The media was the main focus of discussion around social pressures to be thin, however several women also described occasions where male partners or friends made negative comments about their weight. For example, Rachel (62 year old lesbian) described how her ex-husband referred to her body shape during arguments: ‘I think he did use my body shape, er, you know, at times when he wanted to… humiliate me [...] it was more like a taunt that he could use if we were having a row or something’ (Rachel, 62 year old lesbian); and Holly (69 year old gay woman) recalled being teased by a male friend: ‘one of them said I was far too big. He used to call me “pear-drop bum”. That’s when I dieted, that was the reason why’. A small number of women also thought that their heterosexual friends talked about their body size and appearance more than their non-heterosexual friends. For example, Pat (27 year old lesbian) recalled how heterosexual friends often discussed their body size/weight but she ‘hadn’t ever had a similar conversation with lesbians’. Such comments suggest that interpersonal pressures often originate from predominantly mainstream (heterosexual) sources. However, the source of such comments did not diminish their harmful effect. Jolim (27 year old lesbian) described how she was bullied because of her weight, and how her weight was the most salient source of stress: ‘You’re always going to get bullied for being a big girl, doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, bi, anything, you know. People see you as fat, they will call you fat. My weight has always been my, my one prime concern.’ Critiquing mainstream pressures Over half of the women were explicitly critical of mainstream idealisation of thinness. These women were particularly angry about the media’s emphasis on slimness, and, in direct
contradiction to comments made by women who were media consumers, actively tried to avoid media exposure wherever possible. These women discussed how unrealistic these ideals were, describing how images were often ‘air-brushed’ (digitally-enhanced). Helen’s (30 year old lesbian) anger towards, and avoidance of, thin images in the media stemmed from personal experiences of using such images as a motivation to diet and lose weight (in the past, Helen was diagnosed with eating disorders including anorexia): ‘it makes me angry that this is going on in the media and nobody’s doing anything about it. [...] Erm, but previously, yes very much so it has affected me and I would, I would often have used, erm, skinny-looking people or athletic-looking people [...] to help me stay motivated to lose weight, to be thin, to be smaller’ The prioritising of physical health was presented as a method of resisting the social emphasis on thinness by some women. Desires to be slimmer were expressed in terms of desires to be ‘healthy’ or a ‘healthy weight’, while ‘overweight’ bodies were seen as undesirable because they were ‘unhealthy’, rather than because they do not meet cultural appearance ideals: ‘I want to be healthy and if I gain weight then I start feeling like I’m getting out of breath running for the bus . . . that concerns me, but in terms of the aesthetics I don’t really, I don’t really care’ (Laura, 27 year old bisexual woman). These women presented an emphasis on health as a resistance to mainstream idealisation of thinness. However, it could be argued that through the lens of health, these women still subscribed to the social ideal that thin body shapes are desirable because they conflated thinness with healthiness (Gonzalez et al., 2012; Kwan, 2009). Despite this reported critique of social pressures, there often seemed to be a discrepancy between the women’s criticisms of cultural ideals and their feelings about their own bodies.