When did the promotion of positive self-esteem and healthy body image develop into a social movement?
If you are just talking about the US, most advertisers realized that women were writing to complain that they were foisting a “perfect body” image on us in the late 70’s and 80’s. Think about the aerobics faze with Jane Fonda making millions. Think about the newest trend of whitening our teeth. think about the massive amounts of advertising Maybelline has to do to get you to buy their product or L’Oreal, etc and so on. It began as merchandising these products with images of celebrities, supermodels. There were no “supermodels” until the 80’s, though there were many famous models before that. It’s all hype. Look at Angie’s lips, and women go running to Botox. You know what I mean. But the focus on positive self esteem was really boosted in my opinion by the enormous amount of women who tuned into Oprah, who lets us know in her own ininmitable way that we are accepted, and yes, JLo has that behind, and she is proud of it, etc… We began seeing more real examples of woman, models who wer
