What You See Affects You

I frequent blogs that are about fashion and body image. That leads to an inevitable post at some point about the manipulation of images, and how there are so damn many skinny models, of a body type that is impossible for a large chunk, far larger than 50%. You then get a large amount of commenters that say that they are able to sort out these images and ignore them.

A study conducted by Rebecca Glauert, Gillian Rhodes, Sue Byrne, Bernhard Fink and Karl Grammer titled "Body Dissatisfaction and the Effects of Perceptual Exposure to Body Norms and Ideals" explores this in an indirect way. In the study they presented images of women who range in body sizes from a BMI of 12-30. They found that 7 seconds of exposure to 20 images. Think about this, that means they were exposed to these images for 2 minutes, just 2 minutes. It shifted their perceptions of what is normal and what is ideal by at least one BMI point in either direction. They also related body satisfaction scores to what the women held as their ideals and found that the women who were most affected by the thin images have the biggest disparity between their considered ideal body and their own body.

Just seeing images of thin women shifts your ideas of what a normal body is and an ideal body smaller. This does not happen consciously. It shifts those norms and ideals down on both an explicit level, what we are saying, but even implicitly, where we look. When asked the same question we'll look to skinnier images, not even considering the same body as before.

So yes, seeing all those images does affect you. It affects you on a level far deeper than you could imagine. There is no study that I know of that examines the long-term effects of these things, but truthfully, it'd be impossible to do so. When the participants go back out into the real world they're inundated with the thin images again and it either keeps the effects of the thin images or reverses the works of the larger images.