Too painful to hug

[Guest guest]

Too painful to hug

The Body Snatchers

By Cyndi Tebbel

Finch Publishing, Sydney

$25

REVIEW BY TAMARA PEARSON

Don’t you think the concept of “diet” Coke is really

bizarre? This is the rationale of a junk-dominated

food industry trying to profit at the same time as a

cosmetics and diet industry. Cyndi Tebbel touches on

these crazy contradictions of capitalism (without

actually ever mentioning the evil “c” word) in her

book The Body Snatchers. She says, “This collective

state of mind ... fuelled by the ... messages of food

advertisements and supermarket shelves ... urge us

to fill up while, at the same time, offering daily

warnings that just about everything we put into our

mouth is a potential death sentence”.

In April 1997, Tebbel, then editor of New Woman

magazine, featured a size-16 supermodel on the cover

of the magazine. It was a hit with New Woman’s

readers, but when a cosmetics company withdrew its

advertising from the magazine, Tebbel was encouraged

to stop promoting “unhealthy imagery”. Later that year

she left New Woman and began a speaking tour around

the issue of body image, receiving much support. She

was then invited to write The Body Snatchers.

The book is a limited but interesting description of

the manufacturing of the “ideal” woman, and how women

are trained by the media to see themselves as only

bodies. It is a useful, constructive and intense

critique of the media, but dangerously one-dimensional

in about five different ways.

Tebbel sees the media as creating “one female role

model” and constructing an image that will create

demand for women’s cosmetics, which is true. But the

media and movie industries are more complicated than

that. These industries also reflect broader ideals of

women. This is why I think we are seeing some random

blossoming of alternate heroines on TV (e.g.,

Absolutely Fabulous, Desperate Housewives, The Nanny,

The L Word etc), and I don’t agree with Tebbel that

these are only token stunts.

“We’ve gone from corsets to bra burning and back

again”, She argues. “We’ve shelled out millions of

dollars on ... slimming companies.” Apparently we all

diet, and we’re all body conscious. Tebbel uses the

royal “we” throughout the book — as though all women

are of one mind and frustration, but worse — of the

same economic position. Most women in Australia (let

alone Third World countries) can’t afford to even

contemplate using the services of slimming companies,

let alone plastic surgery.

Tebbel’s unawareness of economic disparity leads her

to her solution: She argues that the only way to

change the status quo is to “vote with our wallets,

our pens and our PCs”, which inevitably means that

richer consumers have more “power” than poorer ones.

Should we blame the fashion designers, she asks. “Not

until we stop buying their clothes.” It seems a

consumer rebellion is the only solution. But what does

that mean? When you work 40-hours plus a week, do you

really have time to make your own clothes?

Whilst the menu change at Mc’s certainly

suggests a health food trend, Tebbel exaggerates how

health-obsessed we are, and I personally can’t relate

to her claims that “we” think eating for taste is seen

as too indulgent.

Tebbel also exaggerates when she argues, repeatedly

and tirelessly, that beauty is key to a woman’s

success. She never explains what she means by success,

so we have to assume she means the career, money and

fame kind.

Tebbel fails to analyse the media in a broader social

and economic context. However, her “insider’s”

perspective on the industry gives transparency to a

world we’re not usually allowed to see. Her stories of

what women have to do to be on the cover of a magazine

and cringe-worthy quotes of various publishers as they

try to justify their role in (basically) promoting

anorexia are quite disturbing.

Her background also shows through in the style of the

book — with its easy-to-read font and wording, shaded

insets with statistics, quotes, and short commentary,

and bold, attention grabbing titles for each short

chapter.

The Body Snatchers contains a tiny drop of history, a

little bit of an analysis of the racism involved in

the beauty myth, a lengthy account of the bigotry

larger people suffer from (she argues they receive

less support than drug addicts — I’m not sure.) We

learn about ageism in Hollywood, and how it’s not just

the cosmetic industry that profits from “thin

fashion”, but also drug companies and their diet

miracle cures.

Tebbel successfully critiques the media and prosecutes

its role in creating unrealistic female body idols,

but if you’re after a little more than this (such as

understanding women’s oppression, its causes, and if

you want to understand what kind of society allows

such magazines to flourish), then you’ll be

disappointed.

But, the reader will discover and come to know more

deeply, a troubling world, in which some women feel so

compelled to have plastic surgery, that in a survey

that Tebbel quotes, 61% of women with breast implants

found it too painful to hug.

From Green Left Weekly, September 28, 2005.

Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/644/644p25b.htm