Healthy is the New Skinny and the Perfectly Unperfected Project have released two new videos. In the first, Katie Halchishick and I talk about the whole issue of authenticity and beauty — a discussion of real v. fake similar to the one I touched on in this Jezebel piece. The second looks at the issue of bullying in schools, and explains how the PUP program can be part of the solution.
Check out Real Beauty and Bullying in Schools.
There are some issues with your claims in the second video about the root cause of bullying. Scientific american did a special on this (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=exploding-the-self-esteem), addressing research on the topic of self esteem. Generally bullying seems to be correlated more to high self esteem and narcissistic traits, rather than to low self esteem.
While I agree that the overall trend of telling your young women that there are women who are attractive, and who we value for that external beauty, but who are also fake, because women are ACTUALLY supposed to look this other way, whom we do not really like either, is profoundly unhealthy, it may be less a self esteem issue than it is an issue of where we get our value from.
I might use words like “self-efficacy” more than self esteem. The way that this type of issue is usually framed, makes it sound to an untrained reader like women need to feel pretty enough, in order to function. The real underlying problem is that perception.
Kyle, that Scientific American piece is controversial — the best known study on bullying and self-esteem does find a very clear correlation, and it’s not that far out of date: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ab.1010/abstract
Thanks for your interest and support.
I looked over the abstract of that study and it does make claims consistent with what you are saying, and has a pretty decent sample size. Though the idea that they found a significant portion of the population who had not been bullied or participated in bullying seems a bit hard to swallow lol.
I think that some of the inconsistencies in this data might be explained better by a third variable than self esteem itself. It makes intuitive sense to say that people with low self esteem would be more likely to lash out or have problems that people with high self esteem would not. It also makes intuitive sense that people with higher self esteem due to narcissistic traits would be more likely to think that they have the right to bully other people.
Perhaps a different way of looking at it is *where* the self esteem comes from in each case. If young men and women are socialized to garner their self worth from unhealthy behaviors and values (like from being the skinniest, or for males being the most aggressive), then high self esteem may be a problem. If they are getting their self worth from something better, like strong friendships, academic success, an involved family, or from finding meaning in the work that they do, then self esteem would seem to be more likely to be associated with positive outcomes and a decrease in bullying.
I think that the idea of “healthy is the new skinny” would definitely be helpful, because if people are increasing their self worth through valuing their own health and physical fitness, then that would be positive regardless of how you interpret self-esteem. My only real concern here is really that it is all framed in a way that people walk away from your message with an idea that young men and women should feel good about themselves *because* they can be effective and meaningful agents in their own lives, who do things that are of value, and are important because of those things, rather than just having higher self esteem for its own sake.
I think y’all might be too narrow in your focus on the “why” of people get bullied, I realize bullying due to looks is your main concern, but it really is but one of MANY factors that lead to it. Bullying happens for a variety of reasons beyond that: race, class, gender, sexual identity,country of origin, even stuff as seemingly silly as an accent or lack there of can lead to bullying. If not addressing all sources is your aim, then rock on, but if you are really seeking to impact change, you need to look wider.