Monday, 14 November 2005 - 10:46 AM EST

Caroline Davis, Michael Cowles, Body image and exercise: A study of relationships and comparisons between physically active men and women, Sex Roles (Historical Archive), Volume 25, Issue 1 - 2, Jul 1991, Pages 33 – 44
This article is about the relationships between men and women about body image and exercise. Men and women both were highly dissatisified with their bodies. On the issue of exercise, women exercised to lose weight or because of their bodies, while male reasons relation more to health and fitness alone.

Ensler, Eve. The Good Body. New York:Villard Books,2004
The good body is about Eve Enslers search for body image and acceptance. She explored the broad relaionships between the women she meets and the culture they live in. She mimics their monologues and explains their conversations as to their feelings of strong dissatisfaction with their bodies and their cultural/social upbringing.

Lavine, Howard. “Depicting Women As Sex Objects in Television Advertising: Effects on Body Dissatisfaction” August. 1999 Society For Personality And Social Psychology.
http://bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/672%20Lavine%20et%20al.%201999.pdf
The study examined the relationship between women who viewed TV ads that portrayed them as sex objects to feelings of body dissatisfaction. They found out that there was indeed increased body dissatisfaction in men and women. The study also found out that men who were exposed to sexist ads viewed their bodies as being thinner and women who were subjected to sexist ads thought their bodies were heavy or over weight when they really were not.

Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930. By Margaret Lowe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 240 pp.).
Lowe looks into women in college and body image in the 19th and 20th century America. She traces the issues back to the social and scientific structure of our new society.
Lowe also investigates the relationship of race to the women and their strong sense of body image.


Mc Elhone S., et al. “Body Image Perception In Relation to Recent Weight Changes And Stretegies For Weight Loss In a Nationally Representative Sample In the European Union” Public Health Nutrition. Volume 2, Number 1a, 1999, pp. 143-151(9). CABI Publishing
This is a cross cultural study which explains the demographics of the EU of body image and body perceptions to the culture and social norms. There was a huge response as to the importance of losing weight in females and being underweight.


“Poor body image plagues women” BBC News Healthy Reports. BBC News Online.
9 May, 2001
The study found a huge gender gap between men and women and body image issues. Women were 10 times more likely to be unsatisfied with their bodies when they were perfectly thin. About 90,000 people in the UK were found to have eating disorders