I work at a grocery store near my school’s campus. It’s a more upscale and expensive store in a wealthy and older part of town, meaning there’s a lot of older people who shop there regularly. On top of that, there’s a lot of suburban moms and college students that come by as well. Through all of that, though, I’ve noticed a trend in the way that women talk about the food that they buy. All day I hear women saying they shouldn’t buy this thing and how bad they’re being for buying bread, that they’re making a mistake but they just can’t resist the temptation. It had me wondering why women of all ages talk about themselves this way, particularly older women. There’s a conception that our culture is more tolerant of all body types, and that women aren’t as hard on their bodies as they used to be. Simultaneously, a narrative exists that Gen Z and Millennial women are plagued by a desire to look like the women they see on their Instagram feed. But after these real-life experiences with older women, I felt like they’re being left out of the conversation. Also, just a brief trigger warning that I will be discussing eating habits to a small extent in this article! Feel free to skip if you’re not comfortable.
I’m sure all of us grew up listening to the ways our moms talk about themselves, including the way our moms talk with each other about their body image and eating habits. I still remember being a little girl and listening to my mom’s friend talk about how she’s lost weight lately by cutting out the cheese from her salads. Women are always trying to share these tidbits with one another, how they cut out this thing and stopped indulging in another. Over time, these things have become ingrained in our perception of the world and even the women around us. Feeling guilty for eating sweets and carbs is not something we have to think about, it’s just our automatic response. Women can’t even feel comfortable buying the foods they want at the grocery store without justifying their “bad” purchases to their cashier. Why does this feeling follow us everywhere we go? Does it actually change what we put in our bodies, or just how we feel about ourselves for eating it? I feel like in the current conversation about body image there’s an emphasis on social media and the ways that women compare themselves to photoshopped and filtered images. However, in diving deeper into this concept I realized that we only learned to look out for those things from the older women in our lives. And they learned it from the women they looked up to growing up as well, making a vicious cycle of generations of women who torture themselves over a purchase of a cookie or a pack of Oreos.
To start my research, I just wanted to look generally at how women of all ages feel about their bodies. A study. by Pruis and Janowsky in the Journal of General Psychology found that overall body dissatisfaction did not differ significantly between age groups. Meaning that older women and younger women thought their bodies did not match their ideal image, which is interesting because the older women had an overall higher body weight than the younger women. However, the younger participants had a higher drive towards thinness than their older counterparts, which the study attributes to more societal pressure to be thin. What’s interesting about these results is that regardless of societal pressure, older women still experienced the same level of body dissatisfaction. In my own experience, older women are more comfortable talking to anybody about their negative beliefs around their food choices. In contrast, women my own age really only say these things in small group settings with their close friends. So, although they find different avenues to do so, I think younger and older women are talking negatively about their bodies at around the same frequency. Especially if you consider the internet to be a public space, younger women and especially teenage girls spend a lot of time in videos or comments sections talking about their bodies. In an article published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, they studied the impact of pro-anorexia tiktoks on young women. What’s key about social media and eating disorders is not that young women are seeing an unrealistic body image, although that’s true as well. However, on platforms like TikTok what’s most notable is their access to “tips” from other young women on the app who gain popularity amongst a certain age group for their so-called aspirational bodies. So, although young girls might not speak as candidly in public about their body image, social media still manages to have a similar impact on other women socially.
Overall, based on my research and personal experience I realized that having negative body image and talking about it publicly is not any less common in younger women than older women. I think it just had to do with the way that body image was talked about in TV, movies, and magazines that these older women grew up seeing. The behavior of excusing your purchase of a chocolate bar to the cashier is not far from the body-checking behaviors a lot of younger women partake in, it’s just about where it’s taking place. I was inspired to take a look into this phenomenon because I think there’s a misconception amongst older women that us younger girls have it figured out just because we’ve grown up in a generally more socially aware generation. However, I don’t see any evidence that we’re any more realistic about women’s bodies in general than we were in their generation. We’ve all spent our lives taking in what it means to be a woman from the world around us, and particularly from other women. I hope my research and anecdotes come to mind the next time you criticize yourself for indulging in a little sweet treat (that you probably deserve). My challenge to you is to think about how you can incorporate body neutrality in your conversations with other women, even ones you don’t know. You have a body, and that is a neutral fact. Society, life experience, and our social groups are what change that for us. So, I hope you feel inspired to think of your body more in terms of its capacity for movement, insight, skill, and just some gratitude that you have a body in the first place.