We Are Amazing

Hello readers!  Apologies for my long silence – most of my time and energy have been taken up with work and cycle training recently – but there is no excuse for not writing and I will endeavour to post a bit more regularly in the future (people tell me one of the best ways to get good blog readership is to post regularly, so I hope I still have some despite my atrocious irregularity!!).

I should take a leaf from his book and blog more often!

I’d like to clarify that the fact I haven’t published anything on here in a while doesn’t mean I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the things I write about.  I suppose I’ve had less energy to think and write about these things because work has been tough going, but right now I’m sort of feeling a new lease of life and hoping it lasts!

Recently I’ve met and had discussions with a fair few people who share my views on mental health, body image, etc.  The feeling I get is there are a lot of us, which makes it even more frustrating that things aren’t changing more quickly.  Anyway, my favourite encounter happened a few weeks ago when I discovered a new musical hero, who by fortunate coincidence was the support act at a gig I went to.  She goes by the name Philippa Hanna, and one of her songs in particular struck a chord with me (pin not intended!!).  Well, more to the point, the sentiment behind the song struck a chord (this is one thing I really like about this girl - she is a proper singer-songwriter and gave a little synopsis of each song before performing it - nice touch!). 

Philippa talked of how in the past she would do things like go on crazy diets to try and conform to the image of ‘beauty’ prescribed by the media.  Sometimes she thought that she couldn’t get a record deal because physically she wasn’t beautiful enough.  Then, she tells us, she realised it wasn’t necessary to do this, that she was beautiful the way she was, that each one of us should be happy with ourselves because “no one else can be you”.  She then wrote a lovely song called I Am Amazing, which illustrates her change of heart and encourage others to challenge negative thoughts about themselves.  I don’t feel I’ve done this justice as I remember Philippa putting it a lot more nicely and eloquently than I have!  But the point is that there are just too many people striving for unrealistic and impossible ideals of ‘beauty’ because it is drummed into is culturally that this is what we should do.  We need to break free from this viscous circle of media distortion and unhealthy behaviour. 

Let's stop striving for unrealistic ideals of physical beauty

Mental illness is on the up, particularly amongst young people, and I feel that this problem is a big contributing factor to this.  Probably my favourite lyric from the song is Not gonna listen to the voices of my enemies today.  I see the harmful ideals being imposed on people by today’s Western culture almost as an enemy that needs to be challenged, and re-shaped into a healthier form.  This is one of several big cultural changes that I strongly feel need to take place, and I’m determined to contribute to making this happen.

After I saw Philippa Hanna perform, I was fortunate enough to have a brief but interesting conversation with her and told her how pleased I was to hear her speaking the way she had about body image and the media.  She mentioned to me that there have been attempts in the past to pass a law the required all airbrushed images to be labelled as such.  Sadly such a law has not been passed.  Personally I think this would be a very positive step towards reducing the current problem whereby such a great number of young people are taking unhealthy steps towards unobtainable ideals in appearance.  Perhaps my next step will be to start a petition to make this happen… Who’s with me?!

That's Not Real To Me

The song this post’s title comes from is Real To Me by good old Brian McFadden!  I’ll be talking all about how so much of what we see in the media in today’s society isn’t real, and the difficulties that we face in distinguishing what is real and what isn’t.

What inspired me to write this post is something I saw on TV on Sunday.  I caught the second episode of Superstar, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s latest reality talent show, in which he searches for a ‘Jesus’; someone to play the lead role in Jesus Christ Superstar.  To my surprise, Jonathan Ansell (or ‘the blond one out of G4’) appeared on the show.  He’d got through to the boot-camp-style training stage of the show but was sadly sent home at that point.  Anyway, there ended up being a bit of an uproar on Twitter where Jonathan received a lot of stick for being ‘arrogant’, as a result of him being edited to be portrayed in such a light on the show. 

 

Now, back in the day I was a MASSIVE G4 fan (and proud, might I add!) and have followed Jon’s solo career to certain extent since they disbanded.  As a result, I’ve met him quite a few times at gigs and happen to know that he is actually a really lovely guy and has a huge amount of time and respect for his fans.  But 10 minutes on TV showing viewers a couple of moments that don’t paint him in a good light and bang!  A great number of people is left with an inaccurate, negative, but probably lasting impression of his personality.

On a brighter note, Ben Elton has written some quite entertaining novels that illustrate this propensity of reality TV producers to edit people in whichever way they like to make a more entertaining show (namely, Dead Famous and Chart Throb.  Dead Famous in particular is a good read, in my opinion).  Chart Throb basically takes the mick out of singing competitions like The X Factor.  In this story, the Simon Cowell-like producer of the show uses the powers of television editing to make some perfectly reasonable people seem like complete idiots.  For example, a sound-bite of “I’m not claiming I’m the next Elvis” would later be cut down to “I’m the next Elvis”, to make a humble individual seem perfectly arrogant.  Although it’s obviously a fiction book, I wouldn’t mind betting this is a fairly accurate, if slightly exaggerated, representation of how things work on these show in real life! 

As well as being damaging to individuals’ reputations, the media’s portrayal of certain things can also be damaging on a much wider scale to it’s consumers.  I’m talking particularly about media influence on body image, ideal self and self-esteem.  As you may have picked up on in previous posts, body image is something I feel really strongly about and there is a lot of work to be done by various parties to diminish the deep-set problem of poor body-image and self-esteem in modern Western society.  The media has a key role to play in this issue, with the use of airbrushing to create unrealistic ideals in appearance that real people can never hope to achieve, and for that matter shouldn’t hope to achieve!

An example of the images used in Media Smart's educational package

Fortunately, awareness of this problem seems to be on the up, and the Government’s Body Confidence Team has recently worked in conjunction with Media Smart to create an educational package which is designed to teach 11 year-olds about airbrushing and how to distinguish between what is and isn’t real; what images they should and shouldn’t aspire to be like.  What’s really great about this package is that it uses images of really famous people, like Britney Spears and Keira Knightly, and shows children how these people look before and after airbrushing.  This should help to give people the tools, from a young age, to view media images critically and learn how to avoid striving for unrealistic ideals in their appearance.  There is a lot of work still to do, but I think this is a great start.

I could go on about body image all day, but for now I’ll finish there.  Please do leave comments if you have any views on this, and please do come back for more on my views on body image in later posts.  As always, thanks for reading!