Spectatorship

Low cut pants, if any at all.
High cut shorts, exposing butt cheeks.
Prominent breasts on stick thin, decapitated women.


You’d think I was paging through a men’s magazine or website. No, these soft-core porn images litter the pages of Pinterest, a social media image bookmarking site dominated by women.

The images certainly hail the heterosexual man, but how do they gain such notoriety within the world of Pinterest? These images are part of the visual culture phenomena known as


THINspo.
Thin and inspirational.

According to Glamour online, several social media sites like Pinterest and Tumblr are banning these “scary pro-anorexia images,” but its cousin, FITspo, is still going strong. As a few are fighting against such depictions of women in the media, others are choosing to collect images, sometimes for the image, sometimes for the linked website, on boards such as “Health & Fitness,” “Not Gunna Quit Til I’m Fit,” and “Working on my Fitness.” How do these images affect the women who are repining them each day?

FITspo images vary in attempts to show athletic, healthy women. Like the Reebok ad in Practices of Looking, some “are resistant to the traditional power dynamic of the gaze.” They may show a woman lifting weights, sweaty (with perfect hair), or running along the waterfront. Other images are ridiculously skinny objectified women with unnatural breasts. Were an average woman to lose weight and gain a similar body, the results would not be lingerie model breasts. Yet this “ideal” body calls to women, young and old, begging them to find their value in a sexualized, gendered caricature of themselves. To add insult to injury, we add captions to these objects of the gaze:

Daily ABspiration: Hot Chicks with Hot Abs—This woman on the left is anonymous; she covers one side of her face with the camera and the other with her hair. She is backed against the wall, but willingly? She seems to be turning herself into the object of a gaze by holding up a camera within her domestic domain.

30 Day Challenge—Presumably, the woman on the right is a link to a fitness article with a 30 day exercise challenge. Contrary to some FITspo images, she is wearing athletic clothes, has athletic equipment, and we can see her face. Still, the image relies on her barely clothed torso and emphasizes her breasts.

Proponents of FITspo argue that it is motivation to be active and healthy. In contrast, Cynthia Bulik, Ph. D., director of the University of North Carolina Eating Disorders Program, notes that most images are impossible to achieve, and the addition of slogans (such as “my weakness becomes my pain, and my pain my pleasure”) are shaming, “promoting the same obsessive tendencies and impossible appearance ideals” as those associated with eating disorders.

Along with inspirational phrases, before and after pictures are common in FITspo.



Some of the FITspo images are rooted in years of athletics marketing. FitSugar collected 20 of those images for an article entitled “Good Advertising Works: 20 Motivational Ads that get us to the Gym.”



These two images were particularly telling.

Woman as work-out equipment. Who needs a bench when you can do your pushups on a woman?

Or the woman being chased by the man who can’t help but notice the rays of light molding her tush.

In these images--the THINspo, the FITspo, the actual advertisements--women are called to the image and asked if they meet the same standard of beauty as the (objectified) woman in the picture. The model’s only worth is found in her gendered and sexualized physical body. Even in the winter, it is important to have the perfect abs for underneath the oversized sweater that belongs to the male in your life (or those moments when you cover your face and expose your bellybutton and underwear to the world-wide web).



How do you compare?
Are you able to be
as sexual as this woman?



If not, look at her each day,
deny yourself food, and exercise more
until you earn the gaze of (wo)men.
Why? So stores always have your size…