Why body image campaigns get it wrong

Every once in a while, my Facebook feed becomes flooded with pictures of students holding up signs or changing their profile pictures as part of the newest campaign to encourage acceptance of one’s body. These photographs are usually captioned with some encouraging phrase, such as “Everyone is beautiful,” to inspire people to talk about their bodies and how they feel about them.

No question, problems like anorexia, bulimia and general body image issues are very serious, and it’s important for the University to help students address them. Despite these good intentions, however, I believe that the central themes of these campaigns hurt, rather than help, the cause.

There are two traits that must come together in order for people to have insecurities about their bodies. The first is that these people must feel that their bodies aren’t very beautiful or attractive. The second is that they must base a large amount of their self-worth on their attractiveness. Only when people possess both traits can they really be hurt by their body image. It doesn’t hurt someone to be bad at something that they don’t really care about. For instance, I’m a terrible painter. Nonetheless, I don’t value myself based on my painting ability, and so this doesn’t hurt me.

These campaigns always attack the first of these two issues. They try to make us believe that everyone’s paintings are fantastic, at least in some way. And while yes, there may be someone who would think my paintings are good, perhaps even amazing, I know that most people would not. Furthermore, almost everyone would agree that there exist many much better painters than me.

After enough time, effort and USG campaigns, could I be convinced that my paintings are good? Perhaps. More likely I’d begin to believe that they have some unique and interesting quality about them, even if most people don’t consider them to be wonderful. Even that much is uncertain though.

To me, this is exactly what these “love your body” campaigns achieve. They are never going to convince everybody at this school that their body is wonderful and perfect. At the same time, they exacerbate the second problem I alluded to earlier, that of students correlating their self-worth with their attractiveness.

For example, take the recent USG “As I Am” campaign, which collected pictures of students holding up signs with the question “What do you feel about your body and why?” along with their answers. Looking at picture after picture of students talking about their bodies and how they feel about them implies to me that my body is something I should be highly concerned with. These pictures tell me that the people around me consider their appearance very important to them and that perhaps I should, too. They make me focus on how I eat. They make me self-conscious about how my friends and peers perceive my beauty. They tell me that I live in a society that really cares about how I look.

All of this contributes to a subconscious belief that I should base some of my self-worth on my body and my attractiveness. As I said earlier, without this belief, it’s very difficult for someone to have body image issues.

So, instead of running campaigns that focus on “being beautiful,” let’s instead try to explain why it shouldn’t matter. USG should be running campaigns that highlight the great qualities and abilities of the many talented students here independent of their appearances. A much better question for the “As I Am” campaign would have been “Why do you love yourself?” or “What do you believe makes you great?” Questions like these tell students that the society around them doesn’t judge them based on their body and encourages them to think about the things they do well.

While I commend the tireless efforts of the many students and faculty who work to rid the plague of body image problems from this campus, we are looking for the solution in the wrong place. Our current approach not only fails to tackle the problem, but is actually detrimental. If we want a happier campus, we need to encourage students to focus on what causes them to “be” great, rather than what makes them “look” great.

Colter Smith is a sophomore from Bronxville, N.Y. He can be reached at crsmith@princeton.edu.