Meredith

All indications are that the U.K. is finally beginning to take curve-o-phobia and thin-supremacism seriously.

First, there was the amazing "Ditching Dieting" protest, which was discussed on this forum last week.

Now, in a new article, a journalist rightly slams the media for being "ludicrously slow to ridicule and attack the skinny-model fashion houses and the snake-oil diet sellers."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...body-confidence

The entire piece is a must-read, but here are a few significant passages:


It's encouraging to see this journalist excoriating her own profession -- the media -- for its inexcusable negligence in this field. The press is always ready to fight the so-called "power" and to attack corporations...except when those corporations provide ad revenue, as the fashion/diet profiteers do. The media sells out every time it takes a penny from these anorexia-pushers and turns a blind eye to their abuses.

Well, no more. Now, at last, the government is holding inquiries into the diet-starvation and exercise-torture industries, and the media is beginning to act responsibly and condemning anti-plus, androgyny-pushing propaganda.

It may be only a step, but it's a significant one, and hopefully will lead to strict regulation that will end the promotion of emaciation and the dispensing of body hatred., once and for all.

M. Lopez

There's another reason why the media blatantly fails to condemn the fashion and diet-starvation industries besides the media's addiction to the shekels that these thin-supremacist industries pump into media advertising. Much of the media outside the fashion sector is comprised of the same types of personalities who populate the fashion world. Journalists in general silently agree with the fashion industry's degenerate, anti-feminine aesthetic. The modern media self-selects similar personality types in both sectors - after all, the fashion media is just another branch of journalism - so these people share the same political and aesthetic values. Journalists both inside and outside fashion largely have the same biases against traditional values of every kind, including traditional aesthetic values favouring full-figured femininity. For the media to censure the abuses of the fashion industry properly, it would need to be comprised of very different individuals than it (largely) is today.

Incidentally, the Guardian article that Meredith posted links to the official Web page of the U.K. government hearings on body image:

http://www.ymca.co.uk/bodyconfidence/parliament

The panel has heard from a number of industries, including the "diet and cosmetic surgery industry" and "media and advertisers," but the one that matters most of all is still coming up:


Finally, some representatives from the anti-plus, curve-o-phobic, anorexia-pushing fashion industry will have to sit down in front of the people's representatives and be held to account for the misery that they inflict on society.

I just hope that these hearings aren't merely an attempt by the government to make it appear as if it's doing something, but lead to zero change. I hope they result in concrete legislation that has real teeth, and which mandates, once and for all, that underweight models cannot be used in fashion advertising and that the diet-starvation/exercise-torture industries must stop promoting body hatred.