Costing the invisible: A review of the evidence examining the links between body image, aspirations, education and workplace confidence

Throughout the world, girls and women are interested in their looks. What has been perceived as an enjoyable part of life is however imbued with negative economic and psychological costs which are rarely calculated. International studies confirm the disturbing trend that body dissatisfaction and the perception that one is too large (even if this is not the case) undermine adolescent girls’ academic achievement. It doesn’t lead to failure, but to a diminishing in confidence and hence in performance. The marketing of beauty aimed at girls as young as five through to women in their seventies has made the idea of beauty more accessible but simultaneously, the narrowing of the ideal standard to very young women with one body type, one look, one shape, one colour, one breast or buttock size whose images are then photo-shopped to create bodies that rarely exist in real life - and are frequently unrecognizable to the model herself - has had many unfortunate consequences. The beauty ideals which saturate all media from facebook, to tumblr, to instagram, to mainstream magazines, music videos and billboards, create anxiety and shame around personal appearance.Concern about looks, size, weight, shape and attractiveness filch girls’ and women’s minds, passions and bodies. There is an urgent need for multi-level intervention to reverse the trend of poor body image and poor body confidence. The silent self-attacks are thwarting girls’ ambitions at exactly the time when society is apparently opening up to them. Programmes and social policy that can interrupt the cycle of undermining that is intensifying need to be underpinned by robust research, which can demonstrate the economic and psychological case for underpinning girls’ capability and can demonstrate the effectiveness of such strategies. The substantial economic costs of clinical eating disorders and obesity have been assessed in terms of present and future expenditure to the NHS and opportunities lost for young women. However, no costing exists of the ubiquitous breeding of body insecurity which takes form in the growth of appearance anxiety, body dysmorphias, bulimic behaviours, compulsive eating, and confidence issues, many of which are now normative and widespread among adults and young people. It is urgently required

Facts about our ecological crisis are incontrovertible: we must take action

Humans cannot continue to violate the fundamental laws of nature or science with impunity, say 94 signatories including Dr Alison Green and Molly Scott Cato MEP. Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria Jem Bendell joined others in calling for a wider debate about sustainability, featured in The Guardian. We the undersigned represent diverse academic disciplines, and the views expressed here are those of the signatories and not their organisations. While our academic perspectives and expertise may differ, we are united on one point: we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis. The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making

Fat, syn and disordered eating: The dangers and powers of excess

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Fat Studies on 8 April 2015 available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21604851.2015.1016777This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this group’s language of “Syn.” Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body which has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders which hold women’s bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating.This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this group’s language of “Syn.” Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body which has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders which hold women’s bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating

A História da Alimentação: balizas historiográficas

Os M. pretenderam traçar um quadro da História da Alimentação, não como um novo ramo epistemológico da disciplina, mas como um campo em desenvolvimento de práticas e atividades especializadas, incluindo pesquisa, formação, publicações, associações, encontros acadêmicos, etc. Um breve relato das condições em que tal campo se assentou faz-se preceder de um panorama dos estudos de alimentação e temas correia tos, em geral, segundo cinco abardagens Ia biológica, a econômica, a social, a cultural e a filosófica!, assim como da identificação das contribuições mais relevantes da Antropologia, Arqueologia, Sociologia e Geografia. A fim de comentar a multiforme e volumosa bibliografia histórica, foi ela organizada segundo critérios morfológicos. A seguir, alguns tópicos importantes mereceram tratamento à parte: a fome, o alimento e o domínio religioso, as descobertas européias e a difusão mundial de alimentos, gosto e gastronomia. O artigo se encerra com um rápido balanço crítico da historiografia brasileira sobre o tema

The construction and expression of a gendered mind and body: Contributions of a psychoanalytic approach.

Post World War II developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice have subsumed discussion about the body, the corporeal to a somatic. Bodily experiences, physical symptoms ranging from eczema to vaginismus to anorexia are seen as manifestations of psychic disturbances: the body acting as the recipient of intra-psychic conflict. This thesis proposes that psychological and physical development are more inter-related with neither the body serving the psyche or the psyche serving the body. To state that there is a relationship between somatic and psychic development is not however to conflate the two. In patients with disturbed body image or with a propensity to physical symptoms with no perceivable organic basis, an examination of the emotional ambience surrounding the physical 'dwelling in' development of the self yields interesting and clinically useful material. This thesis argues that the physical development of girls needs to be problematised much as gender conscious psychoanalysis has problematised the psychic development of girls and the construction of femininity. It looks at the importance of the maternal body image and the unconscious transmission of body insecurity from mother to daughter as well as the purposeful messages a mother passes on to a daughter about her body. It sets the necessarily ambivalent and pained ambience around the body between mothers and daughters in the context of the particular social milieu of late twentieth Western culture. The method of inquiry has been an in depth study of the physical aspects of the transference countertransference. An examination of the subjective physical states aroused in the psychotherapist in the countertransference yields extends the understanding both of body disturbances, their derivation and tenacity as well as makes links between physical and psychic development without collapsing one into the other with important clinical implications

The Economy of the Body

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, writer, and co-founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York. She lectures widely in the UK, Europe, and North America, has written for several magazines and newspapers, and has provided consultation advice for organisations from the Government and the NHS (National Health Service) to the World Bank. She was a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Her other books include Hunger Strike, What’s Really Going on Here?, Towards Emotional Literacy, On Eating, The Impossibility of Sex, Bodies, Fifty Shades of Feminism (co-editor) and In Therapy (based on her BBC Radio 4 series).Susie Orbach, ‘The Economy of the Body’, lecture presented at the symposium Dis-Ordered Eating: Temporality, Normativity, Representability, ICI Berlin, 27 April 2018 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e180427-1

Shame Chorus

Shame Chorus, is a new project developed in association with the Freud Museum London which takes as its starting point Sigmund Freud’s famous ‘talking cure’ conceived to uncover hidden, repressed and unconscious desires. Shame Chorus is a collaboration with world-renowned psychoanalyst and cultural critic Susie Orbach, and the London Gay Men’s Chorus. In a series of psychoanalytic interviews, Susie Orbach invited members of the Chorus to recall memories of feeling shamed - events that may have, in part, shaped their feelings about themselves and their sexuality. Taking these recorded and anonymous interviews as their inspiration, established and emerging composers from a range of music genres have turned these memories into original songs and choral works. The London Gay Men’s Chorus will sing these new works in a compelling live concert event that is a collective act of catharsis, community, celebration and liberation