What is internalization, why is it so important to consider in the context of beauty norms, and how can girls and women be protected from its negative effects?
Girls and women learn about beauty standards from their parents, peers, and objectified, unrealistic images of women in the media. But not everyone who is surrounded by these influences takes them fully to heart. Feminist psychologists, among others, think that if enough women, and men, ignore these beauty norms, the norms themselves will start to change. However, some women—particularly White, wealthy, able-bodied, thin, cisgender women—benefit from beauty norms. Many girls and women are likely to internalize them and pressure themselves to conform. Internalization is the process of taking on the standards and norms of dominant society as one’s own and then striving to meet those standards (Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1999). This is believed to be a key risk factor for body dissatisfaction and disordered eating (Thompson & Stice, 2001).
Through a process of social comparison (Festinger, 1954), women and girls may check their appearance against these standards, as well as against the actual appearance of others. Exposure to advertisements featuring the thin ideal has been related to engagement in social comparison, which, in turn, was related to body dissatisfaction and depression (Bessenoff, 2006). This was especially the case for women who felt their bodies didn’t meet the thin ideal. These days, lots of social comparison happens on social media. For example, women who use Facebook have been found to compare their appearance to others, and doing so was related to body image concerns (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2015). In a qualitative study about experiences on Instagram, a girl from Singapore described her experiences this way: “If you’ve never gone out to see the world, you’ll probably love yourself, because you don’t look at others. But when you look at social media, you start comparing. You start comparing yourself to other girls, and you’ll start to wonder why you’re not looking like them” (Chua & Chang, 2016, p. 194).
try it for yourself
Do you find yourself participating in social comparison when you use social media such as Instagram? How does that make you feel about yourself and your body? Whether or not you’ve noticed negative effects of social media in your own life, try to go an entire day (or even a week) without using social media. How easy or difficult was it to do? How did it make you feel? Did it change the way you thought about yourself during that time?
Some women do manage to resist social comparison and the internalization of appearance norms. For example, researchers have found lesbian women to be more satisfied with their bodies than heterosexual women (Morrison, Morrison, & Sager, 2004) and Black women more likely to have higher body satisfaction than White women (Grabe & Hyde, 2006). One explanation may be that these groups of women have internalized a different set of norms about beauty—ones that they’re better able to achieve. For example, Black women have been found to be less likely to internalize traditional beauty norms, particularly the thin ideal (Capodilupo, 2015; Evans & McConnell, 2003). The same has been found with lesbians (Beren, Hayden, Wilfley, & Striegel-Moore, 1997; Bergeron & Senn, 1998). In a study with Latinx women who either immigrated to or were born in the United States, those who immigrated endorsed a larger ideal body than those who were born here, indicating that they may have internalized a different beauty norm (Lopez, Blix, & Blix, 1995).
spotlight on . . .
Health at Every Size
Health at Every Size (HAES) is a grassroots movement opposing fat oppression and fat stigma (Burgard, 2009). It focuses on the importance of healthy practices and self-acceptance rather than body size, shape, or weight. The premise is that eating well and being active are key to a healthy lifestyle, and these are things that someone of any size can do.
HAES focuses on the fact that weight is not the only, or even the most useful, indicator of health. While some studies have found that a higher weight is associated with negative health outcomes, the correlations aren’t large, and data rarely show whether weight loss actually changes health outcomes (Bacon, 2008; Kasardo & McHugh, 2015). Moreover, other data show that people classified as overweight or moderately obese live at least as long as, and often longer than, people classified as being normal weight (Bacon & Aphramor, 2011). Given this, more people are advocating for fat/size acceptance, and some seek a shift in public health policy toward a HAES perspective (Bombak, 2014).
Daily goals reflecting the HAES perspective (Bacon, 2008) include
How often do you meet these goals? How might adopting a HAES perspective change your relationship with your body?
It’s also been suggested that feminist women, as compared to non-feminist women, are less likely to accept traditional beauty norms (Brown, 1987), and research has shown some support for this. For example, one study with a predominantly White sample found that identifying as a feminist was related to rejection of the norm of thinness (Hurt et al., 2007). In another study with a majority White sample, researchers showed that Instagram use was unrelated to engaging in body surveillance for women who scored high on a measure of feminist attitudes (Feltman & Szymanski, 2017). However, greater Instagram use predicted greater body surveillance for women with low and moderate levels of feminist attitudes. At the same time, other research indicated that feminist women experience conflict because they recognize that they’ve internalized beauty norms (Rubin, Nemeroff, & Russo, 2004). In other words, feminists are more likely to be aware of the unrealistic nature of these norms as well as the negative influence of internalizing them, and feminists want to be immune to them. However, they see the benefits that society gives to those who are beautiful. As a result, many feminists struggle because they find themselves caring about beauty but feeling they should be able to rise above it.
Various media literacy programs are targeting adolescent girls to counteract the media’s negative influences. These programs teach girls to critique media representations because, as discussed above, they reflect only a small percentage of the population and are often manipulated. Research has shown that media literacy programs can lead to increased body satisfaction among both adolescent girls (Wilksch, Tiggemann, & Wade, 2006; Wilksch & Wade, 2009) and college-age women (Yamamiya et al., 2005). Another effective approach has involved asking young women to make statements against the thin ideal (e.g., by writing an essay or role-playing discouraging a peer from focusing on the thin ideal; Becker et al., 2010; Ciao, Latner, Brown, Ebneter, & Becker, 2015). In this approach, because the young women have to make statements that are inconsistent with their own internalization of the thin ideal, they must change either their statements or their feelings about the thin ideal. Because the statements are already out in the world and can’t be undone, the young women change their attitudes. However, long-term follow-ups of these programs have not yet been undertaken, so researchers don’t know how long the effects of these interventions last. More research on this topic is needed.