The media need to find an honest and real concept of beauty that is based on diversity of shape. People come in all shapes and sizes, an obvious and redundant statement that we’ve all heard hundreds of times but the fashion industry is the reason bodies resembling skeletons are idolized. Delia, a college senior mentioned in Sharlene Hesse-Biber’s book, “Am I Thin Enough Yet?” said, "I am so affected by Glamour magazine and Vogue… I’m looking at these beautiful women. They’re thin. I want to be…" Another college student mentioned in Hesse-Biber’s book, felt the same way, "I would see these thin girls in the magazines and say, I want to be like that. I would look at myself in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw." With the increasing bombardment of these advertisements, it is no surprise that girls have resorted to eating disorders to conform to the hidden message sent by the fashion industry: thin is in. Rather than frowning upon a size 16 figure and striving to attain a size two, a variety of shape and size should be emphasized much more in our society. We have an obsession with weight and beauty, the two often associated with each other. Magazines and the fashion industry should provide readers with more realistic models, with figures that boost their confidence rather than crush it. The Media have become a very powerful and manipulative tool in today’s world and what is portrayed in the media is very often placed on a pedestal above reality.
Despite the plethora of evidence stating that the media portrays an "ideal image" much lower in weight than the average female, fashion editors and models think the idea that their ads provoke disordered eating habits amongst their readers is ridiculous. They claim that they are just responding to a "supply and demand" type phenomenon and what is in demand has shifted, from the previous "superwoman" image of the 80’s fashion era: high-heels, big shoulder pads, tons of make-up and teased hair, to the Kate Moss "I’ll blow away if you point a hair dryer at me" waif look. Other individuals feel that advertisements don’t necessarily cause eating disorders, but can encourage them. Lorraine Butler, editor of Cosmopolitan, for example, feels that, "You cannot ‘catch’ anorexia from the pages of a magazine" A predisposing vulnerability needs to be present in order for the development of an eating problem to occur. Eating disorders are surrounded by these myths and misconceptions: they're about vanity, they're 'self-imposed', they happen to silly girls who have got out of control with their silly diets. All wrong. Watching and listening to sufferers, even for a few minutes, it isn't possible to entertain any of those myths. In the most deliberate and inescapable way, the girls are using their bodies to ask for help. Due to this it is imperative that parents address this issue with their children, especially with teenage girls. Emphasis needs to be directed towards encouraging natural beauty and health instead of glamorising social X-Rays. If faddy diets really worked then there would be no need for so many of them to be in circulation. By encouraging a healthy, balanced diet and lifestyle, parents will succeed in properly educating children’s dietary habits by illustrating what is healthy and what is harmful.
Those who feel that you cannot catch an eating disorder from the pages of a magazine ignore the fact that adolescence is one of the most vulnerable stages in your life; the sudden physical and hormonal changes one’s body goes through leave a teenager confused and often diminish his or her self-image. Adolescents strive to stabilize their "self" and become more susceptible to ad persuasion and with an estimated 60% of girls reading at least one fashion magazine regularly, persuasion can become overpowering. Results of a 1990 study showed that all subjects involved experienced the greatest pressure to be thin from the media and this exposure to the "thin ideal" produces depression, shame, guilt, body dissatisfaction and stress. Although it has its benefits, digital technology has fanned the flames of this controversy. It becomes impossible to distinguish what is real from what has been digitally altered in magazines, and teenagers feel pressure to transform their bodies to match those of the five foot ten, seven stone, Kate Moss. Perhaps if the media are faced one-on-one with the facts and evidence of their influence among teenage girls, they will realize that it is their responsibility to recognize the fact that what they print in magazines and air on television heavily influences the public’s perceptions of "normality." They need to reconsider the message they want to send out to the public and the message the public will actually interpret, because the two often do not match up.
Perhaps this raises the question of why teens are still reading these magazines if it is evident that they are subsequently subjecting themselves to potential health hazards. In a society where everyone is surrounded by advertising from childhood and where it becomes a part of everyday life, it would be unrealistic to tell someone to stop reading magazines and watching television. The purpose of the media is to serve as a form of entertainment and as a source of information for the public. These functions have been somewhat forgotten as the exploitation of women’s bodies has escalated throughout the years. This exploitation has spread itself through every aspect of media; it’s not just magazine ads we have to worry about any more. If girls were to boycott reading these magazines, they would still be surrounded by the same images. Think of Times Square in New York City with its flashy billboards and the ads pasted to the sides of passing buses and the phone booth you’re trying to make a call from. It seems that nowadays, everywhere you turn, the same message is being sent out.
This is a growing problem within today’s society, but where exactly did it come from? The fashion industry has shaped women’s ideals of what to wear and what to look like throughout history. From Christian Dior’s Post World War Two "New Look" to the miniskirt of the 1960’s era, the pressure to be thin was always strong for women as fashion designs hugged the dangerously thin and humiliated the healthy. Researchers in the fields of communication and eating disorders have long suspected that the media play a significant role in transmitting thinness-oriented norms and values. Garfinkel and Garner, two pioneers in the study of eating disorders, described this role in an article from the Journal of Communication, “The media have capitalized upon and promoted this image and through popular programming have portrayed the successful and beautiful protagonists as thin. Thinness has thus become associated with self-control and success.” At the end of World War Two, Christian Dior’s "New Look" was born. A reaction to the uniformed woman and the material restrictions brought on by the war, Dior’s designs featured an hour-glass waist, made tinier by voluminous sleeves and bell-shaped skirts, lower hemlines, and higher heels. His aim: "to make all women beautiful.” Of course, beautiful to Dior meant emphasizing a woman’s teeny waist by making the shoulders and other features bigger. A waist larger than seventeen inches was "repulsive" in Dior’s eyes, and women who wore his designs had to wear a corset to shape their bodies into the unrealistic figure he used for his popular dresses. Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar began to employ the finest photographers for their picture spreads. They portrayed the "pretty girl," whose legs were impossibly long and thin, waist narrow, bust prominent and whose image was sought after by women across the country. The ideal woman’s frame was petite and physically inferior to her male counterpart, never threatening his dominating façade.
A disturbing new phenomenon is now sweeping across the internet, indicating society’s positions on body image. Websites with names such as “Sharp Bones”, “Stick Figures” and “Skinnylicious” have been multiplying like a virus. Their users under go alliances such as “Thinkthin”, “Fatnugly” and “AnorexicwannaB”. They are primarily female and in their early teens to late thirties. Thousands of them log on daily to provide and receive encouragement and exchange tips with like-minded individuals. However, this is not a forum for women who are recovery from eating disorders to support each other and achieve a healthy relationship with food. These are pro-anorexia and bulimia websites, owned and visited by young women who believe an eating disorder is an acceptable and even desirable lifestyle, rather than a potentially life threatening illness. Their views have caused many to condemn them, yet their numbers are growing weekly.
It’s easy to understand why this new cyber community has alarmed parents, experts in the field of eating disorders and those recovering from them. The content of most of these sites is very shocking to the casual observer. “Here is a place for the bony and vomitous to hang out,” announces the homepage of Anorexia And Bulimic Rec Room. Pictures of skeletal women are posted on many sites to act as “thinspiration.”
Whilst owners of cyber sites like Anorexic Goddesses claim that, “the pressure people put on us to have a normal relationship with food,” they are giving a clear message to what may well be a vulnerable psyche that eating disorders are an attractive lifestyle and they may encourage women, who are clearly very ill, to become even thinner. The danger of these sites is that they stimulate the competitive nature of anorexia as being thinner than other people becomes very important as the illness progresses. The more these sorts of habits are fuelled, the more serious the eating disorder becomes because they generate the buzz people can get from starving themselves. So, should what the media produces be censored?
Eating disorders are a very serious problem amongst teenage girls, vulnerable from the puberty hormone changes and self-image distorted. Their own sense of reality is also distorted when surrounded by images of underweight models. Diversity, reality, and positive health attitudes appearing more frequently in the media will obviously not eliminate teenage girls from developing an eating disorder overnight, but with enough time, the pressures for conformity will shift more towards acceptance. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness and it has been estimated that over ten percent of anorexics die from the condition or associated complications, such as pneumonia and heart failure while suicide accounts for twenty seven percent of the deaths. Large numbers of women have anorexic tendencies and people who enjoy their food can’t possibly understand them, consequently, if they can find other like-minded people, it reinforces their feelings about food instead of helping them see that it’s abnormal to want to be so thin. With the exploitation and glorification of skinny models the media try to assert that an eating disorder is a “cool” thing to have rather than stressing that is a life threatening illness. In doing so, they’re actually advocating a slow suicide not a healthy lifestyle. In this era of female dominance in education and apparent girl power, girls are still, like their repressed Victorian counterparts, confused, frustrated, manipulated and dominated, and terrified of having to grow up and become what society deems women 'ought' to be. They still have to protest silently, in the most horrible, wretched and destructive way, about what they aren't allowed to express. If the media is willing to stop the exploitation of underweight models then it would provide a chance for young girls to stop the fatal fasting.
