The role of the mass media in promoting a thin standard of bodily attractiveness for women

Thinness and body shape of Playboy centerfolds from 1978 to 1998

“…The latter ®nding was con®rmed in a study that examined the curvaceousness of female models and found a decline from 1950 to 1980. 13 A later study extended the Playboy data and showed that the body weights of centerfolds had plateaued over the years 1979 ± 1988, although Miss America contestants had decreased in body size over the same time frame. 14 The purpose of the present study was to extend the Playboy data for the past 20 y (1978 ± 1998) and to compare with previous reports.…”

An Examination of General and Specific Motivational Mechanisms for the Relations Between Body Dissatisfaction and Eating Behaviors

“…Among the different sources of social pressure, the media has been proposed as one of the most important purveyors of the cultural expectations of thinness for women (Garner & Garfinkel, 1982;Gordon, 1988;Harrison & Cantor, 1997;Silverstein, Perdue, Peterson, & Kelly, 1986;Stice, 2001). Indeed, content analyses of print and televised media have demonstrated a trend toward increasingly leaner and less curvaceous representations of women throughout the past few decades (e.g., Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz, & Thompson, 1980;Owen and Laurel-Seller, 2000;Sypeck, Gray, & Ahrens, 2004).…”

Psychological Correlates of Anorexic and Bulimic Symptomatology

“…They suggested that this new trend toward fitness may serve as a more discrete and socially accepted form of purging. Silverstein, Peterson, and Perdue (1986) implicated the media further with their findings that women's magazines portrayed a more noncurvaceous figure during the mid-1920s and 1960s, time periods that correlated with a higher proportion of very thin women in college as well as a higher incidence of eating disorders. Still, they raised the question as to why certain women strive toward the slim standard.…”