Body Image

 Body Image

By Jake Kohl

     The importance of body image and the way one needs to look is becoming an epidemic in our western culture. Popularity and social status are placed on beauty and attractiveness, and our society as well as our parents and network of friends are playing into this critical error, which is damaging our moral ethics as well as our perception of who we truly are.  We place a price on maintaining body image that can lead to many psychological disorders, including the growing problem of “eating disorders” (Papalia, Diane, & Feldman, 2010).

     We correlate beauty with sexuality and push this on our children as being the acceptable norm. By the time children reach the age where body image is a concern, the damage may have already been done; especially when the parents didn’t maintain self control in the families eating habits, which has caused their children to become obese and later the child sees this as problem regarding their social status. Appearance is usually labeled on how one looks, dresses, and even how one carries their selves. Those that are obese have a preordained image based on social influence and media influence.

     Media plays a huge role in how we perceive body image and many of the clothing and images you see on TV are aimed at our children in this area. Recently, a controversial ad by “Abercrombie & Fitch, a popular store among teenagers, recently introduced the "push-up triangle," marketing the swim top to girls as young as 7 or 8” (Shipman, 2011). Media markets to children because children will tell their parents what they want. Many parents will buy these things and will even encourage their children to look pretty. I have even heard a teenage girl (17 years old) tell her younger sister who was 10 years old to “make herself look as if she has breasts, because this is what guys look for.” Of course, upon hearing this, I stepped in as a guy to contest this generic view. Other media examples are actors, who appear thin, and beautiful, or people in magazines, child clothing, billboards, and I could keep going on, as to the types of people the media uses; it’s all about body image.

     Our society draws towards beauty, a natural form, and while we naturally draw towards beauty, we do not have to encourage or alter it in any way. Our moral ethics, as I stated, is declining into a judgmental standard that we place on our children; more so for girls than for boys. Self expression is leading to decay, and leading to a poor image we hold over our own heads. When you encourage children to dress and look like an adult, both in body and dress, it becomes easy to understand and see the increase in sex crimes against children, at least in my opinion.

     Personally, I believe that the growing “love” of self image is doing nothing more for our children than promoting emotional, and psychological issues that run deep.  I believe it also promotes sexual curiosity and exploration, including premarital sexual relationships in which all is damaging to our children and to our future. When having and implementing a biblical worldview, we can see from scripture that our image is that of Christ, our image should be on loving one another, just as Christ loves us. Our bodies belong to God and are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We are commanded to keep them clean, and to avoid the thoughts of lust and self satisfaction. Not looking to ourselves and what we can get out of the world but what we can do and how we can use ourselves to glorify Him. In Genesis 1, we can see on the sixth day that God saw all that He created and said it was good. We are good (image) regardless what the enemy tries to convince us; our body is created by God and God created us in His image, not our own. In Galatians 5:14, we are told that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (paraphrased). We have a problem of loving ourselves in the world which was given to us. We see so much hatred in the world and when we look at the hatred and the lack of love we have for ourselves, we can then begin to understand why there is so much hate. Love begins with you, and if we can master the commandment of love, then we will not break the 10. Think about that! Our image belongs to our King, we are His and He says our image is good, and that should settle it!

 References

Papalia, D. E & Feldman, R. D. (2011). A child's world: Infancy through adolescence (12th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Shipman, C. (2011, March, 28) Padded bikini top For 7-year-olds draws parents' ire, ABC News/US, Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/US/abercrombie-fitch-padded-bikini-top-year-olds-parents/story?id=13236904