Thank you very much.
First I'd like to start by commending the committee for undertaking this study, I think it's incredibly important. I'd also like to commend Ms. Lemoine for her really important testimony before this committee and I really appreciate that you came and shared that with us.
Rather than looking at the individual level effects and consequences for people, I came to this issue from a different angle. I'd like to take some time and look at some of the structural issues that exist in the environment that position girls to be particularly vulnerable to eating disorders and problems with body image. I'm drawing on the findings from a research project that I co-lead with my colleague, professor Jane Bailey at the University of Ottawa, called the eGirls Project. We started the eGirls Project because we wanted to get a sense of how girls perform gender in online spaces.
When we went into this project we expected to find a diversity of different kinds of girl, where online media—because it does remove us one step from the physical world—would create opportunities for greater equality and greater freedom to express girls' authentic sense of self. Our very first foray into this field was stunning. We looked at over 1,500 social media profiles of girls who reported to be between the ages of 15 years old and 22 years old in Ottawa. And we found one monolithic performance of girl. It was a girl who was very ultra thin, very heteronormative, very white, very sexualized, that kind of thing. And we were fascinated by this because we thought that this was perhaps a reflection of the fact that we were looking at publicly available profiles.
So we got funding to sit down and talk with young women from Ontario, from both urban and rural areas, about their experiences online and what they thought of this particular performance of girl. And what we were told is that it is a normal girl online, that they are under an incredible amount of pressure to conform to this hyper thin ideal of feminine beauty that's so unattainable. And as we've thought through the reasons for this, we've come to the conclusion that there's an unintentional consequence that's built right into this combination of online architecture and the commercial agenda behind the sites that girls live on in online spaces. These sites are built around the seamless collection of personal information from the children who inhabit these sites. But it's not just their name and their address, that type of thing. Everything they do, everything they say, everything about their relationships with each other is collected. And all of that information is fed into an algorithm that sorts them for commercial purposes so they can be targeted, not just with ads, but targeted with a new environment to encourage certain kinds of behaviour. And there is research out there—and ours supports this conclusion as well—that suggests that the algorithm is not neutral. That when we are sorting these people, we're sorting them along the same “-isms”, the same discriminatory patterns that you see in offline spaces.
I want to give you two quick examples of how this works for the girls we talked to—both were my experiences online actually. Many years ago when I was on a very common early social networking site, I had been on the site reading all of their legal policies. I'd been there for about two weeks, I lived on this site. They knew my IP address as well as I knew their legal terms of use. And then I wanted to register on this site to see what it would be like to be a 16-year-old girl who lives in Vancouver. And I had been on this site and every time I went to the homepage I was surrounded with world news. It was a particular kind of world news, yes, but world news. You know, politics, the issues of the day. I registered as a 16-year-old girl and instantly that news disappeared and I was surrounded with celebrity news, talk of celebrity relationships, and celebrity tips on how to get skinny, ads for surgery so I could become more beautiful. So the algorithm sort just doesn't target young women with advertising, it chains the social environment that they live in to promote certain kinds of being girl.
Another interesting example from my own experience is this. At the same time, I was also on a lot of the anorexia sites online. I had been talking to a number of people about educational initiatives helping girls deal with these kinds of messages and recover from anorexia and bulimia. And one of the best educational sites was supported by ads powered by Google.
When you went to this educational site to learn about your illness and to be given information to help you deal with your illness, it was powered—I kid you not—by ads for plastic surgery and dieting aids. That's the first point.
This environment is changed to privilege and promote a certain kind of femininity that is highly dangerous for young women because it promotes a completely unrealistic expectation around body size and body image. This also has serious consequences for young women, and we have spent the last two or three years talking to a number of them. What we were told over and over again is that this is a highly stressful environment. They're under an incredible amount of pressure to conform. They have to be really skinny. They have to be made up with make up. They have to be sexy—not too sexy, but certainly sexy. All of the girls either said, “Yes, I do the duck face”, which is the sideways shot when you suck in your cheeks and you look like Angelina Jolie, or they laughed about doing it when they were younger. They were very self-reflexive about the fact that this wasn't necessarily very healthy or very pro-social, but at the same time they said, “Hey, it's a good way to look skinny online”. These young women were under incredible pressure to conform to unrealistic images of body size.
There are three stories I want to leave you with.
Here is the first one. Lingerie shots were big with 15-year-olds in the past year. Young girls would put on lingerie; they'd diet like crazy beforehand so they'd be good and skinny; and they'd post these on the Internet. I'd say, “Hey, what's up with that?”, and they'd say, “Well, those girls are confident”. I said, “Okay, what does that mean? What does confidence mean?” They said, “Well, you're confident enough to take off your clothes and pose on the Internet in a lingerie shot. As soon as you post it, you watch that picture like a hawk, and if you don't get 30 “likes” within the first 10 minutes—you know how when you're on Facebook and other social media, you press the “like” button—then you take it off, and it's a disaster, and you're humiliated.” So confidence was displaying a thin, highly sexualized body in online spaces and being “liked” by others. They didn't even see that it was a failure of confidence, because if you're not “liked” by others, you're shamed for it, so you have to get the picture down right away.
When we talked to all these young women, as I said, they told us stories about the stressfulness of this environment, and how difficult it is to be a young girl in today's environment when all these messages around them are telling them to be ultra-thin and to act in particular ways and to perform a very narrow kind of femininity. I do want to stress that this intersects not just with misogyny but also with racism and homophobia and other concerns for equality-seeking groups. When we said, “Where do you think this is coming from?”, many of them would say, “Well, hey, it's media. It's all around us. We are surrounded by it.”
In the second story I wanted to tell you, I was talking to a 15-year-old girl in an urban area in Ontario. We were having this conversation and we were talking about these issues, and I asked her what she does on Facebook. She said, “Girls are under so much pressure on media”. I said, “Okay, so you post pictures on Facebook?”, and she said, “No, I never put pictures of myself on Facebook”. I thought, “I found one. I found a girl who doesn't buy into it. She rejects the whole thing and says, 'I'm not going to do that because it's stupid'”, so I said, “Hey, why don't you put pictures of yourself on Facebook?” She said, “Because I'm fat and I'm ugly and I know it, and I'm not going to let any of those terrible people, those—expletive deleted—kids that I go to school with, tell me I'm fat and ugly. So I say I'm ugly and I don't put my picture up.”
First of all, she is underweight if anything. She's 15. In all the interviews I did, with one exception.... I, at one point, had to reach over to a girl who was crying and say, “But you are beautiful”. She was a beautiful girl, and she was trying so hard to conform to this, and it created so much tension, that instead she just rejected herself completely.
The last story I wanted to tell you—and I'll make it very short because my 10 minutes is just about up—I was talking to a 22-year-old woman, and again I thought this was great, because she was talking about how she uses media to promote a company she had started. She does a lot of crafts so she takes pictures of her crafts and sticks them up on Pinterest. Again I thought, “This is terrific. I've found a kid who has navigated this well”, but she said, “Oh, no, it wasn't always like that. I actually had a lot of trouble with body image”. She began cutting when she was in high school, so I asked her what happened.
She said, “Well, I hit grade 9 and I was desperate to be popular. I did everything: I dieted, I did the makeup, I did the clothes. I did everything I could to fit in with the cool group. One day when I was at school I checked in on Facebook. I was friends with one of the popular girls at school, and she had posted a picture of her and me on her Facebook page.”
Another girl within their group of friends had posted, “We all know why you posted that picture”. She looked at it, and she didn't know, so she went up to the girl who was in the picture with her and asked what this was about. The girl said, “Surely you know”. She responded with, “No, I don't know. What is she talking about and what is everybody on Facebook now seeing about me?” The girl said, “Well, you're fat and you're ugly. You make me look good. That's why I'm friends with you. That's why I put pictures of you up on my Facebook page."
So not only are we making it incredibly difficult for young women to navigate through the social space, we are allowing the commercial mining of the social world that these young women live in. We're also making it really difficult for them to have healthy relationships with each other, where they can support each other as they try to push back against this.
I'll end my comments with that. Thank you very much.