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Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women, and Children. By Sarah Grogan (London, Routledge, 1999), 225 pp., HB $75, PB $24.99.
In this carefully crafted book, Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women, and Children, Sarah Grogan offers the reader a virtual short course on body image. Although her perspective is primarily psychological and sociological, the author skillfully integrates research from those disciplines along with women's studies, cultural studies, and media studies. She summarizes and critiques both quantitative and qualitative data, primarily from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, to yield what the preface promises, namely "a fresh summary of research on body image" (p. ix).
The book is premised on the belief that, to understand the phenomenon, we must consider the cultural milieu in which people with body image dissatisfaction function. For instance, Grogan argues that body dissatisfaction in women is normative in societies that prescribe a very narrow range of acceptable body shapes. Chapter 2 describes the history of the present idealization of slenderness for women and the muscular masculine ideal for men-both antiflab/fat ideas-and explores the debate about the basis of these ideals. Grogan ably marks the shift over time, cultures, and economic circumstances in what is considered "fit," making the biological argument that the ideal is determined by a healthy appearance (or evolutionary press for procreation) less compelling. The author emphasizes the role...