images that are far removed from reality and often impossible to achieve, or focusing on women’s looks rather then their achievements.The pressure to represent more realistic images of women in the media has led to larger models being used, though as Calvin Klein discovered when it featured a US size 8-10 (UK 12-14) model, criticism was quick to be triggered by a suggestion on Twitter that she was “plus-size”.
In the UK, Jameela Jamil, the female presenter who became the first woman to host the Radio 1 Official Chart Show in 60 years, recently won a body confidence award for speaking out against how her achievements as a presenter (including widening the Chart Show’s audience by a quarter of a million listeners) were overshadowed by negative reports about her increased weight.
Although her acceptance speech was witty, emotional and impassioned on the continuing focus on women’s appearance rather than talents, she still apparently felt it necessary to explain her weight gain as the outcome of a health problem.
Government campaigning
In, 2010 the UK government’s equalities department launched its Body Confidence Campaign – the campaign which gave Jamil her award. Lynne Featherstone, the then minister for equalities, said the campaign was important because:
Whether it’s a perfectly toned “six-pack” or a painfully thin “size zero”, men and women are bombarded everyday by airbrushed body images which bear little or no resemblance to reality. These images can cause real damage to self-esteem.
Featherstone also said the body confidence campaign would work “closely with the media and other industries to reverse this trend and promote more honest and diverse depictions of men and women”. The awards, she said, showed there was real support across industry to tackle the issue head on.
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