March 28, 2025 • 55 mins
Why do so many girls and women feel like they’re never “enough” when it comes to their appearance? In this powerful episode, Dr. Renee Engeln, author of Beauty Sick, joins Justin Coulson to explore the deep-rooted cultural obsession with beauty that shapes how girls and women see themselves. From five-year-olds already worrying about dieting to teens tying their self-worth to their looks, we discuss how self-objectification, social media, and unrealistic beauty standards impact mental health and self-esteem—and, more importantly, how we can help the next generation break free from beauty sickness.
KEY POINTS:
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How self-objectification starts young—why even five-year-olds worry about their bodies.
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The role of social media in reinforcing beauty standards and distorting self-worth.
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Why puberty makes body image issues worse for girls while often benefiting boys.
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The pressures of perfection on women—from “mum jeans” to Botox and beyond.
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The hidden costs of beauty obsession—lost time, lost opportunities, and lifelong insecurity.
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How parents unintentionally reinforce body image struggles (and how to change that).
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The power of focusing on what bodies can do, rather than how they look.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
"We may no longer play dress-ups and pose in front of the mirror like young girls do, but I worry that’s only because we’ve internalised that mirror—we never actually left it behind." – Dr. Renee Engeln
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
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Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women by Dr. Renee Engeln
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The End of Average by Todd Rose
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Beauty Sick Website—More on Dr. Engeln’s research
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Happy Families Website—Parenting resources
- Enough: A Session for Young Girls [Webinar]
- The Miss-Connection Summit [On sale!]
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:
- Create an “appearance-free” zone at home—focus conversations on interests, achievements, and values, not looks.
- Model self-acceptance—avoid negative self-talk about your own body in front of your kids.
- Encourage body functionality—celebrate what bodies can do, like running, dancing, creating, and learning.
- Audit social media—help your child follow diverse, inspiring accounts rather than beauty-focused ones.
- Talk about the beauty industry’s influence—help kids see how companies profit from insecurities.
- Give your teen a cause—channel their energy into fighting beauty standards, rather than succumbing to them.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello. My name is doctor Justin Coulson, dad to six daughters,
author of six books about raising happy families, and when
I began researching for my book Misconnection, it became pretty clear,
very quickly that body image was an enormous issue between
and teen girls. In fact, for women generally. The anxiety
(00:26):
the body image causes our daughters is a byproduct of
the world we live in, where women are judged on
their appearance in a way that men simply don't experience. Well,
my guest today is doctor Renee Engeln. She's the author
of one of my favorite books, Beauty Sick, How the
cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. Doctor Engeln
(00:49):
is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois,
where she directs the Body and Media Lab. Renee's work
has been published in numerous academic journals, and she's a
regular contributor to The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune,
and the Huffington Post. Her ted X talk from the
University of Connecticut has racked up almost seven hundred thousand
views on YouTube. So when you finish this podcast, look
(01:11):
up that one as well. It's so worth watching and
make sure you grab a copy of Beauty Sick, How
the cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. It's
a fabulous book when it comes to psychology and how
girls and women view their physical appearance. I don't think
that there's anyone more qualified than Professor Renee Engeln. I
began by asking her what work in family life looks
(01:32):
like for her.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Well, let's see, I'm a psychologist, I'm a buddy image researcher,
and I'm a professor at Northwestern University, which is in Evanston, Illinois,
just just north of Chicago, Illinois. And what else am I?
I'm an aunt to a wonderful niece and nephew who
came along kind of leader in my life, and that
has been an absolute joy.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
There four and almost two.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Oh so they're really little. They're little.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah, they're little.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
And I've never I have to say this is going
to be a horrible thing to say on a podcast
focused on parenting, but I've never really liked babies. I
find them kind of terrifying and sticky, and they don't
hold their heads up, and they've always been scary. And
when I knew my brother was you know, he and
his wife were having children, I thought, what if I
don't love them?
Speaker 3 (02:22):
But no I do.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I love them more than I thought it was possible
to love. So it's been full of joy and also
just interesting for me to learn how to connect with
these these little people that have been such a good
part of my life.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, I'm totally with you on the floppy neck thing that, Yeah,
that really bothers me. But for some reason, especially when
they you're blood. I mean babies generally, you know, you
see them in, they out, but when they blood, when
they related to you, there's something that happens, is there.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Everyone said it would feel different, and I didn't believe them,
but yeah, there's something powerful there that they're an extension
of my brother, my love so much and and you.
I've always been teased like I like tweens and teenagers.
So about the time that children really start to drive
their parents crazy, I'm always like, send them to me.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I got them, Like, I really like that.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I like their anger and their intensity and all that.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
So you can say that. You can say that because
you're not the mum, right, The mums are like, ah,
that'll be the cool artie, this will be fun.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah, send them to me. I have a number of
friends who say, will you talk to my daughter?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
And I'm like, oh, yeah, Sana, Yeah, game on, tut
talk about how terrible you are.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Well, well, Renee, We're going to cover in this conversation
body image because that's your area, this is your absolute fascination,
and we're going to talk about how to fix the
youngest children right through to tweens, teens, and even adults.
The mums and dads who are participating in this conversation
and listen to what we have to say. So a
(03:57):
little over a year ago, I read a book that
it just absolutely captured me. I wrote it on my list.
I keep a spreadsheet of all the books that I
read each year. I'm a little bit. It's just because
my bookshelf's kind of full of books, and sometimes I
forget which ones that I loved and which ones I
didn't or what was in them. And so I've got
this spreadsheet where I title author, what did I give
(04:19):
it out of five, and a bit of a spiel
about how I enjoyed the book. I'm so glad you
think that's funny.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
So anyway, my dear, I'm getting a live book review,
and the nerdiest way, ever, I like it.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
This is who I am. Your book was a five
star book. It was pretty much my book of the year.
I think that one and a book by Todd Rose
from Harvard called The End of Average Was that were
my two books of I think it was twenty eighteen.
I just loved Beauty Sick, which is the name of
your book, Beauty Sick, and I gained a sense of
(04:50):
perspective that I just can't describe. So I'm a male,
I've never had the kinds of questions about my body
that you describe women experiencing. Now I haven't told you
something about me as well, and that is that my wife,
Kylie and I are the parents of six daughters.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Oh what are their age rangers?
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Our eldest has moved out, she's married, she's in her
early twenties, and then we've got one who is finishing
her senior year of high school. She's about to be eighteen.
We've got one who's sixteen in grade ten, and then
we've got one in grade seven, one in grade five,
and our baby is in her first year of school.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
So all girls. So as I was reading your book,
I saw things in a new light. I just didn't
know that females felt the way you described when it
comes to their bodies and the pressure that they feel
around their bodies. Even with my wife, I never saw that. Now.
What's really interesting about that is when I first went
on a date with her, I think it was pretty
(05:50):
much our first proper date. We walked into a chicken
and chip shop. You don't really have them so much
in the United States. I've found where you buy the
barbecued chicken and a whole lot of hot you call
them fry, we call them chips. We've got these places everywhere.
We call them things like charcoal chicken. And so you
go in and you order your chicken, your chips, and
your salad or your chicken fries and salad, and it's
all really fresh, and go out and sit on the
(06:13):
beach and eat it or whatever it might be. So
I've walked in and I've ordered a chicken and a
couple of dollars worth of chips, and then I looked
at Kylie and I said, what do you got to order?
And she thought that was funny because she thought I
was going to share my chicken and chips with her,
and I was like, no, no, no, I'm eating the chicken
and the chips. What do you go to order? And
she said, for the first time in her life, she
was able to relax on a date because she could
(06:34):
see that I didn't care what she ate, because she
was never going to be able to eat even close
to what I ate. In fact, she said, it was
the first time she'd been on a date where she
ate more than a little bit of salad.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I'll just have a salad, right.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So many women they go home hungry and then they
eat in private afterwards.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And your book kind of opened up this world of
what it must be like to be female and to
be worried about body all the time. Now, as it happened,
as I was reading your book, I was writing a
book about teen girls, and it influenced the questions that
I asked them in the way that I was able
to write about their answers. And I found it just
so helpful and so extraordinary. But in the introduction of
your book, you state, and I quote, so many young
(07:12):
women today are strikingly bold in important areas of their lives,
but still crumble in front of the mirror. They fight
so hard to be treated with respect, but seem at
least at times, to be willing to trade it all
in an instant if they could only remake their physical appearance.
And then you give an answer to the question of
why that is, And this is an image for one
(07:36):
of a better word, or maybe it's the perfect word
that really sticks throughout the entire book. You say, quote,
we may no longer play dress ups and pose in
front of the mirror the way young girls do. But
I worry that's only because we've internalized that mirror, we
never actually left it behind. I mean, that is so powerful.
Can you talk about this idea that the mirror is
(07:57):
on the inside.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
This is a This is a big paradox that I
think a lot of people are not sure how to
wrestle with because in many ways, we've been sold a
bill of goods.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
We've got these generations of young women who are like,
I can do anything and I can be anything.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And what we've seen is a co optation of that
sense of power to sell them on beauty products and
diet plans and tutorials and this.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
World that is completely obsessed with how they look.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And we've sold it as empowering, right, which is which
is insane and what happens is that we've gone from
having a culture that's always looking at women, that's always
commenting on how they look. We've gone from that, from
that coming from the outside to a point where we've
internalized it and we do that to ourselves. So I
try to stay away from academic jargon, but the there's
(08:52):
a term that I always need to use, even though
it's jargon, which is self objectification.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
So the idea is if the world treats you like
an object long enough and with enough intensity that eventually
you see yourself that way. Right, You don't need to
be looking in the mirror because it's in your head,
and so you're always monitoring how you look. You're always aware.
It's distracting. It's distressing, right. It crops up in inopportune times.
(09:20):
It keeps you from living the life that's more consistent
with your values. So that's what I mean when I
say beauty sick, is that you've got that mirror stuck
in your head and it's causing you trouble and it's
not your fault. That's always the thing I want to say.
This is not something wrong with individual girls and women.
(09:40):
It's something wrong with our culture.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Well, let's start with the culture. In fact, no, we
might come to the cultural stuff in just a few seconds.
I want to talk about this beauty sickness. First of all,
let's talk about young children, young girls, because when I
was reading in Beauty sick you set the stage by
starting with the youngest about children. Let's say around age five,
and you cite some research that talks about how five
(10:05):
year olds feel about their bodies. Five year old girls.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
There's a pretty large survey found that about thirty five
percent of five year old girls are already saying that
they at least sometimes engage in dietary restraint. Now, I
want to be clear that five year olds don't understand
what dieting actually is, right, So when a five year
old tells you that she's dieting, what she's telling you
is that she's already learned that this is what women do, right,
(10:32):
that this is part of being a grown up, this
is something you think about. All of these young girls
are already telling us close to third saying that they're
comparing their bodies to women and girls they see in
cartoons and movies and television programs. So they're at this
really young age where they're just learning to use their bodies.
(10:53):
I'm not a developmental psychologist by training. I focus mostly
on teenagers and adults. I don't I'm not super expert
about young children. So when I started writing this book,
I actually just did some basic research on the developmental
stages for children. And one of the things that really
threw me and I read about this in the book
is I asked, well, okay, well, what are five year
olds supposed to be doing? Like what marks where a
(11:13):
five year old is? And one of the things that
was listed was learning how to properly use utensils a
spoon and fork, And I thought, these are kids that
don't even necessarily know how to use a fork particularly well,
and they're already worried about dieting, hasn't even gotten great
at getting the food into their mouth yet, and they're
already trying to keep it out.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
It's it's heartbreaking, right.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
It suggests that what's happening is that a lot of
families are transmitting values to their young daughters that they
don't mean to transmit.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
I think that's a lot of what's happening.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, and I appreciate what you've said there at the end,
that parents will intentioned and they don't even know very
often that these values are being passed on to the
next generation from that tiny, tiny age. I wonder how
much of it is children actually being unhappy with their
bodies versus just doing what they're seeing happen in the
environ Mum's always talking about the diet or Dad's always
(12:11):
talking about the diet, and so therefore I'm supposed to
be on a diet. I don't even know what a
diet is, but I remember when my little ones, and
in fact, I've got some video footage of my sisters.
I've got twin sisters who are a few years younger
than me, and I've got some really great footage of
them at about the age of four or five, and
they're running around the swimming pool. And the way I
describe it is they're running around. They're not wearing any
(12:33):
tops because they're only four or five, you know, they're little.
They've got their little bikini bottoms on or the little
you know, their little swimwear bottoms on, and they've got
what I would only describe as sticky addy tummies, because
you know how little kids, they've got the sticky addy
tummy and they're completely uninterested in what they look because
they look like because they're so absorbed in the moment.
(12:55):
They're so caught up in it, and I kind of think,
isn't that what it's supposed to be?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah, it's I mean, my four year old niece loves
to show me. We talk only on FaceTime now because
we are still locked down due to COVID, but she
loves to lift up her shirt show me her stomach,
right and kind of like grab it and move it around.
And I get kind of sad already for the day that.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
She's ashamed of her stomach.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
And you might think, oh, that day won't necessarily come,
and I think, yeah, it will, right, We haven't.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
We haven't really found a way to prevent that for
our girls. Yet.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
It may not be all the time, and it may
that be that it may not be that bad, but
you can bet there's a really good shot that she's
going to become a tween, probably maybe not until a teen,
who doesn't like her stomach anymore. And so that joy
she has in her body now, I wish she could
keep it longer. I think it's it's it's amazing. It's
(13:52):
important too. In learning how to use your body without fear,
right and in learning how to really inhabit your body
as a doing thing instead of as an object. But
even parents who meanwhile are already tamping this down in
young girls that sort of bodily joy so partially with comments,
(14:13):
right when we say things like sit like a lady.
Partially And this is my big beef lately, by dressing
girls and clothing that doesn't allow them to move. If
this is a thing parents do, and I don't think
it's it's it comes from poor intensions at all, right,
But there's this temptation to put girls in in dresses
and tights and things that make it really hard to
(14:33):
crawl and jump. Are things that where you're more likely
to tell them to be careful, not to get dirty,
to sit nicely.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Just on that there's a there's a movement increasing in Australia.
So we, unlike America, all of our schools, almost all
of our schools insist that children wear a school uniform
to school. But what typically happens is the boys wearing
a shirt and shorts. The girls will in many cases
be wearing a dress, or they'll be wearing a skirt,
(15:01):
or they'll be wearing some item of clothing that makes
movement a little bit more restrictive if they want to
be I feel uncomfortable even saying the word now that
we're having this conversation, I was going to say, if
they want to be more boisterous, but let's change that too.
If they want to be more active, it's very, very
challenging for them to do that in a way that
would conserve a sense of modesty, because they're wearing dresses
(15:23):
and they don't want to be flashing their undies all
the backside to everybody. And so we've had this conversation
building in Australia over the last year two, maybe even
three years, where schools are now starting to recognize that
perhaps it's okay for girls to wear whatever they want,
including comfortable shorts, so long as it's within the school
uniform set up like this.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And why wouldn't it be okay the fact that we
have to have that.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Conversation, But so many are still saying, though, it's not okay.
This is our uniform and this is how we want
our girls to be. We want them to be demure
and lady like. Can you be lady like and wear shorts?
That's my question. I mean, I think you can.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
What does lady like me?
Speaker 2 (16:02):
And I mean ladylike means like a lady, And there
are all kinds of ladies out there, So I find
I find that whole phrase really problematic because what you're
teaching your girls when you say that is stay small, right,
don't take up space, don't move, don't don't learn to
use your body, don't stretch it, don't trust it. Instead,
(16:24):
from the beginning, think of your body in terms of
how it looks to other people. Does it look appropriate,
does it look modest? If you want them to look modest,
then put them in shorts so they can move however
they want. Right, And when you look at infants, I
guess when they're a little older they start to crawl.
It's actually quite hard for a lot of babies to
crawl in skirts and dresses. Right, And even that is
(16:46):
something we don't think about. I mean, just imagine it.
Imagine now trying to crawl in a dress versus pair
pants or pair of shorts.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
So are how we dress girls in such a way
that requires constant and monitoring. It has a real impact
on how they grow up to feel about their bodies.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I want to come back to you your bodies for
other people.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go back to the conversation
about children. Okay, So we started with five year olds
and how a third of them or just over a
third of them females. I'm guessing it wasn't the males
that wanted to change their bodies, by the way, it
was just the females that we're talking about the diet.
What happens as they get older? Can you talk me
through the next sort of ten to twelve years from
age five through to age seventeen eighteen.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
So I'd say there's two big changes, right that happen.
One is the introduction to social media. Now, when that
happens depends on the kind of choices parents make and
what's going on with peers and things like that. But
it's often tweens we're looking at who are starting to
get into social media.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Which adds this additional mirror.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Right, you had the mirror in your head, and now
you have the mirror on your phone where you're taking
selfies and you're looking at yourself constantly, and you're editing them,
and you're scrolling through hundreds thousands of images a day
of other people, right, So that's just really turning up
the focus on appearance. So that's the first sort of
challenge that girls are running into at this age. And
(18:14):
then puberty hits, right, and the research around puberty is
so clear that it tends to make boys like their
bodies more right, It brings boys bodies more in line
with the ideal, tends to make them more muscular, broad
on their shoulders, get taller, things like that. But with girls,
because puberty tends to increase the amount of body fat
you have. Despite the fact that puberty is a sign
(18:36):
of them physically becoming adult women, it actually is moving
them farther from the body ideal for women. And there's
something really twisted and wrong about that. But this is
the time that we see a lot of girls start
to have very very significant struggles with body image, some
of which can turn.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Into eating disorders at this age.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
And I think one of the most important findings for
me that's come out of the clinical psychology literature is
it's a study that was trying to understand why it
is that we see the gender gap and depression show
up in this sort of early adolescent place. You know,
until that point, both girls and boys get depressed about
(19:17):
the same rates, but once the girls get a little older,
it just starts to go up and up. Right, we
see this big gap, and there's pretty good evidence now
that part of where that gap comes from is girls worried.
Girls worries about their bodies, right, how their bodies look
to other people, how their faces look to other people.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
Their appearance.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
So it's really this time when body image concerns that
could have been a distraction can turn into something much bigger,
and I think it's something to really be on the
lookout for as parents.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
The second most worried about issue in my study of girls,
and now this was not a university study. It was
a survey with a handful of interviews and some focus
groups with girls from my book Misconnection. Number one was
I wonder if you can guess what do you think
teenage girls? Number one issue was.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
I'm a little biased, but right, my sense is that
one of the biggest issues is.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Body and so body image was number two.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
So besides that, I would say relationships and.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Parenting, relationships with friends It was yeah, yeah, I'm worried
about my friends and how they see me in whether
I've got any. And what was fascinating about that was
so many of them linked their relationships with friends to
issues with appearance or you know, they wanted to be popular,
but to be popular, they had to be hot. You're like,
there's this explicit, unmissible link when you look at the
(20:40):
when you look at the comments from girls, it's it's
an undeniable link for so many of them that they
literally tie their value as a human being to their
physical appearance. And if I look good, then I'm a
valuable person. But if I don't look good, I'm worthless,
I'm nothing, and nobody will like me.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
It would be incredibly hard for them to tie their
value to their appearance because that's what every cultural message
they get tells them to do. Right, that's what they've
been sold since they were young. Right, that their prettiness
and then as they get older, their sex appeal. Right,
that that is their source of worth. That that will
be the ticket to success in life. It will be
(21:19):
the ticket to a happy relationship, to good peer experiences. Right,
this is a lesson that we learn over and over again.
It's really hard not to internalize that.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And there's there's that halo effect where I mean there's
so much research on this. People who are attractive get
a on average, an easier ride in life. They're more
likely to escape speeding tickets when they get pulled over
by the police, They're more likely to be marked better
in an exam, they get a better ride. There's so
many studies in so many different contexts now that highlight
(21:54):
that physical appearance actually makes life easier.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I would never underestimate the sort of the goods you
get in exchange for being sort of consistent with our
culture's beauty ideals.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Right, you get a lot from that.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
It's not all good, though, right You also get assumptions
that you're arrogant or that you're dumb sometimes right, that
you can't be smart and pretty.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
And I've also talked to a lot of.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Young women who felt like, yeah, it was great to
be identified as pretty or beautiful, but over time you
start to wonder if that's not all you are. And
then I talk to women who are heading into their
thirties and forties who are terrified because they are well
aware of the power they got from being beautiful, and
they're also aware that it has an expiration date on it,
(22:43):
and they head into middle age thinking what's left? Right,
once this goes, what's left?
Speaker 1 (22:51):
You should have quote from your grandpa.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Oh yes, I always worry about this because I don't
know if he made this up or if he got
it somewhere.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
I couldn't find it online. But he always used to
tell me. He called me Nane, and he would say, Nana,
never be too proud of your youth or your beauty.
You did nothing to earn them, and you can do
nothing to keep them.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
And I know it sounds sort of brutal, but I
never experienced it that way, right, what I as a
child growing up like that was his way of telling
us that, hey, this this this game was rigged. Right.
You might have gotten some privileges. You might have them now,
you're not going to have them forever, and you didn't
deserve them, you didn't earn them. Right, Be proud of
the things that you work for and build foundations for
(23:35):
your life that you can keep.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Right. That's I think the most important lesson there.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
It's a little bit of tough love advance. But it's good.
I mean, it's really good. What's driving this though? So
can we point the finger any one main culprit?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So I don't think so you know, I'm not I'm
not interested in sort of bashing any one target.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Here.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
What I see is this collection of forces.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
You know, it's create this toxic stew that girls and
women are swimming around in.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
And part of those forces we help a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Right when we buy into the diet industry and the
beauty industry, Right when we follow people on Instagram who
do nothing but show us.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
How beautiful they are. Right, would we encourage this kind
of thing? Sometimes?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Oh, you know what you've just reminded me. I saw
a picture of a dinner plate set for sale in
a store. I saw it was I couldn't believe what
I was reading on the plate. There are three circles. Okay,
so there's like an inner circle drawn on the plate.
Then there's a circle halfway along the plate, and then
there's a circle towards the outer rim of the plate.
And there was a name for each circle. The inner
circle which was you know, it was representative of the
(24:43):
smallest portion size you might put on that plate. The
inner circle said skinny jeans, the middle one said favorite jeans.
And then the largest circle, which you know, was out
near the rim taking up the whole plate, said mum jeans.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Oh, oh, what would way we treat mothers the way
we treat mothers?
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Right?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I watched you know, since we've been sort of in
lockdown here, I've been watching maybe a little more Netflix
than I should.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
And I stumbled across this show that i've It's called
The Baker and the Beauty.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
It was just this little like families sitcom, and there's
a young woman in it who has this line because
she's pressuring her boyfriend to get married, and she said,
I'm a woman.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
This is what we do.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
We diet, we get married, we have children, and then
we diet again. And I was just oh, So there
was just a silly little show, right, But there was
something about that line. It's like, Yeah, for a lot
of women, that's their life, right. You become a mom
and then you diet because you're allowed to be a mom,
but you're not.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Allowed to look like a mom.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Right.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
This this pressure to have the body of a twenty
year old for the rest of your.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Life, It's it's insane, right, It's it's a pressure that
has gotten absolutely worse over the years. There's not great
data on it, but I've talked to a lot of
practitioners who treat women with eating disorders, and they said
they're seeing something kind of unusual, which is like the
onset of anorexia is showing up in the thirties and forties,
(26:09):
just not something you typically see. Anorexia can last a
very long time, but it tends to start much earlier
than that.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
And some of that is tied to.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
The sense that that women are feeling this pressure to
do everything they can, right to not look like someone
who would wear mom jeans, right to have the skinny
jeans forever, to get botox, to get fillers, to color
your hair, to go to ten workout classes a week,
to constantly watch what you eat.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It's brutal. It's brutal.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
There's got to be more to life than diet. Do
some things and then diet again. Right, They're just has
to be.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, I'm so curious. I know that I kind of
interrupted you when I asked that initial question of what's
creating it? What is the culprit? And now you say,
there's no one thing. There's this toxic stew. But I
wonder if we could actually name them. So we've got
we've got dinner plates, the rainforce, this and We've always
think of the media and the social media, and but
but are they more insidious things as well? Are there
(27:05):
things that we don't even know.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
That it Well, there's the beauty industry and the diet industry,
which are billions of dollars a year. They're incredibly powerful,
and they only make money if you feel unattractive, right there.
These are products like that you'll only keep buying if they.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Don't work, right. The power of.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
These industries to capitalize on women's vulnerability is really breathtaking.
I can't tell you how many smart, educated with it
women will still say things like I swear for just
a moment, I thought that mascara was going to change
my life, right, Like, you just really get sold this
bill of goods, that this next thing is going to
(27:47):
make it all okay, right, and that the only way
you're ever going to feel like enough is if you
can look like a fitness model or look like that
influencer on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
It's it's it's hard to see several.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Generations of women now never feeling like they're going to
be enough.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
That's a really hard thing for me to look at,
and it's really hard for me when I find out
that even some grown women who are my heroes still
feel that way. Right, that's a really hard thing to hear.
I have people ask all the time, like, where did
you find all these women with body image issues to
talk to you for your book? And I was like,
I don't understand the question, right, I just found women.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
I didn't look for women with body issues. Just found women,
and I talked to them about their bodies. It's all
you need to do.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
So young girls, tween girls, teen girls, young women, moms,
adult women, retirees. I'm guessing that this is just a
pervisive thing. And again, just to emphasize, it's not a
man thing. In fact, let me read something. I wish
(29:04):
I could read your entire book to you so that
I could take now tell me about this now, but
let me just read this. This was in a chapter
that you titled just Like a Woman, and I've underlined
Neliber whole chapter. But I just want to read this
bit to you. You said, think about it in this way.
If I told you that someone in the United States
(29:24):
was about to go under the knife in the hopes
of reshaping their appearance, you could bet it was a
woman and be correct. Around ninety percent of the time. Internationally,
eighty five to ninety percent of surgical and non surgical
cosmetic procedures are performed on women. If you heard that
a young person was suffering from anorexia or bolimia, I
guess it was a young woman. You'd be right nine
times out of ten. Eating disorders and plastic surgery of
(29:45):
both complex issues. But we can't ignore gender gaps like these.
They forced us to acknowledge that men's and women's experience
in this culture are vastly different in important ways. Men
and women are living systematically different lives when it comes
to beauty sickness. Read a couple more lines from this
particular area. I know it's probably boring to you because
you wrote it, but it just it's so compelling. Women
(30:07):
talk about how they look more than men do. They
think about how they look more than men do, and
they're more likely than men to engage in behaviors to
alter or improve their appearance. There's a reason no one
in this culture would be surprised to overhear a woman
saying I feel so fat and ugly. Today, we accept
this type of unhappiness as part of being a woman.
(30:28):
Over thirty years ago, researchers coined the phrase normative discontent
to describe the phenomenon. The term suggests that we've gotten
to a place where it's considered normal for girls or
women to be deeply disappointed when they look in the mirror.
It's the girl version of boys will be boys.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
Hey, this is the first question I always get. Right,
if I go speak.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
To any kind of group about this topic, Almost always
the first question I get is what about men?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
What about boys? And So I always want to be
clear that boys and men.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Can absolutely have these struggles too, Right, they can happen
to any gender, But that doesn't mean that boys and
girls and men and women are living in the same
world when it comes.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
To these issues.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
So it's different for me.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yes, yes, it can happen.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And I also I'm not arguing that it's easy to
be a man either, Right. I think there are pressures
that hit men differentially. So, for example, the pressure to
make a lot of money, to be powerful, to have
high status. Right, that is a pressure, a burden that
men bear much more than women do.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I think in some ways women are given more freedom
in those respects. But I don't think we can argue
that that men and women are facing the same reality
when it comes to a parent's focus and so. But
part of the issue is I study women and girls.
That's what I do, right, so that that is my focus.
There are people who focus on body image and men
(31:55):
and boys who are doing excellent work. So I don't
mean to imply that that's not important and not out there.
But what fascinates me is as a culture, this set
of rules that women are just by and large expected
to follow without question, that we would never ask men
to follow. Can you imagine if we ask men to
wear high heels or something equally uncomfortable and you know,
(32:19):
inefficient when it came to walking.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Or even to remove the hair from their bodies.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, And people say, well some men wax, and I
say absolutely right. But if you look at waxing salons,
they'll say here's our waxing menu, and then there'll be
a little part that says men's services, right, So they're
even telling you there there's a differentiation there. It's not
the norm for men the way it is for women,
at least not for straight guys, right. I do think
(32:46):
that sexual minority men face a greater degree of pressure
on this front. But it's everywhere built into our culture, right.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
You hear it from the minute we start talking about infants,
when we say such a pretty girl, such a pretty girl.
Oh look at the strong boy.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Right. It starts very young that we think about women's bodies,
about their physicality as existing to be looked at, right,
instead of as existing to do things.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
You know, I just remembered the story one of the
guys that is a TV host for one of our
major breakfast programs nationwide around Australia. His name is Karl Stefanovic,
and a few years ago there was a big media
storm when he stepped forward and said, guess what, I
haven't changed my suit for a year. I've worn the
(33:36):
same suit and tie every single day on the television
for an entire year, and nobody's noticed. I've not received
one single email. I've not received one single comment on
social media. Nobody's said a word about the fact that
I've been wearing exactly the same suit and tie and
the white shirt for a year. But he stepped out
(33:58):
and said it that day, because that's same day his
co host, who at the time was a lady, called
Lisa Wilkinson. That day, she had been absolutely slammed with
hundreds of comments because people didn't like the clothing that
she wore on the television that day. And this was
a this was a regular occurrence. This happens all the time.
Because I'm on the TV. I'm following a bunch of
Instagram accounts for the TV hosts that I'm interviewed by
(34:21):
or that I work with from time to time, and
whenever they post any pictures of them, the threads are
full of comment after comment after comment of how beautiful
they are. Now, they're not posting anything about their looks,
they're not trying to look snazzy. They're simply saying I'm
here doing this gig, or I'm at home with the kids,
or here's what I cooked for dinner. And nevertheless, all
the comments are about their physical appearance. It's almost like
(34:42):
people feel compelled to say something they don't know what
to say, and so they comment on their looks. But
I can tell you I've never posted a picture, ever
posted a picture on my Instagram or on my Facebook
where people have chosen to make the majority of the
commentary about my physical appearance. Never happened. I mean, I
know that I'm not the most attractive guy in the world.
It's never ever happened. And I don't care that I'm
(35:02):
not the most attractive going in the world. I don't
have to be brad Pit. People don't value me for
my appearents. They value me for the work that I do.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
It's a super awkward place to be.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
I have to tell you I can, I can go
somewhere to do a TV segment or give a talk
on this topic, and often the first thing people will
say to me is something about how I look, even
in that moment.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Right, it still happens.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
I have an author Instagram account, which I'm not particularly
good at. I don't know how to do stories, et cetera,
et cetera. But I almost never post a picture of myself.
I'm not interested. I'm not interested in people's commentary. I'm
not interested in those moments where I have to worry
about how I look as I'm taking that picture, and
what's my hair doing and should I filter it or
should I not filter it.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
I just don't do it right. But that's a power
I have to be able to opt out.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
There are many people in jobs that can't opt out right,
like a woman working in news. It's an image focused profession.
There are there's a journalist I wrote about her a
little bit in Beauty Sick, Heidi Stevens the Chicago Tribune locally,
who's got very curly hair, like, that's it, it's just
curly hair. And she could write a column every year
with a collection of little hate mail she gets about
(36:14):
her hair, right, like, how can you leave your hair
like that?
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Your hair is a rat nest? How could you do that?
That's so unprofessional? And she's not even on TV.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
This is all just based on that little thumbnail picture
that you see next to a columnist. Wow, So just
imagine how that get gets turned up, right, And when
you're a woman in the public eye, and I have
to wonder all the time how many women would seek
out jobs, careers, volunteer opportunities in the public eye but
choose not to because they don't want that kind of
(36:43):
scrutiny about their parents. I think that's happening more than
we talk about.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
And your research shows that the cost to women in
terms of opportunity, which is what you've just described, is huge.
But it's not just that cost. It's the cost in
terms of the time. You know, when I've got to
go and do a TV spot. I walk in. They
throw a little bit of makeupy sort of stuff on
my face. It takes about a minute and a half. Yeah,
(37:09):
they go. I don't know what it is, but they
put some stuff on my face, which I remove as
soon as I'm off the TV. I get those facial
wipes and get rid of it. But I'm in and
out within about a minute and a half. They have
a look at my hair and say, oh, that's fine.
They don't even sit me in the chair. Whereas the
women who I'm often appearing on the television with, they'll
have to be there at least an hour ahead of
(37:29):
the segment. I stroll in fifteen minutes before the segment.
I'm in, I'm out, I'm done there at least an
hour before they're getting their head done. They're spending all
that time, that time that they could be reading a book,
or that time that they could be responding to him,
all that time that they could be building their strategic
plan for their business. And it's all of that money
that they've got to spend. I don't spend money on
my appearance, but women are expected to spend money on
(37:51):
the mascara that's going to change their life that you
mentioned for.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Just the basics, just the basic grooming. Now you're supposed
to get eyelashes glued on to your eyelash is once
a month so that it can save you time and
not having to wear a mask.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Here.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I used to get my nails done, and not only
did I get my nails done, but I got them
done like clear, so it was you know, I'm spending
this time and money. It's not even a color, so
it would be pretty low maintenance then, and my feet too.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
And I enjoyed it. I found it.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
It's like, I know, it's such a privilege we will
go do something like that, but it's super relaxing. But
I found that it got to this point where I
would think, like, oh no, I gotta like it's been
it's been three weeks, I gotta get my nails done,
and it started to feel like this burden, and I thought,
what would happen if I just stopped?
Speaker 3 (38:37):
And you know what happened. It It felt weird. For
a few weeks.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
I learned, like any reasonable human can how to file
my own nails, and it's one lest thing I have
to worry about.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Now and talking must be so much easier.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
It's just it's nice, right, It's nothing now, A pedicure
still feels good. I won't lie.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
But the point is you doing it because it feels good.
You're not doing it to impress somebody. So let's move
towards the final part of this conversation. It's been so
compelling to talk with you about this, but I really
want to talk about what we can do to help
our children, both boys and girls, to get past this
awful belief that ties self worth to appearance. I love
your suggestions in Beauty Sick. You've got the back end
(39:18):
of the book is full of suggestions, and something that
you did was so consistent with what I've read in
the research and what I've understood, and that is there's
very little point talking to our kids about how everything's
photoshopped and saying, you know, I don't believe what you
see because it's all photo shopped. Because to them, whether
it's fake or not, and whether they know it's fake
or not doesn't stop it being aspirational. You know, you're
(39:39):
still focusing on the appearance, even if you're saying, look
at everything and be critical of it and highlight, you
know where the air brushing has happened, or the forty
thousand dollars that have spent on camera and lighting and
equipment and people, it's still in front of them, it's
still being noticed. So let's start with our little ones,
you know, our three, four, five, six year olds. What
can parents do to use the lo likelihood that they're
(40:01):
going to be beauty focused?
Speaker 2 (40:03):
So the thing I love to say is that they're
actually a few pretty easy things you can do that
don't cost money, and they just take some practice. And
one of them is I'm encourage parents to consider making
their home and appearance commentary free zone, right where you
don't talk about the shape of other people's bodies or
who's gained or lost weight, or who's ugly or pretty.
(40:24):
And that means you, that means people on TV, that
means peers, That means even people you don't like, right,
even the politician you don't like. It means you know,
body shame that person either. And so you just give
this like continuous, gentle message that we leave space for
other conversations in this house. That's not how we think
about people. We don't think about them in terms of
(40:46):
whether they're beautiful or not. Now, I do think you
need to be careful there. You don't want to move
so far as to say how you look doesn't matter. Right.
Racism is real, anti fat bias is real. Right, Like,
all of these things can still be wrestled with, but
it means that you don't send the message to your
children that a part of what determines if they're good
(41:07):
or not is whether they're appealing to look at. So
just practice it, right. And if you have guests to
your home and they start saying like, oh, did you
see so and so last weight, just say, oh, we're
working really hard not to talk about those things so
much in this house. Do you mind if we change
the subject?
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Right? It's a pretty easy thing to do.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
And I love thinking about all the conversations that are
going to happen instead.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Right to me, that's so fun. Right. So that means
as a parent, you have to stop body shaming yourself.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
And that's such a big one, isn't it. As a parent,
how do we make sure that the comments that we
make about our own bodies, if we go to make
them at all, which so many of us do, How
do we make sure that those comments are either positive
or uplifting or focused. Something that you emphasized in your
book that I've adopted immediately. I thought, this is so perfect.
(41:58):
Is when we're going to talk about our bodies, we
don't talk about how they look. We talk about what
they do, right.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
I think especially for young children, because they're learning to
use their bodies. Right, So encourage them to think about
their bodies not from this objectified perspective, not from how
do they look to other people, but from the perspective
of what do they do for you? What do they
allow you to experience, what do they allow you to feel.
I've had some people say to me, oh, that's ablest, right,
(42:25):
because what if you're disabled. But that's I don't mean
that you have to be a marathon runner to appreciate
what your body does. Like, our bodies do all kinds
of things right there. They allow for creativity and communication,
you know, they allow us to connect with other people.
If you have children who are into athletics of any kind, right,
(42:45):
they allow that sort of thing. Bodies are super cool, right,
so teach your children about how cool they are, like
all the amazing things they can do and how they
can care for their bodies so that they can keep
doing cool things and not so that they can look
good to other people. Right, the best advice is to
just keep those conversations off the table.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
I just don't have them.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
If you were to extend that developmental trajectory from our
younger children into the older children, everything that you've just
said would obviously apply. Is there anything additional that you
would add to what parents can be doing to reduce
the focus on appearance with the tweens and teens.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
It's gonna get really hard in those tween years, right,
and I think you have to be very careful as
a parent not to Here's a psychological term you've probably
come across a lot in your work on parenting is reactants. Right, Like,
the minute you tell a child don't do that thing,
they're gonna want it more. And so I think you
have to step away from that temptation to say, like
you're being vain, you're being superficial, don't follow that Instagram account,
(43:47):
don't post selfies, don't do that. Right, You can't really
do that. You have to give children some space to experiment.
But I think one of the best gifts you can
give your child as they move into those years, no
matter what their gender is, is room to explore all
the different parts of themselves, right, So ask them questions
about what matters to them, what's inspiring to them, what
(44:09):
they're worried about lately, what they're thinking about. I don't
think we ask our children enough questions as they get
to that age. A lot of children that age are
quite willing to talk if you ask the right question,
and if you show that you're willing to listen right
and not butt in and tell them they're wrong and
try to redirect them. And I think giving tween girls
(44:30):
space to be something other than beauty queens or other
than people who are constantly worried about the fact that
they're not beauty queens is one of the best things
you can do. So help them develop their interests, help
them develop their passions, and then when they move into
the teenyars, here is maybe And it sound like insane
advice that I told you I love teenagers, and I do.
(44:51):
If your daughters, in particular are struggling with these issues,
it's time to get them angry, right.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
It's time to talk with.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Them about what a sick injustice this world does to
girls and women when it makes girls and women hate
their bodies. Right, it's time to ask them questions about
who benefits from that hatred, who's making money off of it? Right?
Whose life gets better when you don't like your body,
and whose life gets worse?
Speaker 3 (45:18):
And what does that mean? Right?
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Teenagers, as you know, are quite angry sometimes, so to me,
that's an opportunity, right, harness that anger. Right, let them
see the ways that they don't like what the world
is doing and set them on the path to make
in a better world. Right, teenagers are ready to make
(45:40):
a difference. I think we see this all around us
right now. We see teenagers doing amazing work, work quite frankly,
that we should have done right, and now they're taking.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
It upon themselves. And so I think you can.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Really give space for your teenagers to turn some of
that sadness and that despondency into appropriately targeted anger. Give
them a passion, give them a cause, let them make
their mark on the world. I think they're way more
ready to do that than we give them credit for
great answers.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Something that stands out to me from the earlier part
of what you were saying is just if I was
to restate it, I guess and reemphasize a little bit
of it. What I'm actually hearing you say is make
their world and their lives so full that they don't
have the time or the space to be worried about
how they look. And that doesn't mean overcram their curriculum
(46:33):
and the shape, but it means give them, give them
the capacity to be developing other things, other talents, other strengths,
other capacities, so that they're not sitting there staring at
their image in Instagram and trying to make it look
that little bit better.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Many years ago, I am so sorry I interrupted you there,
But many years ago I tried to do a study
of young women who weren't hurting in this way, like
who felt pretty good about their bodies.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
And weren't engaging and eating disordered behaviors.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
And we found this very tiny group of them, and
we just did this basic interview about like what did
your parents do growing up and how did this happen?
And what they told us is that it was nothing magic, right, Like, yeah,
they were probably a little more likely to have these
sort of like feminist leaning parents who were like trying
to do some of this deliberately, but mostly what they
said is it's just not something we focused on in
(47:23):
my family.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
We focused on other things. Yeah, yeah, And I think
that's the key.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
A friend of mine, Rebecca Sparrow, she has a great
following here in Australia and one of the things that
she emphasizes is with your tween and teen girls, go
through their Instagram accounts with them, go through the people
that they're following and get rid of all of the
people who are focused on fashion and appearance and instead
fill up your feed with artists and poets and influences
(47:49):
and people who can offer something other than a view appearance.
And it's such a simple thing to do, and I
wonder how often we've done it. The big question. We've
talked about little ones. We've talked about a tweens and teens,
but what about the mom who's listening right now, or
(48:10):
her husband or partner who is saying this has been
my wife. How does she get past this and how
does she make sure that she doesn't pass it on
to her kids, and how does a husband or partner
support her as she tries to get past it.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
So I've talked to so many women who they.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Kind of come to this topic a little late, and
they realize I've struggled with this my whole life and
I didn't mean to, but I passed these struggles on
to my daughter, and it's too late, and I blew it.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
And my message is always like, it is not too.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Late, right, if you have a tween or a teen,
or a young adult or even an adult daughter, it
is not too late. And there is something I think
just really beautiful about sitting down with your daughter and saying,
I realize that these are the messages I've been sending
to you, right, that I haven't been happy with my body,
and these are the ways it came out, and these
(49:08):
are the ways it might have affected you. And I
wonder if you want to work together with me to
change that, Like, here's some things I'm going to try
to do differently now.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
I wonder what you would think about that.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
A lot of the daughters I know would just start
sobbing with relief, right, They would so appreciate that kind
of raw honesty it is. It's not too late, right,
It's never too late. And if your concerns are severe, right,
if they're really affecting your well being and your mental health,
then I would also say, seek some help.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
If part of how they're influencing your children is because
the intensity of those negative emotions is so big that's
leaking out, right, then get some professional support in there, right,
so that you can learn how to you know, heal
yourself up a little and then create a better world
for your children too. But it's not too late, right,
(49:59):
even if you have adult chal and it's not too late,
And it's not too late to call your friends out either,
to say, like, I want to do things differently. I
don't want the first twenty minutes of every conversation we
have to be about weight gain or loss. I just
don't want to do that anymore. I have a friend
who she's a junior high teacher, and she said she'll
have these meetings with other teachers on zoom like we're
(50:20):
doing now.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
And at the first few minutes they all fuss with like, oh.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Do I have a double chin, showing I haven't been
able to call her my gray that it's like this
intro to their meeting. It's okay to just say no
to that, to say like, no, I've decided I want
a different psychological climate for myself, and it's going to
start with me creating it and with me inviting the
people I love to create it with me. Where We're
(50:45):
just not going to spend so much time on this.
There's so many other cool things to spend your time
on and your energy on.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
This has just been such a brilliant conversation.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
I've i fear I've gone into lecture, my number one mode.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
I've been as absorbed in this conversation as I was
with your book. The book is called Beauty Sick, How
the cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. It
is literally one of the best books I've read in years.
It's definitely in my top five over the last handful
of years, and I just loved it. I can't recommend
it enough. Before we wrap up, can I ask you
a couple of quick questions about those that Nissan nephew
(51:25):
of yours? Okay, because I always love to ask a
handful of questions at the end of every podcast, everyone
gets the same ones, rapid fire questions just about what
it's like to have little ones in our midst. So
if we asked your niece and nephew their favorite thing
to do with the coolest auntie ever, what would they say? Ooh.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
So my niece's around four.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
She's super into crafts and so actually for Christmas, I
got her this giant bin full of craft supplies and
that is something she loves right now. And I can't
wait till our pandemic lockdown is over and she and
I can make some mess with paints. And then I
really miss my he's just undertoo, and my nephew. I
miss him so much because one of my favorite things
(52:08):
to do with him is have him cuddle up next
to me on the couch and read a book to him,
and then when you finish the book, he scooches down,
goes and gets another book, brings it back, gets back up,
and I miss that. I miss those moments with him,
so I can't wait to do those things again.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Beautiful. Thank you. What's been your trickiest And I don't
know if you would have had too many with the
kids being so young, but what's been your trickiest auntie moment?
Speaker 3 (52:31):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (52:31):
I will say that I made a pledge never to
talk to my niece about her appearance, that I'm just
not going to do it. Figure I'll leave that to
other people in her life, and I'll be a different
place for her. But she is into Disney princess culture,
and it is very hard for me to sort of
maintain an openness around that when I really don't like it.
(52:52):
I really don't like those elements of the culture. And
when she's very excited and wants to talk to me
about her new princess thing and her pink tiara and
all of those things, I really struggle with that.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Okay, last question for you. If you could spend an
hour with this little niece and nephew at any age
at all. Let's say that isolation finishes and tomorrow afternoon
at three o'clock they're coming over to spend some time
with you, and they're walking into the living room at
whatever age you can choose. What age would you pick?
And why?
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Oh, I can't wait until they're you know, like twelve thirteen.
Speaker 3 (53:25):
I know this this sounds bizarre, but I love kids.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Once they get some angst, right once they're Once they're
a little angry and have that intensity, and to me,
that's such a cool window into the adults they're going
to become, and into what they're going to care about
and what their passions are. I can't I can't wait
until until they get a little little adolescent moody. That's
(53:50):
the age I'm interested in, and that's.
Speaker 1 (53:53):
When parents say, Auntieu are the best. Please take them
for a week, two weeks a year.
Speaker 3 (53:57):
Yes, my brother jokes that I will be able to
do at that time.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Absolutely perfect. Well, Renee, if people want to know more
about you and your book, Beauty Sick, where can they
go to get more information about this incredibly important and
really really smart work that you've been doing.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Thank you so much for the kind words. People can
go to Beautyseick dot com or if you're interested more
in the academic research side of things, my lab has
a website as well, which is Bartianmedia dot com and
if you're into Instagram, it's Beauty Underscore Sick.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing this time with
me and with our audience. You've been wonderfully generous and
shared so much.
Speaker 3 (54:39):
It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (54:41):
I hope you've gotten some insight into doctor Renee Engeln
as a result of this podcast. I love the quote
from Renee's grandfather that she mentioned earlier in the podcast.
Here is again, don't be too proud of your youth
or your beauty. You did nothing to earn them, and
you can do nothing to keep them. Isn't that great?
If you'd like more info about how I can help
your family to thrive and flourish, please visit Happyfamilies dot
(55:04):
com dotu. And as always, thank you very much to
Justin Royland for his work here in producing the podcast
making it sound absolutely fabulous, and thank you for listening
to a Happy Families podcast
Hello. My name is doctor Justin Coulson, dad to six daughters,
author of six books about raising happy families, and when
I began researching for my book Misconnection, it became pretty clear,
very quickly that body image was an enormous issue between
and teen girls. In fact, for women generally. The anxiety
(00:26):
the body image causes our daughters is a byproduct of
the world we live in, where women are judged on
their appearance in a way that men simply don't experience. Well,
my guest today is doctor Renee Engeln. She's the author
of one of my favorite books, Beauty Sick, How the
cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. Doctor Engeln
(00:49):
is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois,
where she directs the Body and Media Lab. Renee's work
has been published in numerous academic journals, and she's a
regular contributor to The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune,
and the Huffington Post. Her ted X talk from the
University of Connecticut has racked up almost seven hundred thousand
views on YouTube. So when you finish this podcast, look
(01:11):
up that one as well. It's so worth watching and
make sure you grab a copy of Beauty Sick, How
the cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. It's
a fabulous book when it comes to psychology and how
girls and women view their physical appearance. I don't think
that there's anyone more qualified than Professor Renee Engeln. I
began by asking her what work in family life looks
(01:32):
like for her.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Well, let's see, I'm a psychologist, I'm a buddy image researcher,
and I'm a professor at Northwestern University, which is in Evanston, Illinois,
just just north of Chicago, Illinois. And what else am I?
I'm an aunt to a wonderful niece and nephew who
came along kind of leader in my life, and that
has been an absolute joy.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
There four and almost two.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Oh so they're really little. They're little.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah, they're little.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
And I've never I have to say this is going
to be a horrible thing to say on a podcast
focused on parenting, but I've never really liked babies. I
find them kind of terrifying and sticky, and they don't
hold their heads up, and they've always been scary. And
when I knew my brother was you know, he and
his wife were having children, I thought, what if I
don't love them?
Speaker 3 (02:22):
But no I do.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I love them more than I thought it was possible
to love. So it's been full of joy and also
just interesting for me to learn how to connect with
these these little people that have been such a good
part of my life.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, I'm totally with you on the floppy neck thing that, Yeah,
that really bothers me. But for some reason, especially when
they you're blood. I mean babies generally, you know, you
see them in, they out, but when they blood, when
they related to you, there's something that happens, is there.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Everyone said it would feel different, and I didn't believe them,
but yeah, there's something powerful there that they're an extension
of my brother, my love so much and and you.
I've always been teased like I like tweens and teenagers.
So about the time that children really start to drive
their parents crazy, I'm always like, send them to me.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I got them, Like, I really like that.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I like their anger and their intensity and all that.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
So you can say that. You can say that because
you're not the mum, right, The mums are like, ah,
that'll be the cool artie, this will be fun.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah, send them to me. I have a number of
friends who say, will you talk to my daughter?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
And I'm like, oh, yeah, Sana, Yeah, game on, tut
talk about how terrible you are.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Well, well, Renee, We're going to cover in this conversation
body image because that's your area, this is your absolute fascination,
and we're going to talk about how to fix the
youngest children right through to tweens, teens, and even adults.
The mums and dads who are participating in this conversation
and listen to what we have to say. So a
(03:57):
little over a year ago, I read a book that
it just absolutely captured me. I wrote it on my list.
I keep a spreadsheet of all the books that I
read each year. I'm a little bit. It's just because
my bookshelf's kind of full of books, and sometimes I
forget which ones that I loved and which ones I
didn't or what was in them. And so I've got
this spreadsheet where I title author, what did I give
(04:19):
it out of five, and a bit of a spiel
about how I enjoyed the book. I'm so glad you
think that's funny.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
So anyway, my dear, I'm getting a live book review,
and the nerdiest way, ever, I like it.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
This is who I am. Your book was a five
star book. It was pretty much my book of the year.
I think that one and a book by Todd Rose
from Harvard called The End of Average Was that were
my two books of I think it was twenty eighteen.
I just loved Beauty Sick, which is the name of
your book, Beauty Sick, and I gained a sense of
(04:50):
perspective that I just can't describe. So I'm a male,
I've never had the kinds of questions about my body
that you describe women experiencing. Now I haven't told you
something about me as well, and that is that my wife,
Kylie and I are the parents of six daughters.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Oh what are their age rangers?
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Our eldest has moved out, she's married, she's in her
early twenties, and then we've got one who is finishing
her senior year of high school. She's about to be eighteen.
We've got one who's sixteen in grade ten, and then
we've got one in grade seven, one in grade five,
and our baby is in her first year of school.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
So all girls. So as I was reading your book,
I saw things in a new light. I just didn't
know that females felt the way you described when it
comes to their bodies and the pressure that they feel
around their bodies. Even with my wife, I never saw that. Now.
What's really interesting about that is when I first went
on a date with her, I think it was pretty
(05:50):
much our first proper date. We walked into a chicken
and chip shop. You don't really have them so much
in the United States. I've found where you buy the
barbecued chicken and a whole lot of hot you call
them fry, we call them chips. We've got these places everywhere.
We call them things like charcoal chicken. And so you
go in and you order your chicken, your chips, and
your salad or your chicken fries and salad, and it's
all really fresh, and go out and sit on the
(06:13):
beach and eat it or whatever it might be. So
I've walked in and I've ordered a chicken and a
couple of dollars worth of chips, and then I looked
at Kylie and I said, what do you got to order?
And she thought that was funny because she thought I
was going to share my chicken and chips with her,
and I was like, no, no, no, I'm eating the chicken
and the chips. What do you go to order? And
she said, for the first time in her life, she
was able to relax on a date because she could
(06:34):
see that I didn't care what she ate, because she
was never going to be able to eat even close
to what I ate. In fact, she said, it was
the first time she'd been on a date where she
ate more than a little bit of salad.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I'll just have a salad, right.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So many women they go home hungry and then they
eat in private afterwards.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And your book kind of opened up this world of
what it must be like to be female and to
be worried about body all the time. Now, as it happened,
as I was reading your book, I was writing a
book about teen girls, and it influenced the questions that
I asked them in the way that I was able
to write about their answers. And I found it just
so helpful and so extraordinary. But in the introduction of
your book, you state, and I quote, so many young
(07:12):
women today are strikingly bold in important areas of their lives,
but still crumble in front of the mirror. They fight
so hard to be treated with respect, but seem at
least at times, to be willing to trade it all
in an instant if they could only remake their physical appearance.
And then you give an answer to the question of
why that is, And this is an image for one
(07:36):
of a better word, or maybe it's the perfect word
that really sticks throughout the entire book. You say, quote,
we may no longer play dress ups and pose in
front of the mirror the way young girls do. But
I worry that's only because we've internalized that mirror, we
never actually left it behind. I mean, that is so powerful.
Can you talk about this idea that the mirror is
(07:57):
on the inside.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
This is a This is a big paradox that I
think a lot of people are not sure how to
wrestle with because in many ways, we've been sold a
bill of goods.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
We've got these generations of young women who are like,
I can do anything and I can be anything.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And what we've seen is a co optation of that
sense of power to sell them on beauty products and
diet plans and tutorials and this.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
World that is completely obsessed with how they look.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And we've sold it as empowering, right, which is which
is insane and what happens is that we've gone from
having a culture that's always looking at women, that's always
commenting on how they look. We've gone from that, from
that coming from the outside to a point where we've
internalized it and we do that to ourselves. So I
try to stay away from academic jargon, but the there's
(08:52):
a term that I always need to use, even though
it's jargon, which is self objectification.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
So the idea is if the world treats you like
an object long enough and with enough intensity that eventually
you see yourself that way. Right, You don't need to
be looking in the mirror because it's in your head,
and so you're always monitoring how you look. You're always aware.
It's distracting. It's distressing, right. It crops up in inopportune times.
(09:20):
It keeps you from living the life that's more consistent
with your values. So that's what I mean when I
say beauty sick, is that you've got that mirror stuck
in your head and it's causing you trouble and it's
not your fault. That's always the thing I want to say.
This is not something wrong with individual girls and women.
(09:40):
It's something wrong with our culture.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Well, let's start with the culture. In fact, no, we
might come to the cultural stuff in just a few seconds.
I want to talk about this beauty sickness. First of all,
let's talk about young children, young girls, because when I
was reading in Beauty sick you set the stage by
starting with the youngest about children. Let's say around age five,
and you cite some research that talks about how five
(10:05):
year olds feel about their bodies. Five year old girls.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
There's a pretty large survey found that about thirty five
percent of five year old girls are already saying that
they at least sometimes engage in dietary restraint. Now, I
want to be clear that five year olds don't understand
what dieting actually is, right, So when a five year
old tells you that she's dieting, what she's telling you
is that she's already learned that this is what women do, right,
(10:32):
that this is part of being a grown up, this
is something you think about. All of these young girls
are already telling us close to third saying that they're
comparing their bodies to women and girls they see in
cartoons and movies and television programs. So they're at this
really young age where they're just learning to use their bodies.
(10:53):
I'm not a developmental psychologist by training. I focus mostly
on teenagers and adults. I don't I'm not super expert
about young children. So when I started writing this book,
I actually just did some basic research on the developmental
stages for children. And one of the things that really
threw me and I read about this in the book
is I asked, well, okay, well, what are five year
olds supposed to be doing? Like what marks where a
(11:13):
five year old is? And one of the things that
was listed was learning how to properly use utensils a
spoon and fork, And I thought, these are kids that
don't even necessarily know how to use a fork particularly well,
and they're already worried about dieting, hasn't even gotten great
at getting the food into their mouth yet, and they're
already trying to keep it out.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
It's it's heartbreaking, right.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
It suggests that what's happening is that a lot of
families are transmitting values to their young daughters that they
don't mean to transmit.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
I think that's a lot of what's happening.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, and I appreciate what you've said there at the end,
that parents will intentioned and they don't even know very
often that these values are being passed on to the
next generation from that tiny, tiny age. I wonder how
much of it is children actually being unhappy with their
bodies versus just doing what they're seeing happen in the
environ Mum's always talking about the diet or Dad's always
(12:11):
talking about the diet, and so therefore I'm supposed to
be on a diet. I don't even know what a
diet is, but I remember when my little ones, and
in fact, I've got some video footage of my sisters.
I've got twin sisters who are a few years younger
than me, and I've got some really great footage of
them at about the age of four or five, and
they're running around the swimming pool. And the way I
describe it is they're running around. They're not wearing any
(12:33):
tops because they're only four or five, you know, they're little.
They've got their little bikini bottoms on or the little
you know, their little swimwear bottoms on, and they've got
what I would only describe as sticky addy tummies, because
you know how little kids, they've got the sticky addy
tummy and they're completely uninterested in what they look because
they look like because they're so absorbed in the moment.
(12:55):
They're so caught up in it, and I kind of think,
isn't that what it's supposed to be?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah, it's I mean, my four year old niece loves
to show me. We talk only on FaceTime now because
we are still locked down due to COVID, but she
loves to lift up her shirt show me her stomach,
right and kind of like grab it and move it around.
And I get kind of sad already for the day that.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
She's ashamed of her stomach.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
And you might think, oh, that day won't necessarily come,
and I think, yeah, it will, right, We haven't.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
We haven't really found a way to prevent that for
our girls. Yet.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
It may not be all the time, and it may
that be that it may not be that bad, but
you can bet there's a really good shot that she's
going to become a tween, probably maybe not until a teen,
who doesn't like her stomach anymore. And so that joy
she has in her body now, I wish she could
keep it longer. I think it's it's it's amazing. It's
(13:52):
important too. In learning how to use your body without fear,
right and in learning how to really inhabit your body
as a doing thing instead of as an object. But
even parents who meanwhile are already tamping this down in
young girls that sort of bodily joy so partially with comments,
(14:13):
right when we say things like sit like a lady.
Partially And this is my big beef lately, by dressing
girls and clothing that doesn't allow them to move. If
this is a thing parents do, and I don't think
it's it's it comes from poor intensions at all, right,
But there's this temptation to put girls in in dresses
and tights and things that make it really hard to
(14:33):
crawl and jump. Are things that where you're more likely
to tell them to be careful, not to get dirty,
to sit nicely.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Just on that there's a there's a movement increasing in Australia.
So we, unlike America, all of our schools, almost all
of our schools insist that children wear a school uniform
to school. But what typically happens is the boys wearing
a shirt and shorts. The girls will in many cases
be wearing a dress, or they'll be wearing a skirt,
(15:01):
or they'll be wearing some item of clothing that makes
movement a little bit more restrictive if they want to
be I feel uncomfortable even saying the word now that
we're having this conversation, I was going to say, if
they want to be more boisterous, but let's change that too.
If they want to be more active, it's very, very
challenging for them to do that in a way that
would conserve a sense of modesty, because they're wearing dresses
(15:23):
and they don't want to be flashing their undies all
the backside to everybody. And so we've had this conversation
building in Australia over the last year two, maybe even
three years, where schools are now starting to recognize that
perhaps it's okay for girls to wear whatever they want,
including comfortable shorts, so long as it's within the school
uniform set up like this.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And why wouldn't it be okay the fact that we
have to have that.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Conversation, But so many are still saying, though, it's not okay.
This is our uniform and this is how we want
our girls to be. We want them to be demure
and lady like. Can you be lady like and wear shorts?
That's my question. I mean, I think you can.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
What does lady like me?
Speaker 2 (16:02):
And I mean ladylike means like a lady, And there
are all kinds of ladies out there, So I find
I find that whole phrase really problematic because what you're
teaching your girls when you say that is stay small, right,
don't take up space, don't move, don't don't learn to
use your body, don't stretch it, don't trust it. Instead,
(16:24):
from the beginning, think of your body in terms of
how it looks to other people. Does it look appropriate,
does it look modest? If you want them to look modest,
then put them in shorts so they can move however
they want. Right, And when you look at infants, I
guess when they're a little older they start to crawl.
It's actually quite hard for a lot of babies to
crawl in skirts and dresses. Right, And even that is
(16:46):
something we don't think about. I mean, just imagine it.
Imagine now trying to crawl in a dress versus pair
pants or pair of shorts.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
So are how we dress girls in such a way
that requires constant and monitoring. It has a real impact
on how they grow up to feel about their bodies.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I want to come back to you your bodies for
other people.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go back to the conversation
about children. Okay, So we started with five year olds
and how a third of them or just over a
third of them females. I'm guessing it wasn't the males
that wanted to change their bodies, by the way, it
was just the females that we're talking about the diet.
What happens as they get older? Can you talk me
through the next sort of ten to twelve years from
age five through to age seventeen eighteen.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
So I'd say there's two big changes, right that happen.
One is the introduction to social media. Now, when that
happens depends on the kind of choices parents make and
what's going on with peers and things like that. But
it's often tweens we're looking at who are starting to
get into social media.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Which adds this additional mirror.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Right, you had the mirror in your head, and now
you have the mirror on your phone where you're taking
selfies and you're looking at yourself constantly, and you're editing them,
and you're scrolling through hundreds thousands of images a day
of other people, right, So that's just really turning up
the focus on appearance. So that's the first sort of
challenge that girls are running into at this age. And
(18:14):
then puberty hits, right, and the research around puberty is
so clear that it tends to make boys like their
bodies more right, It brings boys bodies more in line
with the ideal, tends to make them more muscular, broad
on their shoulders, get taller, things like that. But with girls,
because puberty tends to increase the amount of body fat
you have. Despite the fact that puberty is a sign
(18:36):
of them physically becoming adult women, it actually is moving
them farther from the body ideal for women. And there's
something really twisted and wrong about that. But this is
the time that we see a lot of girls start
to have very very significant struggles with body image, some
of which can turn.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Into eating disorders at this age.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
And I think one of the most important findings for
me that's come out of the clinical psychology literature is
it's a study that was trying to understand why it
is that we see the gender gap and depression show
up in this sort of early adolescent place. You know,
until that point, both girls and boys get depressed about
(19:17):
the same rates, but once the girls get a little older,
it just starts to go up and up. Right, we
see this big gap, and there's pretty good evidence now
that part of where that gap comes from is girls worried.
Girls worries about their bodies, right, how their bodies look
to other people, how their faces look to other people.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
Their appearance.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
So it's really this time when body image concerns that
could have been a distraction can turn into something much bigger,
and I think it's something to really be on the
lookout for as parents.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
The second most worried about issue in my study of girls,
and now this was not a university study. It was
a survey with a handful of interviews and some focus
groups with girls from my book Misconnection. Number one was
I wonder if you can guess what do you think
teenage girls? Number one issue was.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
I'm a little biased, but right, my sense is that
one of the biggest issues is.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Body and so body image was number two.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
So besides that, I would say relationships and.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Parenting, relationships with friends It was yeah, yeah, I'm worried
about my friends and how they see me in whether
I've got any. And what was fascinating about that was
so many of them linked their relationships with friends to
issues with appearance or you know, they wanted to be popular,
but to be popular, they had to be hot. You're like,
there's this explicit, unmissible link when you look at the
(20:40):
when you look at the comments from girls, it's it's
an undeniable link for so many of them that they
literally tie their value as a human being to their
physical appearance. And if I look good, then I'm a
valuable person. But if I don't look good, I'm worthless,
I'm nothing, and nobody will like me.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
It would be incredibly hard for them to tie their
value to their appearance because that's what every cultural message
they get tells them to do. Right, that's what they've
been sold since they were young. Right, that their prettiness
and then as they get older, their sex appeal. Right,
that that is their source of worth. That that will
be the ticket to success in life. It will be
(21:19):
the ticket to a happy relationship, to good peer experiences. Right,
this is a lesson that we learn over and over again.
It's really hard not to internalize that.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And there's there's that halo effect where I mean there's
so much research on this. People who are attractive get
a on average, an easier ride in life. They're more
likely to escape speeding tickets when they get pulled over
by the police, They're more likely to be marked better
in an exam, they get a better ride. There's so
many studies in so many different contexts now that highlight
(21:54):
that physical appearance actually makes life easier.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I would never underestimate the sort of the goods you
get in exchange for being sort of consistent with our
culture's beauty ideals.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Right, you get a lot from that.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
It's not all good, though, right You also get assumptions
that you're arrogant or that you're dumb sometimes right, that
you can't be smart and pretty.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
And I've also talked to a lot of.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Young women who felt like, yeah, it was great to
be identified as pretty or beautiful, but over time you
start to wonder if that's not all you are. And
then I talk to women who are heading into their
thirties and forties who are terrified because they are well
aware of the power they got from being beautiful, and
they're also aware that it has an expiration date on it,
(22:43):
and they head into middle age thinking what's left? Right,
once this goes, what's left?
Speaker 1 (22:51):
You should have quote from your grandpa.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Oh yes, I always worry about this because I don't
know if he made this up or if he got
it somewhere.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
I couldn't find it online. But he always used to
tell me. He called me Nane, and he would say, Nana,
never be too proud of your youth or your beauty.
You did nothing to earn them, and you can do
nothing to keep them.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
And I know it sounds sort of brutal, but I
never experienced it that way, right, what I as a
child growing up like that was his way of telling
us that, hey, this this this game was rigged. Right.
You might have gotten some privileges. You might have them now,
you're not going to have them forever, and you didn't
deserve them, you didn't earn them. Right, Be proud of
the things that you work for and build foundations for
(23:35):
your life that you can keep.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Right. That's I think the most important lesson there.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
It's a little bit of tough love advance. But it's good.
I mean, it's really good. What's driving this though? So
can we point the finger any one main culprit?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So I don't think so you know, I'm not I'm
not interested in sort of bashing any one target.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Here.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
What I see is this collection of forces.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
You know, it's create this toxic stew that girls and
women are swimming around in.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
And part of those forces we help a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Right when we buy into the diet industry and the
beauty industry, Right when we follow people on Instagram who
do nothing but show us.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
How beautiful they are. Right, would we encourage this kind
of thing? Sometimes?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Oh, you know what you've just reminded me. I saw
a picture of a dinner plate set for sale in
a store. I saw it was I couldn't believe what
I was reading on the plate. There are three circles. Okay,
so there's like an inner circle drawn on the plate.
Then there's a circle halfway along the plate, and then
there's a circle towards the outer rim of the plate.
And there was a name for each circle. The inner
circle which was you know, it was representative of the
(24:43):
smallest portion size you might put on that plate. The
inner circle said skinny jeans, the middle one said favorite jeans.
And then the largest circle, which you know, was out
near the rim taking up the whole plate, said mum jeans.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Oh, oh, what would way we treat mothers the way
we treat mothers?
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Right?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I watched you know, since we've been sort of in
lockdown here, I've been watching maybe a little more Netflix
than I should.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
And I stumbled across this show that i've It's called
The Baker and the Beauty.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
It was just this little like families sitcom, and there's
a young woman in it who has this line because
she's pressuring her boyfriend to get married, and she said,
I'm a woman.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
This is what we do.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
We diet, we get married, we have children, and then
we diet again. And I was just oh, So there
was just a silly little show, right, But there was
something about that line. It's like, Yeah, for a lot
of women, that's their life, right. You become a mom
and then you diet because you're allowed to be a mom,
but you're not.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Allowed to look like a mom.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Right.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
This this pressure to have the body of a twenty
year old for the rest of your.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Life, It's it's insane, right, It's it's a pressure that
has gotten absolutely worse over the years. There's not great
data on it, but I've talked to a lot of
practitioners who treat women with eating disorders, and they said
they're seeing something kind of unusual, which is like the
onset of anorexia is showing up in the thirties and forties,
(26:09):
just not something you typically see. Anorexia can last a
very long time, but it tends to start much earlier
than that.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
And some of that is tied to.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
The sense that that women are feeling this pressure to
do everything they can, right to not look like someone
who would wear mom jeans, right to have the skinny
jeans forever, to get botox, to get fillers, to color
your hair, to go to ten workout classes a week,
to constantly watch what you eat.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It's brutal. It's brutal.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
There's got to be more to life than diet. Do
some things and then diet again. Right, They're just has
to be.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, I'm so curious. I know that I kind of
interrupted you when I asked that initial question of what's
creating it? What is the culprit? And now you say,
there's no one thing. There's this toxic stew. But I
wonder if we could actually name them. So we've got
we've got dinner plates, the rainforce, this and We've always
think of the media and the social media, and but
but are they more insidious things as well? Are there
(27:05):
things that we don't even know.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
That it Well, there's the beauty industry and the diet industry,
which are billions of dollars a year. They're incredibly powerful,
and they only make money if you feel unattractive, right there.
These are products like that you'll only keep buying if they.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Don't work, right. The power of.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
These industries to capitalize on women's vulnerability is really breathtaking.
I can't tell you how many smart, educated with it
women will still say things like I swear for just
a moment, I thought that mascara was going to change
my life, right, Like, you just really get sold this
bill of goods, that this next thing is going to
(27:47):
make it all okay, right, and that the only way
you're ever going to feel like enough is if you
can look like a fitness model or look like that
influencer on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
It's it's it's hard to see several.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Generations of women now never feeling like they're going to
be enough.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
That's a really hard thing for me to look at,
and it's really hard for me when I find out
that even some grown women who are my heroes still
feel that way. Right, that's a really hard thing to hear.
I have people ask all the time, like, where did
you find all these women with body image issues to
talk to you for your book? And I was like,
I don't understand the question, right, I just found women.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
I didn't look for women with body issues. Just found women,
and I talked to them about their bodies. It's all
you need to do.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
So young girls, tween girls, teen girls, young women, moms,
adult women, retirees. I'm guessing that this is just a
pervisive thing. And again, just to emphasize, it's not a
man thing. In fact, let me read something. I wish
(29:04):
I could read your entire book to you so that
I could take now tell me about this now, but
let me just read this. This was in a chapter
that you titled just Like a Woman, and I've underlined
Neliber whole chapter. But I just want to read this
bit to you. You said, think about it in this way.
If I told you that someone in the United States
(29:24):
was about to go under the knife in the hopes
of reshaping their appearance, you could bet it was a
woman and be correct. Around ninety percent of the time. Internationally,
eighty five to ninety percent of surgical and non surgical
cosmetic procedures are performed on women. If you heard that
a young person was suffering from anorexia or bolimia, I
guess it was a young woman. You'd be right nine
times out of ten. Eating disorders and plastic surgery of
(29:45):
both complex issues. But we can't ignore gender gaps like these.
They forced us to acknowledge that men's and women's experience
in this culture are vastly different in important ways. Men
and women are living systematically different lives when it comes
to beauty sickness. Read a couple more lines from this
particular area. I know it's probably boring to you because
you wrote it, but it just it's so compelling. Women
(30:07):
talk about how they look more than men do. They
think about how they look more than men do, and
they're more likely than men to engage in behaviors to
alter or improve their appearance. There's a reason no one
in this culture would be surprised to overhear a woman
saying I feel so fat and ugly. Today, we accept
this type of unhappiness as part of being a woman.
(30:28):
Over thirty years ago, researchers coined the phrase normative discontent
to describe the phenomenon. The term suggests that we've gotten
to a place where it's considered normal for girls or
women to be deeply disappointed when they look in the mirror.
It's the girl version of boys will be boys.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
Hey, this is the first question I always get. Right,
if I go speak.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
To any kind of group about this topic, Almost always
the first question I get is what about men?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
What about boys? And So I always want to be
clear that boys and men.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Can absolutely have these struggles too, Right, they can happen
to any gender, But that doesn't mean that boys and
girls and men and women are living in the same
world when it comes.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
To these issues.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
So it's different for me.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yes, yes, it can happen.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And I also I'm not arguing that it's easy to
be a man either, Right. I think there are pressures
that hit men differentially. So, for example, the pressure to
make a lot of money, to be powerful, to have
high status. Right, that is a pressure, a burden that
men bear much more than women do.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I think in some ways women are given more freedom
in those respects. But I don't think we can argue
that that men and women are facing the same reality
when it comes to a parent's focus and so. But
part of the issue is I study women and girls.
That's what I do, right, so that that is my focus.
There are people who focus on body image and men
(31:55):
and boys who are doing excellent work. So I don't
mean to imply that that's not important and not out there.
But what fascinates me is as a culture, this set
of rules that women are just by and large expected
to follow without question, that we would never ask men
to follow. Can you imagine if we ask men to
wear high heels or something equally uncomfortable and you know,
(32:19):
inefficient when it came to walking.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Or even to remove the hair from their bodies.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, And people say, well some men wax, and I
say absolutely right. But if you look at waxing salons,
they'll say here's our waxing menu, and then there'll be
a little part that says men's services, right, So they're
even telling you there there's a differentiation there. It's not
the norm for men the way it is for women,
at least not for straight guys, right. I do think
(32:46):
that sexual minority men face a greater degree of pressure
on this front. But it's everywhere built into our culture, right.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
You hear it from the minute we start talking about infants,
when we say such a pretty girl, such a pretty girl.
Oh look at the strong boy.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Right. It starts very young that we think about women's bodies,
about their physicality as existing to be looked at, right,
instead of as existing to do things.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
You know, I just remembered the story one of the
guys that is a TV host for one of our
major breakfast programs nationwide around Australia. His name is Karl Stefanovic,
and a few years ago there was a big media
storm when he stepped forward and said, guess what, I
haven't changed my suit for a year. I've worn the
(33:36):
same suit and tie every single day on the television
for an entire year, and nobody's noticed. I've not received
one single email. I've not received one single comment on
social media. Nobody's said a word about the fact that
I've been wearing exactly the same suit and tie and
the white shirt for a year. But he stepped out
(33:58):
and said it that day, because that's same day his
co host, who at the time was a lady, called
Lisa Wilkinson. That day, she had been absolutely slammed with
hundreds of comments because people didn't like the clothing that
she wore on the television that day. And this was
a this was a regular occurrence. This happens all the time.
Because I'm on the TV. I'm following a bunch of
Instagram accounts for the TV hosts that I'm interviewed by
(34:21):
or that I work with from time to time, and
whenever they post any pictures of them, the threads are
full of comment after comment after comment of how beautiful
they are. Now, they're not posting anything about their looks,
they're not trying to look snazzy. They're simply saying I'm
here doing this gig, or I'm at home with the kids,
or here's what I cooked for dinner. And nevertheless, all
the comments are about their physical appearance. It's almost like
(34:42):
people feel compelled to say something they don't know what
to say, and so they comment on their looks. But
I can tell you I've never posted a picture, ever
posted a picture on my Instagram or on my Facebook
where people have chosen to make the majority of the
commentary about my physical appearance. Never happened. I mean, I
know that I'm not the most attractive guy in the world.
It's never ever happened. And I don't care that I'm
(35:02):
not the most attractive going in the world. I don't
have to be brad Pit. People don't value me for
my appearents. They value me for the work that I do.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
It's a super awkward place to be.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
I have to tell you I can, I can go
somewhere to do a TV segment or give a talk
on this topic, and often the first thing people will
say to me is something about how I look, even
in that moment.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Right, it still happens.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
I have an author Instagram account, which I'm not particularly
good at. I don't know how to do stories, et cetera,
et cetera. But I almost never post a picture of myself.
I'm not interested. I'm not interested in people's commentary. I'm
not interested in those moments where I have to worry
about how I look as I'm taking that picture, and
what's my hair doing and should I filter it or
should I not filter it.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
I just don't do it right. But that's a power
I have to be able to opt out.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
There are many people in jobs that can't opt out right,
like a woman working in news. It's an image focused profession.
There are there's a journalist I wrote about her a
little bit in Beauty Sick, Heidi Stevens the Chicago Tribune locally,
who's got very curly hair, like, that's it, it's just
curly hair. And she could write a column every year
with a collection of little hate mail she gets about
(36:14):
her hair, right, like, how can you leave your hair
like that?
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Your hair is a rat nest? How could you do that?
That's so unprofessional? And she's not even on TV.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
This is all just based on that little thumbnail picture
that you see next to a columnist. Wow, So just
imagine how that get gets turned up, right, And when
you're a woman in the public eye, and I have
to wonder all the time how many women would seek
out jobs, careers, volunteer opportunities in the public eye but
choose not to because they don't want that kind of
(36:43):
scrutiny about their parents. I think that's happening more than
we talk about.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
And your research shows that the cost to women in
terms of opportunity, which is what you've just described, is huge.
But it's not just that cost. It's the cost in
terms of the time. You know, when I've got to
go and do a TV spot. I walk in. They
throw a little bit of makeupy sort of stuff on
my face. It takes about a minute and a half. Yeah,
(37:09):
they go. I don't know what it is, but they
put some stuff on my face, which I remove as
soon as I'm off the TV. I get those facial
wipes and get rid of it. But I'm in and
out within about a minute and a half. They have
a look at my hair and say, oh, that's fine.
They don't even sit me in the chair. Whereas the
women who I'm often appearing on the television with, they'll
have to be there at least an hour ahead of
(37:29):
the segment. I stroll in fifteen minutes before the segment.
I'm in, I'm out, I'm done there at least an
hour before they're getting their head done. They're spending all
that time, that time that they could be reading a book,
or that time that they could be responding to him,
all that time that they could be building their strategic
plan for their business. And it's all of that money
that they've got to spend. I don't spend money on
my appearance, but women are expected to spend money on
(37:51):
the mascara that's going to change their life that you
mentioned for.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Just the basics, just the basic grooming. Now you're supposed
to get eyelashes glued on to your eyelash is once
a month so that it can save you time and
not having to wear a mask.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Here.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I used to get my nails done, and not only
did I get my nails done, but I got them
done like clear, so it was you know, I'm spending
this time and money. It's not even a color, so
it would be pretty low maintenance then, and my feet too.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
And I enjoyed it. I found it.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
It's like, I know, it's such a privilege we will
go do something like that, but it's super relaxing. But
I found that it got to this point where I
would think, like, oh no, I gotta like it's been
it's been three weeks, I gotta get my nails done,
and it started to feel like this burden, and I thought,
what would happen if I just stopped?
Speaker 3 (38:37):
And you know what happened. It It felt weird. For
a few weeks.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
I learned, like any reasonable human can how to file
my own nails, and it's one lest thing I have
to worry about.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Now and talking must be so much easier.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
It's just it's nice, right, It's nothing now, A pedicure
still feels good. I won't lie.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
But the point is you doing it because it feels good.
You're not doing it to impress somebody. So let's move
towards the final part of this conversation. It's been so
compelling to talk with you about this, but I really
want to talk about what we can do to help
our children, both boys and girls, to get past this
awful belief that ties self worth to appearance. I love
your suggestions in Beauty Sick. You've got the back end
(39:18):
of the book is full of suggestions, and something that
you did was so consistent with what I've read in
the research and what I've understood, and that is there's
very little point talking to our kids about how everything's
photoshopped and saying, you know, I don't believe what you
see because it's all photo shopped. Because to them, whether
it's fake or not, and whether they know it's fake
or not doesn't stop it being aspirational. You know, you're
(39:39):
still focusing on the appearance, even if you're saying, look
at everything and be critical of it and highlight, you
know where the air brushing has happened, or the forty
thousand dollars that have spent on camera and lighting and
equipment and people, it's still in front of them, it's
still being noticed. So let's start with our little ones,
you know, our three, four, five, six year olds. What
can parents do to use the lo likelihood that they're
(40:01):
going to be beauty focused?
Speaker 2 (40:03):
So the thing I love to say is that they're
actually a few pretty easy things you can do that
don't cost money, and they just take some practice. And
one of them is I'm encourage parents to consider making
their home and appearance commentary free zone, right where you
don't talk about the shape of other people's bodies or
who's gained or lost weight, or who's ugly or pretty.
(40:24):
And that means you, that means people on TV, that
means peers, That means even people you don't like, right,
even the politician you don't like. It means you know,
body shame that person either. And so you just give
this like continuous, gentle message that we leave space for
other conversations in this house. That's not how we think
about people. We don't think about them in terms of
(40:46):
whether they're beautiful or not. Now, I do think you
need to be careful there. You don't want to move
so far as to say how you look doesn't matter. Right.
Racism is real, anti fat bias is real. Right, Like,
all of these things can still be wrestled with, but
it means that you don't send the message to your
children that a part of what determines if they're good
(41:07):
or not is whether they're appealing to look at. So
just practice it, right. And if you have guests to
your home and they start saying like, oh, did you
see so and so last weight, just say, oh, we're
working really hard not to talk about those things so
much in this house. Do you mind if we change
the subject?
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Right? It's a pretty easy thing to do.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
And I love thinking about all the conversations that are
going to happen instead.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Right to me, that's so fun. Right. So that means
as a parent, you have to stop body shaming yourself.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
And that's such a big one, isn't it. As a parent,
how do we make sure that the comments that we
make about our own bodies, if we go to make
them at all, which so many of us do, How
do we make sure that those comments are either positive
or uplifting or focused. Something that you emphasized in your
book that I've adopted immediately. I thought, this is so perfect.
(41:58):
Is when we're going to talk about our bodies, we
don't talk about how they look. We talk about what
they do, right.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
I think especially for young children, because they're learning to
use their bodies. Right, So encourage them to think about
their bodies not from this objectified perspective, not from how
do they look to other people, but from the perspective
of what do they do for you? What do they
allow you to experience, what do they allow you to feel.
I've had some people say to me, oh, that's ablest, right,
(42:25):
because what if you're disabled. But that's I don't mean
that you have to be a marathon runner to appreciate
what your body does. Like, our bodies do all kinds
of things right there. They allow for creativity and communication,
you know, they allow us to connect with other people.
If you have children who are into athletics of any kind, right,
(42:45):
they allow that sort of thing. Bodies are super cool, right,
so teach your children about how cool they are, like
all the amazing things they can do and how they
can care for their bodies so that they can keep
doing cool things and not so that they can look
good to other people. Right, the best advice is to
just keep those conversations off the table.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
I just don't have them.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
If you were to extend that developmental trajectory from our
younger children into the older children, everything that you've just
said would obviously apply. Is there anything additional that you
would add to what parents can be doing to reduce
the focus on appearance with the tweens and teens.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
It's gonna get really hard in those tween years, right,
and I think you have to be very careful as
a parent not to Here's a psychological term you've probably
come across a lot in your work on parenting is reactants. Right, Like,
the minute you tell a child don't do that thing,
they're gonna want it more. And so I think you
have to step away from that temptation to say, like
you're being vain, you're being superficial, don't follow that Instagram account,
(43:47):
don't post selfies, don't do that. Right, You can't really
do that. You have to give children some space to experiment.
But I think one of the best gifts you can
give your child as they move into those years, no
matter what their gender is, is room to explore all
the different parts of themselves, right, So ask them questions
about what matters to them, what's inspiring to them, what
(44:09):
they're worried about lately, what they're thinking about. I don't
think we ask our children enough questions as they get
to that age. A lot of children that age are
quite willing to talk if you ask the right question,
and if you show that you're willing to listen right
and not butt in and tell them they're wrong and
try to redirect them. And I think giving tween girls
(44:30):
space to be something other than beauty queens or other
than people who are constantly worried about the fact that
they're not beauty queens is one of the best things
you can do. So help them develop their interests, help
them develop their passions, and then when they move into
the teenyars, here is maybe And it sound like insane
advice that I told you I love teenagers, and I do.
(44:51):
If your daughters, in particular are struggling with these issues,
it's time to get them angry, right.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
It's time to talk with.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Them about what a sick injustice this world does to
girls and women when it makes girls and women hate
their bodies. Right, it's time to ask them questions about
who benefits from that hatred, who's making money off of it? Right?
Whose life gets better when you don't like your body,
and whose life gets worse?
Speaker 3 (45:18):
And what does that mean? Right?
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Teenagers, as you know, are quite angry sometimes, so to me,
that's an opportunity, right, harness that anger. Right, let them
see the ways that they don't like what the world
is doing and set them on the path to make
in a better world. Right, teenagers are ready to make
(45:40):
a difference. I think we see this all around us
right now. We see teenagers doing amazing work, work quite frankly,
that we should have done right, and now they're taking.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
It upon themselves. And so I think you can.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Really give space for your teenagers to turn some of
that sadness and that despondency into appropriately targeted anger. Give
them a passion, give them a cause, let them make
their mark on the world. I think they're way more
ready to do that than we give them credit for
great answers.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Something that stands out to me from the earlier part
of what you were saying is just if I was
to restate it, I guess and reemphasize a little bit
of it. What I'm actually hearing you say is make
their world and their lives so full that they don't
have the time or the space to be worried about
how they look. And that doesn't mean overcram their curriculum
(46:33):
and the shape, but it means give them, give them
the capacity to be developing other things, other talents, other strengths,
other capacities, so that they're not sitting there staring at
their image in Instagram and trying to make it look
that little bit better.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Many years ago, I am so sorry I interrupted you there,
But many years ago I tried to do a study
of young women who weren't hurting in this way, like
who felt pretty good about their bodies.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
And weren't engaging and eating disordered behaviors.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
And we found this very tiny group of them, and
we just did this basic interview about like what did
your parents do growing up and how did this happen?
And what they told us is that it was nothing magic, right, Like, yeah,
they were probably a little more likely to have these
sort of like feminist leaning parents who were like trying
to do some of this deliberately, but mostly what they
said is it's just not something we focused on in
(47:23):
my family.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
We focused on other things. Yeah, yeah, And I think
that's the key.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
A friend of mine, Rebecca Sparrow, she has a great
following here in Australia and one of the things that
she emphasizes is with your tween and teen girls, go
through their Instagram accounts with them, go through the people
that they're following and get rid of all of the
people who are focused on fashion and appearance and instead
fill up your feed with artists and poets and influences
(47:49):
and people who can offer something other than a view appearance.
And it's such a simple thing to do, and I
wonder how often we've done it. The big question. We've
talked about little ones. We've talked about a tweens and teens,
but what about the mom who's listening right now, or
(48:10):
her husband or partner who is saying this has been
my wife. How does she get past this and how
does she make sure that she doesn't pass it on
to her kids, and how does a husband or partner
support her as she tries to get past it.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
So I've talked to so many women who they.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Kind of come to this topic a little late, and
they realize I've struggled with this my whole life and
I didn't mean to, but I passed these struggles on
to my daughter, and it's too late, and I blew it.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
And my message is always like, it is not too.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Late, right, if you have a tween or a teen,
or a young adult or even an adult daughter, it
is not too late. And there is something I think
just really beautiful about sitting down with your daughter and saying,
I realize that these are the messages I've been sending
to you, right, that I haven't been happy with my body,
and these are the ways it came out, and these
(49:08):
are the ways it might have affected you. And I
wonder if you want to work together with me to
change that, Like, here's some things I'm going to try
to do differently now.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
I wonder what you would think about that.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
A lot of the daughters I know would just start
sobbing with relief, right, They would so appreciate that kind
of raw honesty it is. It's not too late, right,
It's never too late. And if your concerns are severe, right,
if they're really affecting your well being and your mental health,
then I would also say, seek some help.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
If part of how they're influencing your children is because
the intensity of those negative emotions is so big that's
leaking out, right, then get some professional support in there, right,
so that you can learn how to you know, heal
yourself up a little and then create a better world
for your children too. But it's not too late, right,
(49:59):
even if you have adult chal and it's not too late,
And it's not too late to call your friends out either,
to say, like, I want to do things differently. I
don't want the first twenty minutes of every conversation we
have to be about weight gain or loss. I just
don't want to do that anymore. I have a friend
who she's a junior high teacher, and she said she'll
have these meetings with other teachers on zoom like we're
(50:20):
doing now.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
And at the first few minutes they all fuss with like, oh.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Do I have a double chin, showing I haven't been
able to call her my gray that it's like this
intro to their meeting. It's okay to just say no
to that, to say like, no, I've decided I want
a different psychological climate for myself, and it's going to
start with me creating it and with me inviting the
people I love to create it with me. Where We're
(50:45):
just not going to spend so much time on this.
There's so many other cool things to spend your time
on and your energy on.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
This has just been such a brilliant conversation.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
I've i fear I've gone into lecture, my number one mode.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
I've been as absorbed in this conversation as I was
with your book. The book is called Beauty Sick, How
the cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. It
is literally one of the best books I've read in years.
It's definitely in my top five over the last handful
of years, and I just loved it. I can't recommend
it enough. Before we wrap up, can I ask you
a couple of quick questions about those that Nissan nephew
(51:25):
of yours? Okay, because I always love to ask a
handful of questions at the end of every podcast, everyone
gets the same ones, rapid fire questions just about what
it's like to have little ones in our midst. So
if we asked your niece and nephew their favorite thing
to do with the coolest auntie ever, what would they say? Ooh.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
So my niece's around four.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
She's super into crafts and so actually for Christmas, I
got her this giant bin full of craft supplies and
that is something she loves right now. And I can't
wait till our pandemic lockdown is over and she and
I can make some mess with paints. And then I
really miss my he's just undertoo, and my nephew. I
miss him so much because one of my favorite things
(52:08):
to do with him is have him cuddle up next
to me on the couch and read a book to him,
and then when you finish the book, he scooches down,
goes and gets another book, brings it back, gets back up,
and I miss that. I miss those moments with him,
so I can't wait to do those things again.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Beautiful. Thank you. What's been your trickiest And I don't
know if you would have had too many with the
kids being so young, but what's been your trickiest auntie moment?
Speaker 3 (52:31):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (52:31):
I will say that I made a pledge never to
talk to my niece about her appearance, that I'm just
not going to do it. Figure I'll leave that to
other people in her life, and I'll be a different
place for her. But she is into Disney princess culture,
and it is very hard for me to sort of
maintain an openness around that when I really don't like it.
(52:52):
I really don't like those elements of the culture. And
when she's very excited and wants to talk to me
about her new princess thing and her pink tiara and
all of those things, I really struggle with that.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Okay, last question for you. If you could spend an
hour with this little niece and nephew at any age
at all. Let's say that isolation finishes and tomorrow afternoon
at three o'clock they're coming over to spend some time
with you, and they're walking into the living room at
whatever age you can choose. What age would you pick?
And why?
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Oh, I can't wait until they're you know, like twelve thirteen.
Speaker 3 (53:25):
I know this this sounds bizarre, but I love kids.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Once they get some angst, right once they're Once they're
a little angry and have that intensity, and to me,
that's such a cool window into the adults they're going
to become, and into what they're going to care about
and what their passions are. I can't I can't wait
until until they get a little little adolescent moody. That's
(53:50):
the age I'm interested in, and that's.
Speaker 1 (53:53):
When parents say, Auntieu are the best. Please take them
for a week, two weeks a year.
Speaker 3 (53:57):
Yes, my brother jokes that I will be able to
do at that time.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Absolutely perfect. Well, Renee, if people want to know more
about you and your book, Beauty Sick, where can they
go to get more information about this incredibly important and
really really smart work that you've been doing.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Thank you so much for the kind words. People can
go to Beautyseick dot com or if you're interested more
in the academic research side of things, my lab has
a website as well, which is Bartianmedia dot com and
if you're into Instagram, it's Beauty Underscore Sick.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing this time with
me and with our audience. You've been wonderfully generous and
shared so much.
Speaker 3 (54:39):
It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (54:41):
I hope you've gotten some insight into doctor Renee Engeln
as a result of this podcast. I love the quote
from Renee's grandfather that she mentioned earlier in the podcast.
Here is again, don't be too proud of your youth
or your beauty. You did nothing to earn them, and
you can do nothing to keep them. Isn't that great?
If you'd like more info about how I can help
your family to thrive and flourish, please visit Happyfamilies dot
(55:04):
com dotu. And as always, thank you very much to
Justin Royland for his work here in producing the podcast
making it sound absolutely fabulous, and thank you for listening
to a Happy Families podcast
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