BODY SCHEMAS AND MODERN EATING DISORDERS
BODY SCHEMAS AND THE RISE OF BODY DISSATISFACTION
For most of human history, a woman’s mental picture of the female body, her body schema, was extremely narrow.
Before the late 19th century, full length mirrors were rare luxuries. There was no photography, no magazines, no social media, no revealing clothes. For most women, their own body and those of their mother, sisters, and close female relatives was their entire visual reference. Moreover most men probably only ever saw their own wife naked, as nudity was strongly prohibited between opposite sex relatives and in public. So they had no expectations either and were just probably glad to have a naked female body to stare at. This means there were no rigid ideals of perfectly symmetrical breasts, perfect thighs and hourglass figures. Natural variations like lopsided breasts would have unlikely caused body dysmorphia because there was no standardised ideal to compare against.
Social Learning Theory also explains the dramatic shift.
Today we are flooded with thousands of highly curated, edited, and sexualised images every day. Through observation and imitation, these images become the dominant reference points in our body schemas.
Real bodies, naturally diverse, start to feel abnormal by comparison.
Modern visual culture didn’t just show us more bodies. It replaced lived experience with an unforgiving, idealised mirror, and rewired how we see ourselves.
