The first man to ever see me topless was my plastic surgeon, as he took a felt pen to my breasts outlining incision points. My eyes burned with tears of humiliation. I was 16 years old and getting a consultation for a breast reduction.
My entire adolescence I was the bustiest girl in class. My mother bought me my first training bra for my 10th birthday and by the time I was 14, she was tracking down size “F” cup brassieres for me. It is incredibly hard to love your body when everywhere you go boys are telling you to “take it off” and middle age men are openly staring down your shirt.
This concept of body image, the way we see ourselves, is so deeply ingrained in popular culture it is impossible to escape yet also so difficult to talk about. We see stories on our newsfeeds about the latest celebrity eating disorder followed by airbrushed magazine covers and it changes the image we see in the mirror.
“One thing we do, and we don’t have to do this consciously, is we are always figuring out what percentage of people are this weight. So if we are constantly bombarded with images of skinny women, we actually overestimate the prevalence of skinny women. When really, in reality, half of women are a size 14 or larger,” said Cynthia Gangi, an assistant professor at The University of Tampa who studies health psychology.
Health psychology is an area that specializes in the connection between the mind and its effects on body. Gangi was involved in a study with female students on campus that found most of the participants developed worse self-image as they compared themselves to other students. In a sample survey I passed around to UT students, 67 percent of students said they have felt pressured to look a certain way based on what the media projects.
Deepali Puri, a freshman human performance major, said she feels pressure to have a particular body type from not only media and other students but also from her intended career. Puri hopes to be a fitness trainer, and to attract clients, she is expected to look fit.
“It’s a huge pressure and it does weigh on my mind a lot,” Puri said. “I am friends with a lot of people who are skinnier than me and tinier than me, and I always feel like the odd one out because I am built differently.”
Puri believes strongly in putting in the effort to change your diet and workout to have the best possible fitness and health, but she says her body image depends on the day. There was a time where she focused on her clothing and her weight but only to look better for others rather than for herself. She has also noticed that even the girls who are smaller than her struggle with their own body image.
Stress to conform is not a problem exclusive to women and sometimes goes ignored with men. Alex Borrell, a junior business management major, often feels that he has to live up to expectations other people set for him. Borrell noticed that men might deal with those pressures differently than women.
“I don’t think guys talk about the insecurities, necessarily. But if you are in a group of friends and you all like to work out, and try to be fit, then you might start bouncing ideas off each other,” Borrell said. “But I don’t think you would ever talk about how much weight you would want to lose or what you think is bad about yourself.”
Borrell feels that men are sometimes more accepting of the physical realities of the body types they are born with, which makes it easier. However, with all the focus on plastic surgery and diet methods it may be harder to accept for women.
“It sucks because I know a lot of girls who look beautiful, who are skinny, even feel more pressure,” Puri said. “And they go off the rocker with all these eating disorders and all of that.”
One of the more surprising facts I learned from Gangi was just how high the instances of eating disorders are on college campuses. Twenty-five percent of college women engage in bingeing and purging as a form of weight control, according to the National Association for Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD).
“I have a friend that struggles with bulimia because of how she sees her body,” said Anna Papageorgiou, a junior criminology major. “She feels like she’s fat when she is the tiniest little person I have ever seen in my life.”
Papageorgiou is a student from Cyprus. During her time at UT, she has found a big difference in the way people act about their bodies than back home in Cyprus. She has large breasts and a small body, coming in at only a little over five feet herself. She talked about a lot of the same struggles I had growing up, which bonded us in an unconventional way.
“In the U.S., I have seen people react to me differently when it was their first time meeting me, especially guys. They thought they could get with me because I have boobs and they got this idea that I am easy from the way my body is,” Papageorgiou said. “What did I do to make you think that I would do that? I know how I carry myself and I do not carry myself like that.”
When she first moved here, all the unwanted attention from people made Papageorgiou feel bad about herself when she never had before. She also has looked at breast reduction surgery, for both health reasons and to put aside from of the negative factors her body attracts.
“There is a lot of judging around here,” Papageorgiou said. “And here, even me, I am the Greek Girl with the Boobs or the Greek Loud Girl. They do not really have anything good to say.”
I embarked on this journey because I feel as if we as a society do not talk about body image enough. We see the Dove and Aerie Real ad campaigns about advertising real women, but we do not discuss the real effects negative body images have on us. In the survey I conducted, about 41 percent of both male and female students said they considered plastic surgery to fix their body issues.
Everywhere you look in society, there is someone telling you that who you are is not enough. Between reality television shows giving transformations and commercials selling diet pills, very few voices send positive messages. It affects all of us as a community at UT, especially when 95 percent of those with eating disorders are between the age of 12 and 26, according to the ANAD.
As a culture, we need to address the damage we do to each other by letting such a huge issue remain ignored. Body image seems difficult to talk about, yet it is possibly the one aspect of life we can all relate to with each other.