9781626569768

Unapologetic Inquiry #13
How has body shame fueled your consumerism? What do you buy to
“be normal,” “fit in,” or “fix your flaws”?
Our exploration into advertising and media is at its root a critique of the
exploitative nature of capitalism and consumerism. Our economic systems
shape how we see our bodies and the bodies of others, and they ultimately
inform what we are compelled to do and buy based on that reflection.
Profit-greedy industries work with media outlets to offer us a distorted
perception of ourselves and then use that distorted self-image to sell us
remedies for the distortion. Consider that the female body type portrayed in
advertising as the “ideal” is possessed naturally by only 5 percent of
American women. Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches
tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and
weighs 117. Now consider a People magazine survey which reported that
80 percent of women respondents said images of women on television and
in the movies made them feel insecure. Together, those statistics and those
survey results illustrate a regenerative market of people who feel deficient
based on the images they encounter every day, seemingly perfectly matched
with advertisers and manufacturers who have just the products to sell them
(us) to fix those imagined deficiencies. 18
Buying to Be “Enough”
A 2013 article from InStyle magazine reported that the average American
woman spends $15,000 on beauty products over the course of her lifetime.
Nearly $3,770 is spent on mascara, $2,750 on eye shadow, and $1,780 on
lipstick. 19 That, my friend, is an epic amount of lipstick. If I handed you
$15,000 to read this book (I really want folks to read this book), what
would you do with it? Let me make some guesses. Pay down debt? Put a
down payment on a house? Take a vacation to some exotic location? Help
your children or loved ones? Go back to school? Buy an alpaca? Whether I
guessed your specific answer correctly or not, I am willing to bet five
million of Bill Gates’s dollars that you did not say, “Sonya, I would buy a