Body image issues highlighted in documentary screening

As part of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, Dr. Brian Petersen of the University's Counseling Center organized two film screenings and a Q&A session with the filmmakers. This included "Eating Disorders, Body Image, Perfectionism" which was held in the Student Union on Feb. 23.

The event was sponsored by the Counseling Center, Dyson College of Arts and Science's Body and Mind (BAM) House, Women's and Gender Studies and The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA).

Dr. Petersen opened up the event with an introduction. "In addition to Pace students, other students from New York area schools came out to take part in this important discussion," Petersen said.

Assistant Professor of Communications Studies Dr. Emilie Zaslow then discussed how media and society influences our definitions of beauty.  She introduced the concept of "mass beauty" and how it only developed in the late 1900s.

"Women then were not, before this time, offered or persuaded to buy products to create socially sanctioned versions of beauty…So the significance of natural beauty faded and instead a produced beauty, manufactured beauty–a painted woman, quickly became the ideal." Dr. Zaslow said.

Dr. Zaslow continued to explain the transformation of the standards of beauty throughout history and how society and the media, especially the cosmetics industry, formed our modern idea of beauty today and the feminine ideal.

 Zaslow added, "The cultural imperative is of course injected into our whole cultural landscape and perpetuated through a mass media that is supported by our investment in beauty and obsessions with thinness, whiteness and flawlessness."

The first film shown was a Sundance Award-winning short documentary by Jesse Epstein called Wet Dreams & False Images.  Epstein filmed it in a barbershop and talked to the men there about their thoughts on beauty.

One of the men, Dee, had photos on the wall of all of these women that he thought were perfect.  Epstein then showed them interviews with artists who edit the photos. 

They revealed that even models and actresses like Halle Berry have skin flaws and other things that they change to make them look the way they do in photos.

"Just walking down the street, there are a million billboards.  So, I guess why I made this movie was to sort of think about like ‘what happens to all of these messages that we're just getting bombarded with?'" Epstein said.

After the film screening, the floor was open to questions for Epstein.  One student asked a question about if it can be said that what the photo editors do is art. 

In response, Epstein said,    "You could say that the beauty industry is evil or something, but actually we're all human beings kind of creating perfect images of ourselves and trying to live up to it."

"But what I think is dangerous is when people don't know or understand that there's artists behind these images creating, you know, the images to be perfect and people think that that's actually attainable."

At one point in the film it was shown how one of the photo editors changed a woman that was "too thin" and made her look fuller.  A student commented that "thin is no longer in."

The second film was a documentary called Beauty in the Eyes of the Beheld by Liza Figueroa Kravinsky.  Kravinsky gathered a group of women of different ages and races who had been referred to her as beautiful.  She interviewed these women on their experience in growing up beautiful and how people perceived them.

"My film demonstrated by example that definitions of beauty in real life are more diverse that those portrayed in the media and that being physically beautiful is overrated in terms of life happiness," Kravinsky said.

Another Q&A session followed the film screening. "The discussions at Pace went very well. The questions we got from the audience were very thoughtful and passionate.  One woman said that our films made her feel better about herself and that just made my day," Kravinsky said.

Kravinsky continued, "I am hoping that others would advocate for a screening of my film at their schools, universities, or organizations.   One way we can challenge the mainstream media's unhealthy obsession with beauty is to support alternative media like Beauty in the Eyes of the Beheld and Wet Dreams and False Images."

Dr. Peterson stated, "I was asked to program more events on this theme and the Pace Counseling Center will be purchasing a copy of Beauty for future use in training members of the Pace community."

"Beauty in the Eyes of the Beheld challenges some of our key beliefs about how people define and experience beauty.  Most compelling is the way in which Liza captures the voices of women for whom beauty has been experienced as burdensome, all-defining, and sometimes painful. 

The screening at Pace generated a lively discussion and left the nearly 100 attendees thinking critically about the role of normative beauty in the construction of self identity, family relationships and labor," Zaslow said.