Panelists Discuss Race and Beauty

A former interracial fashion model who is also a Men’s Fitness magazine relationship columnist teamed up with a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist to discuss “Race and Female Body Image” in Emerson Hall last night.

The event, sponsored by the Harvard Foundation and the Harvard College Women’s Center, featured author Sil Lai Abrams, of mixed Chinese and African ethnicity, and Anne E. Becker ’83, director of Mass. General Hospital’s Eating Disorders Program, along with a panel of Harvard students.

The speakers discussed issues ranging from female body image insecurities, stirred by media glamorization of picture-perfect models, to the role of final clubs in the lives of Harvard women.

Also discussed were body image issues resulting from specific cultural and racial views.

Kimberly N. Foster ’11, a black panelist, said that “in black culture, the thick girl is the idealized girl,” while event organizer Theresa H. Cheng ’08 talked about how Chinese culture focused not only on being pale and thin, but also on the “double eyelid phenomenon.” The double eyelid, which varies in preponderance and degree in Asians, makes the eye appear larger; as a result, the demand for cosmetic surgery among Asians has increased in order to create the trait.

Along with weight-related pressures generated by television, magazine, films, and other media outlets, Shauna L. Shames, a graduate student in government, described these stresses in body image to be part of a “constant cycle that makes sure you have to be unhappy about how you look, no matter how you look to begin with.”

“You have to not feel good about yourself in order to be a good consumer,” Shames said.

Becker, an anthropologist, found that the Fijian populace—where women were traditionally very comfortable with varying body images—was radically changed within three years by the introduction of television. (Fiji was one of the last places on Earth to receive television access.)

The community began to obsess over dieting, and 11 percent of teenage girls began making themselves throw up to lose weight, a comparable level to Massachusetts.

The panelists emphasized the importance of discussing these issues in the public eye, even at Harvard.

“I feel like the most important thing we need to do on campus is to keep having these types of conversations, because as women, we are constantly bombarded by these images,” Foster said. “There needs to be more collaboration between women’s groups on campus.”