The Daily Mail just ran a frightening story written by a mother whose daughter died of anorexia directly caused by the media's promotion of emaciation. It's a damning indictment of the underweight standard, and another call to arms for the media to stop promoting malnourishment, and to begin showcasing natural, plus-size female beauty.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...d-anorexia.html
The article begins with the mother taking aim at yet another celebrity magazine talking about skinny actresses:
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There they all are in the celebrity magazine Heat this week: a parade of stick-thin stars so emaciated they look as if the slightest pressure would snap them in two.
'The Rise Of The Celebrity Twiglets!' screams the headline, beneath a procession of skeletal young women. The analogy is entirely appropriate.
These women have no more substance than a cocktail snack. Indeed, their limbs are so denuded of flesh that they resemble the knobbly appendages of famine victims.
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Perceptively, the writer indicates that although such stories are disguised as criticisms, they are actually
triggering to the girls who read them:
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Ostensibly, we are urged to be shocked by these images of women who seem to have whittled themselves away.
However, while the celebrity magazine headline says 'This is appalling', I believe an unwritten sub-text shrieks: 'Isn't it amazing that these women are so thin?'
Small wonder that growing numbers of teenagers are falling prey to eating disorders, when role models in magazines exhibit their jutting bones and attenuated limbs
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She points out how pathetic the efforts on the part of the media have been, so far, in presenting healthier, fuller female figures. Discussing the few curvy women who have appeared in the public eye, she says:
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I fear it is merely tokenism: for every size 12 woman on the catwalk or in the magazines read by millions of young women - and Heaven help us, even this is below the average British dress size - we see a dozen skeletal ones.
So the 'real' women are the exception to a rule, which demands more and more freakish levels of slenderness.
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A "dozen"? If only. The ratio is more like a couple
thousand walking corpses to even one curvy starlet. And she's so right when she observes that the media disguises the "freakish" as normal, and makes natural, full-figured bodies look marginal by their relative absence.
She states, point blank, that these images of malnourished celebrities
are causing eating disorders in young women:
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Every time I pick up a magazine, only to be assailed by the emaciated form of another 'twiglet' celebrity, I feel not only profoundly sad, but also overwhelmingly disturbed.
The fact is, these super- skinny celebrities have inordinate influence over our teenage children.
And the toxic nonsense they spout about 'forgetting' to shop for food, or the fact that they've put on weight when they are so palpably emaciated, is frightening.
They are teaching adolescent girls that it is normal to obsess over their size and dissemble about their eating habits. More vitally, they are bound to convince huge numbers of them that it is laudable and desirable to starve oneself.
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And she knows whereof she speaks, because her own daughter died of anorexia. This is heartbreaking to read:
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In two short, devastating years I watched my healthy, happy girl diminish in front of me until she was reduced to skin and bone.
Shortly before she died of heart failure and internal bleeding, brought on by her eating disorder, she was so frail she could not raise her arm unaided.
Actually, she could not even lift her head from the pillow of her hospital bed. Her vision was impaired and her mind was so addled by lack of nutrition that she could no longer think cogently nor express a coherent thought.
She shivered constantly and no amount of heat could warm her.
Not a glamorous image, is it? Yet I strongly believe that celebrity magazines played a role in precipitating Sophie's death. And they did so because they disseminate - and continue to perpetuate - the hazardous myth that thinness equates to beauty.
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Exactly. And this isn't just speculation on the mother's part. She witnessed it first-hand, as a cause-and-effect scenario:
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she was an avid reader of the kind of glossy magazines that obsess about body image. She would leaf through a pile of them every month, mulling over photos of dangerously thin women.
And she soaked up their 'advice' about diet and weight loss. She bought into the fiction that slimness equals success.
Would she have coveted the emaciated look of the celebrities we see today?
Undoubtedly she would. Teenagers are like sponges, aren't they? All around them are images of improbably slender bodies. It is a drip, drip effect. And their young brains soak it all up.
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Her counsel is that magazines be forced to run warning labels alongside images of emaciated models and celebrities; which would pretty much mean alongside
every picture in every fashion magazine. Her proposed wording is very clear and unambiguous:
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'Being this thin could lead to death,' it might say. Then it could list the symptoms - shrivelled ovaries, brittle bones, wasted muscles and foul breath - of starving oneself. Not remotely alluring or sexy, are they?
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But actually, it should go further. Instead of warning labels, such images should be banned outright.
Why not? They have been proven to ruin the body image of the majority of women. Literally millions of lives could be improved if such images were eliminated. And they have directly contributed to eating disorders in countless thousands of girls, even leading to the death - and a horrible death at that, all the more horrible because it is so senseless - of many of these victims.
Ban them. Ban them all, the way in which equally toxic substances like hard drugs are banned, the way asbestos is banned. All of the fashion/media requirements of selling clothing and makeup and perfume could be perfectly well accommodated by using plus-size models. There is no need
for even one more young girl to die such a pointless, and tragic, and horrifying death.