Indoor Tanning Cultural Messaging
The Impact of Pop Culture
Societal and cultural pressures have constructed strict standards and ideals of physical appearance and beauty. Idealized images of women construct unrealistic norms about how a woman should appear and be. Pop culture is the greatest source of these idealized images, from movies to magazine covers to models. In pop culture, the ideals are expressed visually and are distributed on a mass level—thus, their impact is profound.
Pop culture ideals of beauty have disproportionate implications for women and girls.[1] For women, more so than men, physical appearance is a major component of personal identity. Thus there is greater pressure for women to fit the physical ideals they see celebrated in pop culture and American society.
Young women are the most vulnerable group to services like indoor tanning, which are largely used in order to achieve certain beauty ideals. Young women are the highest percentage of indoor tanning customers[2], in part, because they are the most deeply affected by cultural standards of physical appearance.[3] As a result, indoor tanning can and should be viewed specifically as a gendered and generational problem.
Cultural Messaging
There needs to be a greater amount of what I would call “cultural messaging” that denounces indoor tanning as dangerous and undesirable. The American public is familiar with anti-smoking and anti-drinking campaigns. The TRUTH campaign[4] and organizations like MADD (Mothers against Drunk Driving) are well known.
There are some examples of pop culture movements that seek to resist the tanning phenomenon. Cosmopolitan Magazine has been involved with indoor tanning regulation. Editor-in-Chief, Kate White, joined Representatives Maloney and Dent when they introduced the Tanning Bed Cancer Control Act. In 2006, Cosmo launched a “Practice Safe Sun’ campaign and partnered with ABC to do an undercover investigation of tanning salons. In 2008, fashion designer Marc Jacobs joined with celebrity friends to launch an anti-tanning campaign called “Protect the Skin You’re In.” The Skin Cancer Foundation has a campaign called “Go With Your Own Glow.” Unfortunately, these groups are too few in number, and are not very far-reaching.
[1] For academic scholarship on Western standards of beauty and their implications for women in a patriarchal society, see: Naomi Wolff, Susan Bordo, and Joan Jacobs Brumberg.
[2] Of the 30 million patrons who use indoor tanning salons each year, 71% of them are young girls and women ages 16-29.
[3] A useful analogy here might be eating disorders and the cultural demand for thinness. It is estimated that 7 million women in America have an eating disorder (compared to 1 million men). And of those, 95% are between the ages of 12 and 25.
[4] Interestingly, much of the funding for TRUTH comes from the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which is discussed in Part IV of this memorandum.
Assisted by Jessica Began
Steven N. Berk has over twenty years of litigation experience spanning both the private and public sectors. His practice ranges from representing Fortune 500 Companies, to consumers. Steven is based in Washington, D.C. and founded Berk Law in May 2009....
