TV changes teenagers’ outlook in Fiji

Western Fiji was a rural community, with very little knowledge of Western popular culture – until television arrived in 1995, with a preponderance of slick and glamorous American drama serials plus ads for new consumer products in the breaks.

Researchers from the Harvard medical school’s Adult Eating and Weight Disorders programme saw a great opportunity to explore a direct link between TV and changes in the way teenage girls thought about their body shape and size [1].

Slimness means success?

Traditionally, a hearty appetite 
and being heavy have been highly 
valued in Fiji, for both men and 
women. A robust, even fat, body 
is thought to represent wealth and 
a strong, loving family network. 
The often reed-thin (and possibly 
surgically-enhanced) female 
bodies on display in shows like 
Beverly Hills 90210 and Xena, 
Warrior Princess popular in the 
1990s and much-watched by the
 new-to-TV Fijians, were at the other end of the spectrum.

And yet these very different body shapes, and the clear implication that they were beautiful and desirable, certainly had an effect, according to the interviews carried out by the Harvard team.

They selected 30 teenage girls to speak to in depth, about their viewing habits, about what they liked and why they liked it, and asked them to think about the effect the actors had on them – with surprisingly strong results, considering TV had only been available for three years at the time of the study.

The main overt connection made was between slimness and economic and social success. Many of the girls said that they wished they could look like the stars of their favourite shows, because they would be able to ‘work harder’ – being fat was seen by them now as ‘lazy’ while slimness was something that permitted faster, more productive work.

The researchers speculate that the materially-wealthy lifestyles shown on TV were being contrasted with the much more subsistence-level lives in rural Fiji, and the conclusion was drawn by the girls that slimness itself had actually led to improved economic and social status in the world,  and could somehow do the same for Fiji.

A few of the girls reported their own, or friends’, attempts to change their body shape as a direct effect of watching TV; some concern was expressed about some girls who try to lose weight and who then have an ‘uncontrollable’ diet, ending up ill as a consequence.  Medical sources in Fiji confirmed that Western-style eating disorders were starting to emerge at this time, too.

More to it than TV…

The study does not insist on the simple equation that TV causes anorexia and other food issues. Other work shows that societies undergoing major social and/or economic change (as Fiji was and still is), demonstrate a clear tendency to eating disorders. But television is a means of comparing oneself to the rest of the world.

As the researchers say, "It is as though a mirror was held up to these girls in which they perhaps saw themselves as poor and overweight."  

References

1. Television, Disordered Eating, and Young Women in Fiji: Negotiating Body Image and Identity during Rapid Social Change, by Anne E Becker.