Women’s Attitudes towards Their Bodies: Influential Tendencies in Modern Western Culture Elena Stankovskaya 46 b Volgogradskyi prospect, office 102, 109316, Moscow, Russia stankovskaya@hse.ru Keywords:Women Studies, Embodiment, Gender Studies, Cultural Psychology, Personal Identity, Self. Abstract.A woman’s body becomes a site of alarming attention and anxiety in modern Western culture. The preoccupation with the body seriously affects women’s psychological well-being and self-esteem, health and health related behaviours, relationships with others, and career. This article focuses onthe social influences on body perception and women’s individual lives. It reveals the complexity of a human body and women’s personal activity addressed to their bodies, and containsthe results of qualitative hermeneutical research of influential bodily sociocultural tendencies and women’s attitudes towards their bodies in modern Western culture. 1. Introduction In modern world body dissatisfaction becomes commonplace. It is so widespread that Rodin and her colleagues suggested a term ‘normative discontent’ to describe nearly epidemic popularity of concern for the body[1], and Orbach stated ‘body destabilization’ as one of the most significant features of bodies in our time [2]. The preoccupation with the body seriously affects an individual life: it strongly influences psychological well-being and self-esteem, health and health related behaviours, relationships with others, and even career. Analysis of previous studies in the field has shown three important characteristics of them. In the first place, although both men and women suffer from body dissatisfaction, many surveys demonstrate that women are more vulnerable in this aspect [3]. Secondly, many researchers emphasize the role of social environment in body dissatisfaction development [2, 4, 5, 6]. In the third place, despite the increasing interest to the problem, a lot of questions are still to be answered. For example, what are the most influential body related tendencies in modern society? How a person does assume sociocultural patterns? Why body image is so important for women? How are interrelated body satisfaction and general self-esteem? Therefore, to provide better understanding of the point we decided to investigate the complexity of a human body, women’s personal activity addressed to their bodies and influentialbodily sosciocultural tendencies in modern Western culture. Such examination, we believed, might extendknowledge of women’s personalities and individual lives, reveal meanings and potentials of challenges faced by modern women and considerably contribute to the psychology of the body. 2. The complexity of human body We are used to think about a human body as a physiological mechanism or as an object to be possessed, worked with and worked on. But this perspective is limited and does not correspond to our everyday experience. In psychology we have to develop more complex and comprehensive understanding of human body, understanding which is adequate to personal reality. 2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society 978-0-9831693-4-5/10/$25.00 ©2011 IERI ICSSS20 11 14