Does This Game Make Me Look Fat? Musings on Body Image

One of the female Blood Elf jokes in WoW is “Do you think the expansion will make me look fat?”

And, since I brought up Barbie yesterday – knowing full well that she is a symbol to many of patriarchal body image oppression, I thought I’d riff on the subject for a while.

As I have previously admitted, I was anorexic for a while. Never bulemic, that’s a place I just don’t want to go. I was more of a power gamer anorexic, who memorized calorie charts and complicated formulae to calculate one’s metabolic rate depending on the activity.

And I wasn’t doing it because I wanted to look like a supermodel. I was doing it because I wanted to look like a boy. Keith Richards, in fact, circa 1967. Or actually, more like Joan Jett or Chrissie Hynde or one of the Heart sisters (who all seem to have swiped his look).

That’s because I was playing guitar on stage and there weren’t a lot of other women doing that back then, and performing arts, has a lot to do with your personal image. You're not trying to look real, you're trying to look hyper-real, iconic-real. I mean, I could have shot for the more organic folkie look like Joni Mitchell, and in fact I played bass for a woman who was heavy into this particular style during my acoustic period, but it ain’t me, so I used to dress sort of Irish-punk for those gigs, plaid trousers and docs and black long sleeved t-shirts.

Diva style was just starting up, as exemplified by the young Madonna , but I didn’t play heavily produced dance music (although I do love it), I played power chord infested rock, and people playing that tended toward the lots o’ hair and eyeliner look.

But mainly you had to be skinny, with waify cheekbones, because that’s how Keith Richard looked back when he pretty much singlehandedly invented The Look. He achieved the skinniness via heroin addiction, but that seemed too complicated for me, I did it by not eating.

And, as a tomboyish rocker chick, I tended to look down on the overly fashion conscious as being retro, even though fashion and rock ended up in the same messy bed. During my day they were as opposed as republicans versus democrats today. We were all about hip progressive androgyny, they were all about money and impressing the neighbors.
It wasn’t really about impressing boys. The girls who wanted to do that were groupies, and they had a look all their own. And I tended to attract the kind of boyfriends more into compatible personalities than impressing their friends with the hawt trophy on their arm (because I eat insecure boys for breakfast, haha) so very little of my anorexia was geared toward looking like a Barbie doll for the sake of pleasing the patriarchy.

Whenever I eased up on my anorexia, I blossomed out to what I now consider my normal body weight. In fact, I am exactly the same size as an aunt on the side of my genetic family that I had no knowledge of until I was in my mid-thirties. I tend to agree with some of the newer theories that genetics play a far larger role in body size than most people realize.

And then I came down with a stupid medical condition that saps my energy and makes me unable to do anything aerobic, and as a result of that I’m over my normal body weight by thirty to fifty depending on my mood. Which, I readily admit, is a major factor in the fact that I get a kick out of playing slender toons who have healthy twenty-something bodies like I used to have before I got trapped in this fat middle aged one.

But anyway, that’s my body image disclosure. These days I’m laid back about the whole subject. I can identify with the mindset that goes “OMG, I ate a french fry, I must do 90 situps!” and also with the “life’s short, have another dessert” one, and also with the “who the hell cares what it looks like as long as it’s not in acute pain and can function enough to get me through the day” one, which sort of added major perspective to the rest of it. So does getting older. I’d really rather not be one of those over-40 ladies who obsesses on looking like a teenager, especially not when I can play my computer games and act like a teenager instead. It’s fun being a pretend teenager, but not if it requires surgery.

I already did a rant about Barbie, how her thinness was intended for a world where young ladies sewed their own clothes so appreciated having a miniature dressmaker’s model, and didn’t go out without four or more layers of fabric at their waist. Not for a world of exposed belly buttons.

I realize this puts me at odds with a lot of feminists who think Barbie’s thinness is more of a directive. But I can’t go there, and I’ll tell you why.

If Barbie makes girls anorexic, then video games make children violent, Huckleberry Finn makes children racist (so it should be banned from schools), Heather Has Two Mommies makes them gay (ditto), Knocked Up makes women not have abortions, Spiderman makes children swing from skyscrapers, Superman makes them jump out of windows, Harry Potter makes them occultists, rock and roll makes them everything from pregnant to drug addicted, on and on and on and on.

Never mind the fact that Captain Planet didn’t make us all ecologists and Mr. Rogers didn’t make us all wear cardigans and Oscar the Grouch didn’t make us grow up to live in garbage cans and the Carebears didn’t really make us care all that much. And those were actual childrens’ shows seen by millions of actual children with wholesome uplifting moral themes deliberately (and sometimes heavy handedly) incorporated right into the programming rather than the subtle subtexts that are often pointed out by those who have some kind of vested interest in “proving” that art causes deviant behavior and then censoring it.

So, frankly, I see the “Barbie creates bad body image” camp as being the left equivalent of the “purple Teletubby makes toddlers gay” theory developed by Jerry Falwell on the right.

Because no matter which extreme fringe its coming from, the underlying belief is that art creates reality rather than represents one individual’s interpretation of it. Especially if it’s not strictly representational art, say, a photo of a covered bridge. If you color the bridge orange and put some purple giraffes in front of it, some folks will take this as the artist’s demand that we make the bridge orange, that we dye some giraffes, that we put them there.

Do people sometimes do terrible things based on art (and I am defining art extremely loosely here to include kids’ TV)? Why certainly they do. There was recently a very repulsive murder in the news that seemed inspired by the Oliver Stone flick “Natural Born Killers.” And I myself confessed to becoming anorexic because I wanted to look like the images of cool rockers that I saw in magazines. And people have killed each other over computer games, and they have copied violent scenes from movies, and consumed all kinds of intoxicants because their heroes do. Absolutely. Sometimes people do copy the art, with disastrous results. They always have. Is the problem with the art? Well, I'm pretty certain that the kind of people who would do horrible antisocial things in the first place derive their inspiration from many sources, and if you take away their satanic heavy metal they'll play violent video games, or watch sadistic horror movies, or read gory fairy tales. Sort of like Alex in Clockwork Orange, who took up religion in order to convince the prison authorities he had turned into a nice boy (but the extent of religion's appeal to him seemed to consist of fetishing over the bloodier aspects of the crucifixion).

Personally, I think the problem is with the unstable people that are likely to do bad things. We should develop better ways of helping them not do bad things, before they do them. That's a far easier task than changing all popular media to reflect our personal opinions. Instead of demanding an end to controversial words and images, let's teach people better ways of dealing with exposure to them and come up with better ways of shielding ourselves from inadvertent exposure to them, especially the people that are at risk for doing bad things. Just my opinion. Freedom of speech includes the right to go in your house and shut the door whenever the speech gets on your nerves.

On a historical note, some of the most interesting crime of the 20th century took place during Prohibition, while the Hays code ensured that “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.”

I also note that Billy the Kid and an awful lot of guys like him grew up with organic produce, no TV and lots of healthful exercise. Just like most murderers throughout history.

Plus I’ve also noticed that the risks associated with media-copying types of antisocial behavior are pretty small. I’m thinking about a “OMG video games are bad!” article I looked at recently but couldn’t find a link for just now, that attributed 24 deaths in a 6 year period – half of them in Korea – to video games. Any activity that 90% of U.S. teenagers engage in that only proves fatal to an average of 2 a year is remarkably safe, much better than having them driving or playing football.

My own theory about why there is art in the first place is that it creates community. Once a people have Their Musical Genre and Their Paintings and Their Fashions they can congregate and meet, fall in love, raise babies, all because some artist somewhere said “all Goths over here!” or “all lederhosen-wearing polka fans come gather around me!” Communities that have their shared pictures and music and stories tend to be more cohesive than those that don’t. It provides a common language. I've developed many friendships with people from faraway places that still like the same songs and movies and games that I do.

And now that we’re in the age of mass culture, those communities become more massive, frequently threatening communities already in place. Such as the way rock and roll definitely did supercede religious and national identities for lots of its fans, or the way World of Warcraft’s detractors complain that their loved ones are more interested in raiding than socializing with local friends.

In fact, sometimes I suspect that the people objecting to new kinds of art and grasping at straws to try to "prove" their immoral nature have a vested interest in the pre-existing power structure and are threatened by the idea of changing social habits.

Nevertheless, some kinds of art aren't concerned with inspiring anything but sales.

Here’s something that’s been making the internet rounds lately: a picture showing how extensively an image of Faith Hill was retouched for a magazine cover.

A lot of feminists are angry about this because they believe this kind of retouching creates a climate where women are held to an unobtainable standard of perfection.

Challenging that belief is way too big a topic for this blog. I just wrote what I believe, they believe what they believe, and I think we both agree that this kind of thing is disconcerting. The models from my day might have been artificially posed and professionally made up, but they weren’t photoshopped.

I recall during the OJ trial there was similar outcry about a cover photo of OJ that was retouched to make him look darker (and theoretically more menacing).

We expect a photograph to depict objective reality, but technology has blurred the edge between photography and painting to new heights.

Now all cultures – all the ones that permit representation of human faces in their art at least, Muslim cultures do not – have art that represents beautiful women, whether in the realistic style of Greek statuary and Renaissance portraits or whether in the stylized non-representational images of indigenous artists and modern artists who deal in abstract impressions.

No doubt some of the people viewing the art take it as a directive that they must strive to embody the art, while others look at it as an inspiration. The female rockers whose photos I linked above weren’t interested in having sex changes, or in looking like Keith Richards does today (yuck), they just wanted the glowering eyes and towering cheekbones and messy bedhead hair.

Cindy Jackson here holds the Guinness World Record for plastic surgery in her quest to look as much like Barbie as possible.

But Cindy’s a little weird. Most people wouldn’t dream of going that far, just as most video game players don’t kill people and most people who read Huckleberry Finn don’t become racist over the fact the “N” word is used repeatedly.

I do think, however, that this kind of artificial beauty is unfair and exploitative – to men.

Why men? They’re not the target audience for Redbook, but consider our sexist evolutionary biologist in Psych Today that points out men have an involuntary positive reaction to images of young healthy women due to natural selection.

(And I’m pointing out that, while this might be true for the hypercompetitive alpha-type males who aspire to publish articles in Psych Today, it’s not true for 100% of males, some of whom react more positively toward images of young healthy men, or intimate familiar wives or fishnet stockings or extremely large pickup trucks or the WoW login screen than to yet another picture of some girl trying to sell them something.)

Consider a marketing angle that has been documented with regard to women: baby faces = sales. Something about a round big-eyed baby face (or a cartoon animal that’s drawn in the same proportion) makes women reach for the product. Cuteoverload has probably a better definition of “cute” than anything I can come up with, and baby resemblance is right up there, and I’m one of lots of people who visits this site (and one of the smaller number of people who will admit it).

And not all women, no doubt there are some that have a high degree of baby-resistance and respond more to pictures of things like relaxing beaches or chocolatey desserts or cats with funny captions.

But anyway, how would we like it if we went to the mall and instead of beautiful women’s images everywhere, there were pictures of babies?

It would be sort of like Disneyland, with the baby-features-proportioned cartoon animals, something that drives a lot of people nuts for reasons they can’t quite articulate.

Want to buy a soda? Cardboard cutouts of babies, right next to the cooler. Beer? Same thing. Looking for a car? They’re over there, with the baby pictures. How about a nice relaxing magazine? Wow, babies on 75% of the pages.

That’s how men are marketed to with regard to images of beautiful women. By all rights, they should be the ones complaining about these paintings fraudulently representing photographs of actual women.

And further. I never put much stock in Skinnerian behavioral theories with regard to social theories. Too much deviation in response, too many unpredictable outcomes.

However, I will stipulate to the fact that you can artificially induce a sort of fetishistic state by combining high levels of Pleasurable Brain Experience with other stimuli.

The most common manifestation: “darling, they’re playing our song.”

Brain chemicals of love + song = song with heavy associations.

Why I’ll bet you might be able to get the same effect if you were to hear a particular song while really drunk or high on drugs.

And it’s not just songs, it works for other things too: movies, pictures, outfits.

Ever have a “lucky” item of clothing that you happened to be wearing while having a particularly PBE inducing day?

But enough about drugs and romance, let’s talk about sex, the granddaddy of all PBE inducing experiences. You really can’t get much more of a Pleasurable Brain Experience than an orgasm.
Imagine if, every time you had an orgasm, you looked at a picture of a duck.

No, even better, let’s just assume you’re freaky and get a little bit excited thinking about ducks in the first place. So you go to the mall and every which way you turn – ducks. On labels, on posters, in ads.

After simmering in a state of hormonal agitation for an hour or so, you can’t take it any more. You go home, grab your favorite media, and what do you see there? A duck, all photoshopped and glossy. With eight legs. It could never exist in real life, but it somehow captures the very essence of duck and then turns it up to eleven. And you’re beyond caring ahout philosophical discussions regarding essence. You need a PBE. Now.

A couple of years later, you go on a date, and you like her and she likes you, and you’re about to get intimate, but there’s just one problem. She’s not an eight legged duck, and you’ve been deliberately conditioning yourself to respond sexually to artificially enhanced eight legged ducks for a couple of years. You’re Pavlov’s dog, drooling uncontrollably when you hear the dinner bell. If you’re going to retrain yourself to drool uncontrollably over your girlfriend instead, it’s going to take some work.

So if anyone should be bitching about paintings disguised as photographs of real women, it’s men. They’re the ones deliberately having their sexual triggers manipulated. We women look at these stylized images of women and sometimes compare ourselves and run out and have plastic surgery until we match, and sometimes get a vague sense of “other woman smiling, it’s safe here” or “mom’s home cooking” or other comparatively mild reactions.

It’s the men, and the lesbians that respond sexually to images of pretty girls, who are being whapped upside the head with the manipulation stick.

I’m sure the more intelligent ones are aware that artificially enhanced beautiful girls are used as marketing tools against them every waking moment, urging them to spend the rest of their lives on a futile grail quest for a female with photoshop-perfect proportions who will never age or gain weight.

But for some reason I don’t see them spinning tales of being controlled against their will by an evil conspiracy, even though there’s a pretty blatant conspiracy out there for large corporations to use pictures of hot girls to get guys to buy stuff. I mean, it’s not like it’s secret or anything. How different is that from promising them seventy virgins in the afterlife? Well, okay, most beer companies don’t expect them to strap on an explosive vest, but we’re talking about the same principal here: evil guru-like alpha male cons young impressionable males into doing stuff against their interests by luring them with promises of unattainable yet incredibly desirable hot chicks.

Could it be a plot by these old corporate executives who control the advertising department’s cash flow to hog all the hot chicks for themselves by taking out the cuter let less wealthy competition?

Well, um, yeah, seems that way, judging from the trophy wives and such.

And so, without drawing any gender battle lines, I urge all men and women who are revolted by constant exposure to manipulative corporate media that wants to fudge with your self esteem and/or sex drive to fight back. Turn off the TV and pick up a book. Ignore the checkstand magazines and read a zine online. Log into your favorite communication interface and talk to your fellow citizens, socialize outside of media-constructed stereotypes. Experiment with new technology, such as avatar interfaces that allow every woman to be as gorgeous as Barbie, so you can see what it's like to interact with other women without that huge looming shadow of "who's the fairest of them all?" getting in the way, safely shielded behind a computer, as impervious to assault as Sgt. Ripley toting a flamethrower. Make your own positive creative efforts showing the world you want to exist rather than endless reflexive critiques and dismissals of everything that draws an audience of more than ten.

And, like, if your political and/or intellectual sensibilities don’t allow you to experience the virtual world of Barbie, I’ll, like, omg, go check it out and write about it. Like so you don’t have to.

And if you haven’t looked at enough cute things, here are some rabbits running an obstacle course. Don’t worry, they’re not trying to sell you anything.