Body image and race.

Are they related to each other? In my experience, very much so. A study found that white women and women of color both are unhappy with their bodies. Lovely.

Contrary to popular belief, white and non-white women are about equally unhappy with their looks, according to an analysis of 98 studies published in the July issue of Psychological Bulletin. It is the largest U.S. research ever done on feminine body dissatisfaction.
“A lot of theorizing and myths,” along with small studies, have emphasized white women’s poor body images, says psychologist Shelly Grabe of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Minority women, it has been thought, enjoy more sensible, forgiving expectations for body shape. But Grabe and co-author Janet Shibley Hyde find little evidence of that.
There’s no significant difference between whites, Asian-Americans and Hispanics in how dissatisfied they are with their bodies, they say. And there’s no difference between whites and blacks over age 22.

Okay I have a couple of issues with this. First off, you can’t homogenize white women and women of color. Every culture (class, race, geographical location, sheesh) has different standards of beauty. My experience as a South Asian woman is different then that of a black woman or a latina woman, in terms of body image.
One common trend I have noticed is that in most cultures there is pressure on what women look like, no matter what those particular standards may be. As transnational feminists have said before, women tend to be the face of a nation, they are forced to be the visual representation of a given culture.
Other factors to consider I believe are geographical location and class locations. Where you grow up or live tremendously affects what is considered good looking and what isn’t. Furthermore, class is such a huge factor. If you have the time to worry about what you look like and do something about it, then you must have some amount of class priviledge. This is not to say, unfair beauty standards affect all communities, some folks can pay more attention to it then others.
I learned this early in my teaching career when I was running an after-school program in an inner city school consisting predominantly of students of color. I ran a weekly girl group and did a workshop on eating disorders and body image. The girls couldn’t understand why someone would not eat. It occured to me how privileged so many of the women in my very white (middle/working class) women’s studies program were. So much of their feminism was about body image and eating disorders. I realized very quickly that in order to decide you don’t want to eat, you have to have food in the first place.
via USA Today.