Accordingly, ageing creates new opportunities for discrepancies between women’s bodies and cultural beauty ideals. Indeed, cross-sectional research supports a relationship between ageing anxiety and both body dissatisfaction and EDs. As such, the relative stability of body dissatisfaction across age groups is, in some ways, surprising. Some evidence, however, suggests that older women may more frequently employ cognitive strategies to partially offset their increasing distance from our societies’ conceptualization of the ideal woman. It also may be that the nature of women’s body image concerns change and that they have not been adequately assessed by approaches that were developed with, and for, younger women.
Lastly, there may be cohort effects. More specifically, researchers may increasingly find higher levels of body dissatisfaction in older women over time as these women have grown up in a more toxic body image climate than those of previous generations.We should note that although most research suggests that cross-sectional samples across the female lifespan report similar levels of body dissatisfaction on standardized measures, a few studies indicate that body dissatisfaction is slightly lower in some (but not all) domains for women in older adulthood (i.e., over age 60). For instance, in a large cross-sectional sample of women over 50, being older was associated with decreased concern in certain facets of body image (e.g., that weight or shape negatively affected life, lesser importance of weight or body shape on self-perception), but not others (e.g. being moderately to extremely upset with gaining five pounds) . In summary, women across the lifespan appear to report similarly elevated levels of dissatisfaction with their bodies, although women in older adulthood (60 years and older) may report less dissatisfaction in some domains such as a perception that weight and shape negatively affected life, in comparison to younger women.
Fat talk and old talk
Numerous sociocultural, intrapersonal and interpersonal factors contribute to girls and women’s body dissatisfaction. One factor that has received increasing attention is “fat talk”(e.g., “I’m so fat,” “Wow, you look great, have you lost weight?”). The term fat talk was coined by Nichter and Vuckovic to describe the body image talk in which pre- and adolescent girls engage when talking about the size and shape of their bodies. Nichter and Vukovic reported that this population used fat talk for impression management (i.e., to increase social likeability and decrease perceptions of arrogance). Fat talk is hypothesized to increase a sense of inter-connectedness between girls and women; yet at the same time, fat talk reinforces the thin-ideal and decreases the opportunity for girls to interact in more meaningful ways.
Empirical research has since documented that fat talk also is common in college-aged women and pernicious. In cross-sectional samples, fat talk is associated with body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, internalization of the thin-ideal, and ED pathology. Clarke, Murnen, and Smolak found that fat talk predicted unique variance in ED symptoms and body shame. Further, Stice, Maxfield and Wells found that a mere 3–5 minutes of exposure to fat talk significantly increased body dissatisfaction among undergraduate women, as compared to exposure to non-appearance-related conversations. Finally, Arroyo and Harwood found evidence that fat talk explains a significant amount of variance in body dissatisfaction, perceived pressure to be thin and depression. This research also found that FT longitudinally mediated the relationship between negative body image and broader mental health concerns.
I’m not just fat, I’m old: has the study of body image overlooked “old talk”? (PDF)
Source: Journal of Eating Disorder
Pages: 1 · 2
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