Evidence of meeting #15 for Status of Women in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was disorders.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Lise St-Denis Liberal Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC
Yes, I will skip my turn. I did not think I would have a second turn.
Liberal
Liberal
Lise St-Denis Liberal Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC
I would like to give my turn to Ms. Ambler. I thought that she was saying some very interesting and important things.
NDP
The Chair NDP Hélène LeBlanc
All right.
Ms. Ambler, maybe you can share your time with Ms. Crockatt, who did not have the opportunity to finish her questions.
You have five minutes.
Conservative
Stella Ambler Conservative Mississauga South, ON
That's very kind, thank you.
I do have one quick question and then I'll give it to you.
There some countries that have passed laws about how thin models should be.
Conservative
Associate Professor, University of Ottawa
It's funny because we regulate all sorts of things. We regulate cigarette boxes. I don't see why we can't regulate that kind of imagery.
There is an argument to be made that it's a deceptive trade practice because there are some wonderful educational videos on the Internet where they take a picture of a real model and show you how it's photoshopped, so even the models don't look like models.
It's kind of a bizarre thing that we're so obsessed with this particular image that is very racialized, very heteronormative, and all these other kinds of things. It seems to me that this should be something on which we should have a public debate, and if we think it's a good idea to regulate that, we regulate all sorts of commercial practices, so why not that one?
Conservative
Joan Crockatt Conservative Calgary Centre, AB
When you say heteronormative, what are you speaking about specifically?
Associate Professor, University of Ottawa
I suppose what I heard from the girls is that there's a very narrow kind of femininity that they're supposed to emulate online. It's very white even if you're not white. We know there are rising rates of plastic surgery among Asian Canadians, or Asians as a whole actually, to have eyes that look more Caucasian.
We know there are all sorts of discussions about black women or black girls who will straighten their hair, so they can look more white, that type of thing. We are privileging a certain kind of idealized beauty that is racialized, that looks Caucasian, that is hyper thin, tall, and willowy, a particular kind of body.
The heteronormative part is probably my short form for the fact that all of these girls said there is incredible pressure on them to appear sexy but not too sexy, in a heterosexual kind of way, that their sexuality is shaped by the social pressures they feel to be attractive to males within their society. These are kids. I'm not saying this is the fact of life but certainly this is their perception of it.
They all go back to the Hollywood thing: you want to look like Rihanna, you want to be Rihanna. Rihanna is, famously and infamously, in an abusive relationship where as a woman she's abused by her male partner. Yet, she has also infamously said that if you don't sext your boyfriend, you're not a good girlfriend. That comes up in these discussions. It's that kind of objectification of the female body as an object for consumption by a heterosexual male.
Conservative
Joan Crockatt Conservative Calgary Centre, AB
Just as an aside, I was noticing that from the movie Gravity, the picture they kept showing on the Academy Awards last night had Sandra Bullock floating through the space capsule with these absolutely stick-thin legs. No one has legs that look like that.
I'm wondering if peer pressure is an effective means to combat that. Sometimes we think that regulations or laws are important, but if you had one celebrity or peer group who went online and fought back against this....What do you think?
Associate Professor, University of Ottawa
I've got two quick thoughts, and I know that we don't have a lot of time.
One is that, yes, that happens. The girl who starred in the The Hunger Games,what's her name? Do you know who I mean?
Associate Professor, University of Ottawa
Yes, Jennifer Lawrence, was closer to real body weight. Kate Winslet was closer to body weight. And yet both of those actresses have lost a heck of a lot of weight over the 10 years. They're trying to say, look, I don't believe in dieting, I'm not going to lose 40 pounds, I look fine, and yet the pressure is on them. That's unfortunate, because that's an incredibly powerful role model.
For those kinds of youth-led initiatives, where kids get together and say, this is enough, we want to push back, there are all sorts of best practices. There are some in Montreal where girls have gotten together and created a media campaign of their own to say, this is crazy, we're not willing to do this anymore. This is what we look like, get used to it.
But I do want to caution you, because it's very easy to co-opt that kind of outreach. For example, one of my favourite corporate initiatives in this field is the Seventeen magazine's Body Peace Project. They had an online campaign to encourage girls to make peace with their bodies and to stop starving themselves to death and all this type of thing. Yet the images that were surrounding the access to this particular site were all of hyper thin pre-teen and teenage girls. They went and they got celebrities to sign the Body Peace Project, and a number of them have had plastic surgery—infamously again—before they were 16, and they were all super, super thin, except for one of them.
What was most interesting about that particular initiative is that the pressure was put on the girl to sign the pledge, “I promise I won't be bad to my body. I'll still that little voice in my head.” I think the challenge for us, as concerned citizens and as regulators, is that voice is not coming from inside their head, it's coming from the environment around them. We're responsible for the environment around them. As much as I support everything that's been said about the need to educate doctors and to get better medical treatments in place, we have to be very critical of those kinds of initiatives because they get co-opted really easily.
Conservative
Susan Truppe Conservative London North Centre, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm going to ask the question of Ms. Beattie, because my seven minutes were up then. I'm going to share my time with my colleague, Terence Young, as well.
I have a couple of questions that I wanted to go over again. When I was talking to the other witnesses here, they had to do a lot of things on their own. It seems like with your circumstance, with your 13-year-old daughter, you were getting nowhere either.
I was just wondering, was it misdiagnosed? Did you determine that it was anorexia or did somebody finally tell you that? It sounds like you were the one who also found the FBT, the Maudsley method. It almost seemed like everything was up to you.
Co-chair, Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Eating Disorders Canada Task Force
Yes. I think it's gotten better in four years, but our primary care providers need a lot more education, continuing education. Our medical students, residents, they're not trained. All they hear about is the obesity epidemic. I did prepare a brief. I've got growth charts in there as well to show you. But, yes, I had to find it online. I suspected. Parents go through huge denial, but I knew how serious the illness was. A lot of times doctors, especially primary care providers, if they don't know what to do, they don't do anything. They can't do anything. We need to educate them and we need to give them the education, the tools, to know what to do.
We need standards all over Canada. It depends where you live, it really does. Even in Ontario, it depends. I'm very fortunate that I live in a city that has this. There are some places that don't have it. I know our treatments have improved. Even from when I started, the FBT has changed.
Conservative
Susan Truppe Conservative London North Centre, ON
I'm just going to ask you how it improved in one second, but I like to ask about the best practice that you've learned throughout your experience. But to me, unless there's something else you'd like to add to that, it would be the family-based treatment. It sounds like it worked wonders and really helped your daughter.
Co-chair, Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Eating Disorders Canada Task Force
Yes.
Conservative
Susan Truppe Conservative London North Centre, ON
You didn't know of it. You just what, googled, and you went online and found it? Was there anywhere to look for this?
Co-chair, Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Eating Disorders Canada Task Force
I found all kinds of information that was very outdated. I found things on eating disorders awareness. As I said before, and I'm speaking as a parent, on the other side, I was very frustrated, because I saw the stuff on body image, and I saw that show Dying to be Thin, and I thought, I have a young child; this is not my situation.
I finally found F.E.A.S.T. I found maudsleyparents.org. And I was stunned. Why doesn't everyone know about this? Why don't we know they are treatable, and that there's genetic predisposition, and predisposing factors, and it's not just about body image. There's so much more to the illness that the public does not know about.
When I found it, I found this incredible parent forum. The F.E.A.S.T. website is full of facts. And it's not just about FBT, because not everybody can access FBT. It's about empowering parents. In the past we've been blamed and shamed, and there's stigma, not knowing what to do. The F.E.A.S.T. site has incredible information.
Just through talking to people, my friends, colleagues at work, they've actually shared this site with other parents who have been alarmed about their child, and they've brought it to their physicians. They're educating their physicians this way.
Conservative
Susan Truppe Conservative London North Centre, ON
Thank you.
Am I at the halfway mark yet, Madam Chair?