According to the British Government, the growing pressure on women to be thin is damaging their health and stripping them of their self-esteem.

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According to the British Government, the growing pressure on women to be thin is damaging their health and stripping them of their self-esteem. On June 21, 2000, ministers of the government, including Tessa Jowell, the Minister for Women, hosted the Body Image Summit in London. It aimed to consider the effects of advertising on teenage girls and women in the hopes of developing an agreement from within these industries to incorporate a social and ethical awareness in their promotional activities. The Summit brought together leading figures from the fashion industry and the publishing industry to discuss the problem along with ordinary British teenagers who were invited to explain how the pressure to be thin affects their life. The medical industry are also concerned that images of thin fashion models and the rise of the so-called "superwaif" are to blame for an increase in eating disorders among young women. An estimated one million people in the UK are anorexic or bulimic, although few sufferers are actually diagnosed or treated (“BBC News”). Anne Marie Cussins, author of the article, “The Role of Body Image in Women’s Mental Health”, has contributed to an understanding of why women are suffering from eating disorders. She offered both a sociological and a psychoanalytical based discussion of the problem women have with body image.  

The first argument presented concerned the consumer industry. Cussins explains how the consumer industries are to blame for the increase of eating disorders in the female population (2001; 106). She argues that we once lived in a world with substance, dependability and real values, but this world is long deceased. It has been replaced with superficial standards and images of self-gratification (2001:106). Adolescents cannot grow in a culture like this because presently our society encourages lack of self-confidence, lack of self-identity and a homogenous body image. “Without a culture offering its adolescents a framework to grow up in that can be widely understood, there will be crisis” (2001; 106).

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The second argument was adopted from Margaret Whitford, who has written extensively on the work of psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray argues against the masculine-gender-based idea of subjectivity. Irigaray believes that women are not sufficiently represented by existing symbolic systems. She argues that they are not given a proper place in a patriarchal world. According to Irigaray, social order determines sexual order.  In a patriarchal society, the males are the "producer subjects and agents of exchange" and the females are the "commodities" (Irigaray 192).  The economy as a whole is based on homosexual relations because all economic exchange takes ...

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