Mother's Wisdom Counters Unrealistic Media Portrayals Of Breast Size

February 17, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Mother’s advice might be the antidote to intense media pressure for women to alter their breasts to meet images of perfection from Britney Spears to Victoria’s Secret, a new University of Florida study finds.

The study found that women hate the shapely models but still feel compelled to increase their breast size because of media pressure and what they think is on the minds of men, said Robyn Goodman, a UF advertising professor who did the research.

But mothers have the power to persuade their daughters to forego surgery, said Goodman whose research appears in the fall issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.

“One mother with large breasts held down her shirt, showed the grooves of the bra strap, and said ‘Be thankful you are not this large,’” Goodman said. “Clearly, mothers served as an important symbolic model for their daughter’s breast self-image.”

Less common were mothers who had implants, and by example, encouraged their daughters, Goodman said. In those cases, daughters were more positive toward increasing their breast size because they “looked up to their moms” and saw their mothers “didn’t regret getting them,” she said.

Goodman and Kim Walsh-Childers, another UF journalism professor, studied three focus groups with a total of 28 participants, between the ages of 18 and 25, from advertising and journalism classes at a large Southeastern university. The goal was to determine how they were affected by media images of disproportionately large-breasted women. This ideal female figure would translate into having size 4 hips, 2 waist and 10 bust, she said.

But because breasts are made primarily of fat, which is correlated with total body fat, the vast majority of thin women would need to have their breasts medically altered to achieve this ideal, Goodman said. Many apparently do because breast augmentation surgeries have grown 548 percent during the past decade and now account for 15 percent of all cosmetic procedures, she said.

“One of the things that surprised me was that some of these women talked about having to show off their breasts when they go out so that guys would find them interesting and buy them drinks and they wouldn’t have to buy any themselves,” she said. “To me, they’re essentially bartering their body for attention or a product, in this case alcohol.”

Many of the women said they did not believe men were savvy enough to realize that media images were often unrealistic. Several described how men thought a size D cup was normal.

Friends exerted less influence, even though women often confided with friends about the subject, compared breasts and lamented about not being large, Goodman said. “They would look at the Victoria’s Secret catalog together and say, ‘Oh, she looks great, I wish I looked like that,’” she said.

The issue raises a variety of health concerns because implants interfere with mammography, making breast cancer detection more difficult. Although the newer saline implants are not as problem ridden as the older silicone ones, they are still the subject of complaints to the Food and Drug Administration, they have to be replaced every 10 years and they carry the risk of rupturing, she said.

Although most of the women described the ideal breast as a “C cup” with “perfect cleavage” on a “thin” body type, agreeing that pop star Britney Spears and Victoria’s Secrets models exemplified this ideal, they also criticized this portrayal as unrealistic, even fake, Goodman said. Some of the students had experience modeling or participating in pageants where they saw how breasts were taped or photos airbrushed to create the illusion of perfect cleavage, she said.

“Even so, many felt they had the potential to attain the ideal breast size as portrayed by the media if they had the money and time that media models had,” Goodman said.

As a condition of the study, none of the women in the focus groups had surgical implants, Goodman said. Several women said they had friends who were obsessed with their breast size to the point of wanting augmentation surgery. One woman had a friend who used her college financial aid money to get implants, she said.

Many of the women liked the look of large breasts but decided they would not want them after considering the discomfort that would come with them, Goodman said. “That’s probably the difference between those that have implant surgery and those that don’t,” she said. “The ones that said they occasionally wanted to look like they had larger breasts just went with the padded bra.”

Goodman believes some women would think twice about having cosmetic surgery if MTV and other youth-oriented venues carried programs that graphically showed the risks of cosmetic surgery. “You’re probably never going to change the media, even though many people have tried,” she said. “What would probably to be most useful in helping people deal with this issue are media literacy programs starting at a very young age in school. Many European countries have these built into their curricula in school, where they essentially teach you how to be critical of the media.”

J. Kevin Thompson, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida and author of several books on eating disorders, body image and obesity, said Goodman’s research is “extremely important.” “Women increasingly feel pressures from the media and important persons in their lives to meet unrealistic standards of appearance,” he said. “In my own work, we find that women actually overestimate the degree to which men prefer large breasts, so it is possible that the decision to have cosmetic surgery for some women is based on an erroneous view of men’s ideal breast size.”