2008 Woodie Awards
SRU celebrates Love Your Body Day
By Sheryl McGlory
Rocket Advertising Manager
Issue date: 10/21/05 Section: News
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Love Your Body Day is part of a national Love Your Body campaign sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW) Foundation. The campaign began in 1998 and is now in its eighth year.
According to the NOW Foundation Web site, the purpose of the campaign is to promote positive body image among women, protest advertisements that are offensive to women and address women's health issues.
Jenett Moyer, graduate assistant for the Women's Center, was responsible for the Love Your Body Day event on campus.
Preparations for the national event began with a sash-making session in the Women's Center on Oct. 13.
"The sashes are similar to the ones women wear at beauty pageants," Moyer said.
Moyer said that in contrast to the beauty pageant portrayal of women needing to be thin to be beautiful, the sashes for the campaign promote every body-type as beautiful.
Students were given a second opportunity to decorate sashes at a table set up for the Women's Center at Tuesday's HealthFest.
Students made up slogans and phrases to write on their sashes promoting healthy body image.
"One girl wrote, 'Start a revolution - love your body,'" Moyer said. "I really liked that one."
Other sashes bore phrases including, "I am beautiful," "Curves are beautiful," "I love mine, do you?" and "I love my body, deal with it!"
Megan Frymire, SRU senior health and physical education major, was one of the students who made a sash.
"I wore the sash to a few of my classes (Wednesday)," she said.
Frymire, a community assistant in Rhoads Hall, said she hadn't been aware of the Love Your Body campaign or day, but stopped to check out the table when she went to HealthFest Tuesday.
Frymire said she likes the purpose of the campaign.
"It's a really good thing," she said. "With what's in magazines today, girls don't love their bodies."
Moyer said that the way media, especially magazines and advertisements, portrays women is an important part of the campaign.
She said that because of what women and girls see on television and in magazines and advertisements, they feel the need to alter their bodies to become thinner.
"There are a lot of unnecessary eating disorders and unnecessary plastic surgery, especially stomach stapling and things like that," Moyer said.
The Love Your Body campaign Web site calls on women to become involved in protesting advertising that projects unhealthy body images as being beautiful.
