Body Image

In an occidental world constantly surrounded by media featuring 00-sized female and beach-bodied males, it's no wonder that so many of the rest of us are self-conscious. Who decided that thin is beautiful?  What happened to the days where beauty was defined by Marilyn Monroe and curvaceous was synonymous with beauty? How often in the media do we see beautiful acts by people instead of outer beauty? What makes a man a man and a woman a woman?

These are the types of questions that need to be addressed in high schools to make students really think about what is "accepted" as beautiful, and to change this generation's view of beauty before it's too late.  Body image is a very important issue to address in high schools, especially, as adolescents are experiencing a huge amount of physical change and have a particularly large need to feel accepted by their peers.

Having just been out of high school for a few years, I can clearly remember the pressures there were to look a certain way. I knew then, and I know even more now, that it's not okay to make students feel like they have to fit a cookie cutter mold to be accepted. Because in reality, everyone is different, and everyone, absolutely everyone, is beautiful in their own way - and I fully believe that. Students are being bombarded with these negative body image issues every day while watching tv, on billboards on the way to school, in magazines at the doctor's office, and in countless other ways, to the point where it's virtually inescapable.

How, then, can we as teachers overcome this massive collection of messages being sent to our students almost 24/7, when we only have them for a 60-minute class, 5 times a week?

We discussed some options in class this week, and I agree with all of those, but for me personally, I found it a bit tougher to incorporate this into my music classroom.  After class, I started brainstorming ways that might be able to help students understand that beauty exists in every one of them.  One of the ideas I thought of was to give students a role model of a professional player on their instrument. There's lots of professional musicians that are not typically what we'd see as 'beautiful' in today's society, yet they're still seen as not only popular, talented, and outstanding performers, but also beautiful. Take a look at Aretha Franklin. She wasn't by any means a small woman, but when she opened her mouth to sing, people listened. Dizzy Gillespie was a larger man, but he played trumpet like an angel. Or take Beethoven, for example, who was only 5 foot 3, and he's considered one of the greatest composers of all time. The list goes on and on. 

In music classes, I also feel like there's often a stigma surrounding instrument choice. In my high school, for example, I played trombone, a typically male instrument, and of 9 of us, there was only me and one other girl. The one male clarinet player was often teased for picking a 'girly' instrument and the opposite was true for my female friend who played tuba. Most of the time, the teasing was in good fun, and the players laughed it off, but after a while, the comments must have been discouraging, to say the least. So then, by providing the clarinet player with male role models like Benny Goodman, perhaps one of the best clarinet players the world has ever seen, students would be able to see that a good musician can look like anything. It's what comes out of the instrument/voice that makes great music. A parallel can be drawn between instruments and people, then: It's not what they look like, but what 'music' comes out of them that determines their beauty- their actions and words are larger factors in determining who they are than their outwards appearance.

I find it so disheartening that teens are so often very willing to change who they are in order to be accepted by a certain group of individuals. I hate to admit it, but it seems like every school has the "Mean Girls" who dress the same, wear the same makeup, talk the same way and are admired by the rest of the student body.  

Body image media affects us in to many ways, by assigning an hierarchy of beautiful based on age, skin colour, gender, size, hair/eye colour and more. When this affects students negatively and forces them to believe that if they don't fit this description, they are not beautiful, it is the start of a downward spiral. As soon as they begin to believe that they're not beautiful, their self-esteem lowers, and they become less confident. Lower self-esteem has been directly related to doing more poorly academically, and may lead to all sorts of other personal and psychological problems.  I think there needs to be some kind of program put into schools (or maybe there is already?) to address the many issues surrounding body image in high schools. I know there have been programs implemented that advocate healthy eating habits and physical activity, but what about being mentally happy? Students need to know that they are meant to be the way they are, and they are beautiful that way.