Carter Henman
chenman@uwyo.edu
Real Women Real Bodies was founded in spring 2014 with the goal of promoting positive body image and challenging the hegemony of beauty cultures on campus.
Sydney Stein is the current president of Real Women Real Bodies (RWRB), a junior studying communication and one of the founding members of the organization.
“Body image affects so many aspects of your life that you might not be cognizant of,” Stein said. “We just wanted to create an organization that promotes positivity.”
The main way that RWRB seeks to promote that positivity is by increasing the representation of diverse bodies on campus through photography.
RWRB Vice President Alison Geary is a sophomore majoring in business management.
Geary got involved in the organization as a freshman after seeing their posters across campus, which prompted her to participate in a RWRB photo shoot and start regularly attending meetings.
“Self-love is a big thing, and not only for women,” Geary said. “For me it’s very important that men realize they’re welcome in our organization; I think men experience body image issues as well and so not only can they be our allies, they can be our
members.”
Bria Frame is a senior majoring in English who volunteered to be photographed for their most recent campaign. RWRB asked volunteers to select a part of their body that they wanted to have photographed, painted a phrase onto that part of their body and photographed it in a dark room with bright lights.
“Body image is something that I’ve struggled with, as I’m sure everyone has, and that makes it important to talk about different issues that affect people’s perceptions of their bodies,” Frame said. “I did it because I think the more people that are represented in this project, the more successful it will be.”
“I came up with the initial idea for the campaigns, which is what drove us to become an RSO,” Stein said. “We just wanted to hang some posters with some shock value, and to get any space to do that we had to register as a student organization.”
While campus regulations restricting access to poster run to organizations officially recognized by the Campus Activities Center represented a barrier at first, jumping through all the hoops proved worthwhile.
“It gave us a lot of opportunities for growth and to do some of the events we’ve participated in,” Stein said.
Last Wednesday, for example, the group arranged to have the slam-poet duo Speak Like a Girl perform in the Education Auditorium. The event was a huge success for members of RWRB who were looking to further the group’s mission as well as increase awareness of women’s issues on campus.
“We were really amazed at how it turned out,” Stein said. “We budgeted for 50 to 60 and we had 160 people come.”
Interestingly enough, it was the members of Speak Like a Girl who originally reached out to RWRB, not the other way around.
“We got an email from Speak Like a Girl and they were like ‘you should check us out!’” Stein said. “We watched a couple of their videos and the topics that they covered were so relevant to everything that we’re interested in: from body image to sexual assault to beauty culture.”
While Stein focused on coordinating with the performers, other members of RWRB worked very hard to get the word out by tabling in the union and advertising the event with posters.
“Being here at UW, we’re kind of isolated from very relevant social issues,” Geary said. “I think it was a very unique and powerful experience to have some feminist slam poets come and talk about those topics in a way that inspires people to create change.”
