I WANT; THEREFORE, I AM: GLOBAL GIRLS IN CONSUMER CULTURE
Margo Maine, Ph.D.

Maine & Weinstein Specialty Group;

National Eating Disorders Association

In contemporary consumer culture, "Global Girls" have a very clear calling: they are to want, to yearn, and to confuse true hunger, desire, and need with an insatiable appetite for things and for the process of accumulating those things. Global Girls get the message that in order to be wanted, they have to want. If they want the right things, they will be happy, successful, desired, maybe even coveted. Shopping has become a spiritual experience and the mall, their church. This is the legacy of the post 1950s explosion of consumer culture when women's buying power became central to the US economy. Women were taught to desire perfection, and that if they did not desire it, they were not desirable themselves, at first making their homes and families perfect, and later their bodies.

And now, a half century later, Global Girls know their role- they are consumers, looking for love in all the wrong places. These Global Girls were global babes, raised in the culture of Baby Gap, Disney and Babies R Us. No wonder that toddlers recognize corporate logos and by kindergarten, girls are worried about fashion, appearance, and body image. Using Disney characters and other childhood images to promote cosmetics, fragrances, nail polish, and other adult products, advertisers urge little girls to become someone else through their purchases and to want, to want, to want.

Global girls are taught to purchase before they are taught to read. Barbie lures millions of girls each year into their lifelong role as consumers. If you ask a little girl what she likes about Barbie, the answer is uniformly "the clothes' or "the stuff." Barbie is about how you look, what you wear and what you have- all image, no substance. A success story like hers doesn't just happen: it is the result of well- crafted, systematic, and painstaking strategies. Recent market research found that Barbie's appeal had narrowed, with global girls over 7 losing interest. Eager to capture the "tween" market, Mattel developed a new set of dolls for the 7-12 year olds, called The Scene, updated and urban, focusing on fashion, music, and dating with pouty lips, a more hip attitude, a PDA, and a cell phone. The Scene is already selling very well, justifying the $65 million/year spent on advertising. Barbie alone brings $1.6 billion into the Mattel coffers each year.

As Global Girls approach being tweens, corporate America sees them as even more attractive: they have money to spend and lots of it. Tweens are vulnerable- too old to be kids but not yet teens, desperate to be liked, to define themselves, to "grow up" and be taken seriously. Teen magazines pull them in and consolidate their consumerism. With celebrities on their cover and pricy clothes inside, these magazines are more like catalogs pushing the unaffordable but the desirable, convincing middle schoolers that they need to be sexy and trendy to be successful: designer brands are the answer to self doubt and insecurity. Brand loyalty benefits the company as well as the self. A lucky few will be asked to be trendspotters, a new kind of volunteering that benefits corporate America and consolidates the branding process where personal identity and clothing choice become one.

Advertisers spend $200 billion/yr marketing to children in the US alone. The average US child sees over 40,000 television ads/year: money well-spent as children now influence over $600 billion of spending, including $28 billion of their own money. Teenaged girls spend over $9 billion/yr on make-up and skin products alone.

The constant exposure to commercials promising everything- beauty, popularity, peace-of-mind, self-confidence, great relationships- turns girls, whom a disproportionate amount of ads target, into insatiable consumers. The "quick-fix" of a purchase actually robs them of self-determination, self-awareness, and self-esteem. Encouraged to look outside of themselves for comfort, values and direction, girls become easy prey to addictive behaviors and unrealistic images that these ads promote. In fact, the diet, tobacco and alcohol industries target girls, capitalizing on the body image, weight concerns, and beauty ideals that make them most vulnerable.

Global Girls are taught to want a particular body type: a boy's body with breasts and washboard stomachs. As a result, the number one wish of girls aged 11-17 is to lose weight and plastic surgery for teens increased by nearly 50% in 2 yrs in the late 1990s and then jumped another 22% in the year 2000. One poll found that 25% of Global Girls had already considered cosmetic plastic surgery, even before their bodies matured.

The more a girl is exposed to the media the more likely she is to diet and be dissatisfied with her body, her appearance, and herself, placing her at serious risk for eating disorders, depression, and anxiety. Adolescent girls who attempt suicide often report that weight and body image contributed significantly to their despair. The CDC reports epidemic numbers of teens involved in risky dieting and a study of over 80,000 9th and 12th graders found 56% of 9th grade and 57% of 12th grade females engaging in dangerous dieting practices, including: fasting or skipping meals, diet pills, vomiting, laxatives, smoking cigarettes, and binge-eating.

Disordered eating and body image concerns are now homogenized through all ethnicities and socio-economic groups in the US. In fact, entire cultures can shift under the weight of the media images promoted by our global consumerism, as demonstrated by the rapid change in Fiji after television was introduced. In no time at all, a culture where large female bodies were valued for their strength and contribution to the family and community life, and where food was celebrated and enjoyed with rich traditions and meanings, was transformed. Eating disorders were basically non-existent there in '95, but after less than 3 yrs of limited exposure to western television, they were rampant. From little talk about dieting or weight in 1995, by 1998, 11% used self-induced vomiting, 29% were at risk for eating disorders, 69% had dieted to lose weight, and 74% felt "too fat."

Conservative estimates are that 8% of high school and college-aged women in the US suffer from anorexia or bulimia; within five years, at least 5% of them will die, as every system in their bodies is compromised. They are 12 times more likely than their peers to die as a medical consequence of the eating disorder and 75 times more likely to suicide.

Wanting can be hazardous to a Global Girl's health.

Global Girls should be able to want more than what our consumer culture offers them.

While their appetites have been supersized to want more, their bodies have been downsized and they are taught to question and deny their true hungers, for food, for self-fulfillment, and for life itself. Let us want more for them


Margo Maine, PhD, (mdm@mwsg.org) of Maine & Weinstein Specialty Group, is a clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment and prevention of eating disorders. She is the author of Father Hunger: Fathers, Daughters, and Food and Food and Body Wars: Making Peace with Women's Bodies. She is a founder of the Academy of Eating Disorders, National Eating Disorder Association, and Eating Disorders Coalition for Research, Policy and Action.