Psychology of Women Quarterly, 28 (2004), 38–47. Blackwell Publishing. Printed in the USA. Copyright C  2004 Division 35, American Psychological Association. 0361-6843/04 WHO’S THAT GIRL: TELEVISION’S ROLE IN THE BODY IMAGE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUNG WHITE AND BLACK WOMEN Deborah Schooler, L. Monique Ward, Ann Merriwether, and Allison Caruthers University of Michigan Although findings indicate a connection between frequent media use and greater body dissatisfaction, little attention has focused on the role of race. Accordingly, this study investigates the relation between television viewing and body image among 87 Black and 584 White women. Participants reported monthly viewing amounts of mainstream and Black-oriented television programs as well as body attitudes as measured by the Eating Disorders Inventory, the Body Esteem Scale, and the Body Shape Questionnaire. Results suggest different patterns predicting body image for White and Black women. Among White women, viewing mainstream television predicted poorer body image, while viewing Black-oriented media was unrelated to body image. Among Black women, viewing Black-oriented television predicted healthier body image, while viewing mainstream television was unrelated to body image. Ethnic identity also predicted healthier body image among Black women, and appeared to moderate, to some extent, the contributions of viewing Black-oriented programming. Body dissatisfaction has such a pervasive hold on young women in this country that it has been called a “normative discontent” (Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore, 1984). Young women often aspire to be perfect when it comes to their physical appearance, and describe the perfect ideal as tall, extremely thin, and blonde (Parker et al., 1995). Un- fortunately, this ideal is unattainable to the vast majority of women, contributing to depression, low self-esteem, and eating disorders (e.g., Denniston, Roth, & Gilroy, 1992). In the United States, it is estimated that 5–10 million girls and women struggle with an eating disorder (e.g., Shisslak, Crago, & Estes, 1995). Mass media are believed to play an important role in perpetuating this ultrathin ideal for Deborah Schooler, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan; L. Monique Ward, Department of Psychology, Uni- versity of Michigan; Ann Merriwether, Department of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York; and Allison Caruthers, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. An earlier version of this paper was selected for the Pat Gurin Distinguished Lecture and was presented as a poster at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. The authors would like to thank members of the Ward/Merriwether research lab and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: L. Monique Ward, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 E. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: ward@ umich.edu women. Indeed, the images of women displayed in the me- dia today are thinner than the images of men (Silverstein, Perdue, Peterson, & Kelly, 1986), thinner than media im- ages of women have been in the past (Silverstein et al., 1986), thinner than the actual female population (e.g., Fouts & Burggraf, 1999, 2000), and thinner than the criteria for anorexia (Wiseman, Gray, Moismann, & Ahrens, 1990). Media Influences on Body Image: Existing Perspectives What impact does repeated exposure to these images have on the body conceptions of young female viewers? Efforts to address this question over the past two decades have centered both on the amount of exposure and on the so- cial comparison processes believed to be involved. With its focus on exposure amounts, cultivation theory (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994) argued that consis- tent representations on television construct a specific por- trait of reality, and that repeated exposure to this content leads viewers to adopt this alternate reality as valid. Ac- cordingly, because the representations of women’s bodies shown on television are so skewed, adopting this reality for young women is believed to lead to decreased satisfaction with their own bodies, a strong desire to be thinner, and disordered eating behavior. Empirical work typically sup- ports this notion, indicating associations between greater body dissatisfaction and both higher levels of overall TV viewing (e.g., Harrison, 2001; Harrison & Cantor, 1997; but see Botta, 2000, for null results), and higher levels of 38