Michael Levine opened the College's Eating Disorders Awareness Week by challenging Dartmouth students to become less involved in media-inspired unrealistic ideas of physical beauty.
Levine, a professor of psychology at Kenyon College, spoke to a mostly female audience about the ways in which U.S. culture influences body image and eating disorders.
Opening with a presentation of his height, weight and body mass index, Levine offered the opportunity for audience members to judge him based on his appearance. From there he asked audience members to fantasize about the perfect body.
Levine used humor to indict popular workout methods as detrimental to positive body images. He called the Stairmaster workout machine a "stairway to nowhere" and said the popular workout video "Buns of Steel" an abnormal psychological tendency to see one's body as a thing.
"Why restrict one's self in the name of some picture in a magazine or some picture in a calendar?" Levine asked.
His speech also highlighted "preposterous" weight loss advertisements, such as a weight loss soap, a chocolate weight loss plan and a waist-away belt to bind the stomach.
Levine said the audience should question what it means to think of human bodies as in need of change, and what the cost of hating an essential part of body structure is, Levine said.
Looking out into the audience, Levine said, "You look great, you've put on fat." He commented that this is not a considered a compliment for a friend and that the word "fat" does not have a positive connotation.
Levine's speech approached the area of eating disorders not through discussing the disorders themselves, but by looking at the culture that spawns them.
He discussed how Americans "participate in a culture that encourages and supports disordered eating."
Levine said the problem of disordered eating leading and misguided body images is not exclusive to one sex and that people today have a responsibility to create a new culture that does not celebrate unrealistic ideas of beauty and healthy physical forms.
As an example of unrealistic body images, Levine presented a short video clip detailing the transformation of a fashion photo from its subject to the finished product.
The video revealed that fashion consultants clamp and tape clothes, tape, bandage and pad bodies and utilize computer software to create idealized human forms. One photo of Cindy Crawford was shown as a computer erased inches from her thighs and upper arm.
Levine said that these media images make it seem that beauty is a woman's project in life and that it is natural for women to be self-conscious. This can lead to the idea that being fat is a signal of weakness and helplessness, he said.
Levine used slides to show the "prejudice against fat people, the glorification of slenderness, and sexism and the new morality."
Using advertisements from different decades, Levine illustrated that as women strove for more civil rights, the preferred body image became more slender and tubular. He cited flappers, with their "up to the minute ways" and usage of ace bandages to bind their bodies as examples of this phenomenon.
