The glossy graphic designs that hang on the gallery walls at the Art Institute of Tampa are familiar — or at least the faces are. The pop singer Gwen Stefani poses in a wet, clingy white blouse, soaked in her namesake fragrance. R&B star Eve vamps for the camera in a skinny black tie, red MAC lipstick and not much else: Minuscule text on the side of the image asks for money to fund AIDS/HIV research. Both are advertisements pulled from national teen magazines by local teen girls who decided they were promoting unrealistic and unhealthy body images. Not to mention totally grody.
For the last several years, Argosy University and the Art Institute of Tampa have teamed up with the nonprofit Ophelia Project to raise awareness for National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, which runs the last week of February. Nikki Stokes, director of community programs for the Ophelia Project, organized last year's "be comfortable in your own genes" campaign, which produced an intergenerational photo exhibit of women in jeans. But this year, the high-school girls in Ophelia's teen leadership program, known as Teen Ambassadors, looked outside themselves — to advertising and the 3,000 images the average American sees every day.
They did not like what they saw.
The girls, 73 of them, are on the first rung of Ophelia's leadership-training ladder for young women in Hillsborough County. Since its inception in 2002 as an initiative of the YMCA, the Ophelia Project has been empowering girls and young women all over Hillsborough County, including Nikki Stokes, who first came to the Ophelia a few years ago as a volunteer on its Young Women's Leadership Board. The Ophelia Project's school-based curriculum in violence prevention, self-esteem and positive peer relations, girls' health and leadership development is sought after by public and private schools alike, and its popularity led the OP to break away from the YMCA in 2006 after it acquired its own 501(c)(3) nonprofit status as OPBI, Inc. There's even a waiting list, because schools are wiling to pay for such "preventative" social and health programs even though it's difficult to find funding for them, according to Anna Abella, program director for schools for the Ophelia Project.
To bring attention to 2008's National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, the teen ambassadors collected magazine ads that made them feel bad about themselves. Over the course of eight weekly mini-focus groups, the Argosy psychology students helped the girls understand why the ads made them react negatively.
"Girls are very relationship-driven, they rely on how others see them," says Abella. A simple but telling get-to-know-you activity asks participants to describe themselves, but most girls respond by looking to their friends for answers. " 'No, it's what you think!'" Abella would tell them, explaining that breaking the habit of reliance is part of the learning process.
Deeksha Bhat, 17, a junior at Hillsborough High, has been a teen ambassador since she was a freshman. She says teens read magazines like Seventeen and People "all the time. We see it, we flip through." When she'd see ads that disturbed her, she would "cringe and go on to the next page." Since taking part in the focus groups, she's come to understand the subliminal messages: She noticed that ads would show women "crouching on the floor, curled up in a ball, not taking up a lot of space," while ads with men associated them with "good things. A sense of adventure."
These mixed messages, plus the images of airbrushed perfection that highlight one's own (perfectly human) shortcomings, can be damaging. But Dr. Madeline Altabe, a clinical psychologist and Argosy professor who has a long-standing interest in eating disorders, is not one to condemn the media. "I avoid the blame game," she says, "I respect the power of the media. It reflects a lot of how people think. But sometimes you have to ask or prompt it for positive messages."
Enter the graphic design students from the Art Institute of Tampa, who sat in on the last two sessions of the mini-focus groups, generating input and ideas to rework the ads.
The end result is Ophelia Teens Talk Back to the Media, an exhibit that places the original hyper-sexualized ads next to body-positive, teen-friendly counterparts, as well as letters written by the teens to the advertisers pointing out the problems and offering the new ads as a solution. (The letter-writing idea originated in curricula from Seattle's GO GIRLS!, a pilot program of the National Eating Disorder Association from 1998-2000).
An ad for the weight-loss supplement NV Hoodia shows eager paparazzi stacked up outside of a narrow broom closet-sized dressing room. The tagline reads: "Keep celebrities slim."
The accompanying teen ambassador's letter begins with a compliment for the company ("We appreciate your natural alternative to achieving a healthy weight"), but strongly criticizes the ad: "[A]s one in five girls already has an eating disorder, we feel that your advertisement fuels this disease."
According to NEDA, up to 10 million females and 1 million males suffer from eating disorders, but the disease receives only $12 million in research. Compare this to Alzheimer's disease, which is prevalent in less than half as many people but receives $647,000,000 in research, or schizophrenia, with 2.2 million affected and $350,000,000 for research. Yet anorexia claims the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders, and NEDA reports the outcome of treatment is better than that of obesity and breast cancer. Still, preventative programs are few and far between.
The CDC reported in its 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance study that while 10 percent of female students are actually overweight, 31 percent describe themselves as overweight. Almost 55 percent of girls ate less to lose weight, 17 percent went without food for at least 24 hours, 8.1 percent are on diet pills and 6.2 percent throw up after eating. Though more boys are overweight, their numbers run significantly below the girls' on all counts.
Dr. Jean Kilbourne, lecturer and documentary filmmaker, said in 2000's Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women that not only does advertising sell a product, it sells "concepts of love, sex and normalcy." Ads "tell us who we are and who we should be." Girls and women are often posed as demure, sexy and silenced. The idealistic images of a super-thin model ("A body type that basically doesn't exist. But the only one we ever see.") is altered — her lithe genetics enhanced by surgery and Photoshop, which removes her humanity in the process. She becomes an object, which tells the public that it's OK for women to be objectified, which opens the door to violence, rape and general lack of respect.
"Advertising is one powerful force that keeps us trapped in very rigid roles," says Kilbourne, and it's only gotten worse. "Everything I said in '79 [in the first edition of Killing Us Softly] is still true, only worse. Even worse since 2000. The models are even skinnier, the youth sexier. The good news is that there's more of a push for media literacy. I was alone when I first started talking about it."
Kilbourne says change depends on an "aware, active and educated public that thinks of itself as citizens, not consumers."
Although Argosy's Altabe agrees with most of those points, she says that rhetoric and images are processed differently, so it takes more than words to fight back. The AI/OP/Argosy collaborative effort counters "images with images."
The new ads keep the marketing essence of the product, while providing "something visual to send out a positive message of beauty and health. You don't have to be model-thin to be beautiful," says Altabe. The research behind the program showed that media literacy is a key component to eating-disorder prevention. "A way to fight thin media ideals is to get girls to fight back with more realistic thoughts and images," explains Dr. Altabe. "That may effect change in the world around them. It can also create change within themselves."
An ad for CKin2U features a young male and female backed against lockers. The young man's belt is undone, the young woman's pants hang well below her navel, revealing her underwear.
"Totally unnecessary," Deeksha Bhat says of the ad. "The girl is [portrayed as] nothing but a play toy. It has nothing to do with the product at all."
She was in the group that redesigned the ad with younger girls in mind. The redesigned counterpart looks more like a cartoon, a girl and boy deep in like and maintaining heavy eye contact. "We wanted to show romance without being overly sexual," Bhat says. In the letter to Calvin Klein, the teen ambassadors wrote, "The ad sends us, and all women, the harmful message that women need to appear overly sexy in order to be attractive to men."
While the before-and-after ads beg to be looked at, the letter-writing campaign gave the girls of the Ophelia Project something to take away for themselves. "It's sparked a flame within them," say Ophelia's Nikki Stokes. "They know what real girls look like. … they've created awareness and have become good advocates for the younger girls."
Ophelia Teens Talk Back to the Media, through March 21, Gallery at the Art Institute of Tampa, 4401 N Himes Ave., Tampa. 813-873-2112. Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-8 p.m.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2008.