Really obviously anorexic people who you see almost every day.

Of course, but subscribing such magazines, most of which still see thinness as the ideal body form (besides, even if you call them "curvy", Beyonce and J-Lo still look pretty damn thin to me - maybe they're "curvy" in the ideal world of fashion mags), certainly isn't going to help people with serious psychic problems with their body image.

Uh, she should realize that anorexia is not about how the media portrays women. In general it's about control issues. It's certainly not about trying to copy models.

The hospital I frequented was so depressing. I didn't stay there. I did a few sessions for something else.

dude the obvious course of action is to print out the ipso fatso thread for distribution around hospitals.

Yes, I know that media isn't the immediate cause of anorexia, but if you want to control something that also means that you strive for an ideal - and where does that ideal come from?

what course of action are you suggesting here, tuomas? we ban pictures of the beautiful people?

We've had this discussion before... No, I'm not for banning anything, but I certainly wouldn't subscribe these mags to a fuckin psychiatric ward. You wouldn't put books about suicide to a ward with people who have suicidal tendencies either, would you?

Being thin is not the problem it's the steps people take in order to get thin.

The thinnest person I've ever seen came from the US to a conference I ran, went straight into a hospice upon her return and died a few days later. She had terminal cancer, and looked like she'd just walked out of Belsen. It was shocking, but I'm glad she came as it was her very great wish to attend (although I find it really hard to understand how somebody can care *that much* about her work, but there you go).

It should be rather obvious that media images work on other levels too than what they directly tell us to do.

Dude, it's not about how the media portrays women. One of the last things that anorexics have is control over their body. One of the reasons people with anorexia (and boulemia) have this eating disorder is that they feel they have lost control and the only thing they can control is their body. Anorexia is not only prevalent in Western society but in cultures that does not propagate skinniness.

-- Tuomas (tuomas.alh...), December 7th, 2005.

if this is true, then there's nothing wrong with showing pictures of thin people cos it'll work on all these 'other levels'.

I have to disagree with you. It's no just about media images, but they do have an effect. Eating disorders can be found is less thinness-obsessed cultures, but I doubt they're as prevalent. Here's some quotes from an anorexia website (http://www.helpguide.org/mental/anorexia_signs_symptoms_causes_treatment.htm):

Who is likely to suffer from anorexia?

Anorexia nervosa is more common in females and usually begins in adolescence. Between 1% and 2% of all females develop anorexia. Less than 1% of males develops anorexia nervosa. The disorder is more common in industrialized countries where thinness is a positive cultural trait. A person with a family member who has anorexia is more likely to develop anorexia.

Social causes

The cultural or social environment may cause or reinforce a propensity toward anorexia. Particular professions (fashion model, horse jockey) and sports (ballet, gymnastics) emphasize thinness and low body weight. Female athletes are particularly prone to being anorexic. Coaches may encourage them to lose weight, and they may notice improved performance with some weight loss. However, the anorexic does not know when to stop losing weight, and, ultimately, hinders performance by not consuming enough calories or nutrients to fuel the body.

Some cultures value thinness as a key element of attractiveness, especially for women. Thus, social pressure is a cause of anorexia.

Families that are overprotective or emphasize overachievement or physical fitness often produce anorexic family members.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro03/web2/arutigliano.html

A quote:

Since the symptoms of anorexia often appear around puberty, another hypothesis is that the girl is afraid of becoming a woman, and therefore diets away all signs of puberty (i.e., breasts, hips, menses). The full-time preoccupation with weight also allows her to avoid adolescent social and sexual concerns and potential conflicts with parents. (8) In case of the pubescent girl, it is possible to trace the cause of anorexia past the initial preoccupation with weight to deeper control issues. The pubescent girl in the throw of fluctuating hormones, and massive physical change, would fit the bill of a person whom would feel as if they had lost control of their world. Their body is turning against them, what better way to reassert control than to regulate its intake of food and thus its shape. Puberty is also the time in which a girl begins to identify herself as a woman, both mentally and physically. She will look at her environment for female role models to copy. This leads to another cause of anorexia—the media. The role of the American cultural ideal of thinness is thought to contribute, at least by encouraging initial dieting, but the scope of its influence is unclear. On any given day, 25% of American men and 45% of American women are actively dieting; moreover, children are starting to diet as early as first grade. Anorexia is now being seen in nonwestern countries that receive American television, so it may be that a cultural ideal of thinness is a potent catalyst. (5)

There are several possible and parallel causes for anorexia, but it would be kinda naive to deny media images can't be one.

i wrote '4 Real' in red on my sling, when i broke my arm -- i blame richey for this.

given obesity levels in the US, isn't this a good thing?

dieting has fuck-all to do with anorexia anyway.

I can't believe I'm even having this conversation...

xpost

Well, one theory contradicts another. The one that I read is that statistically it's as prevalent here as in other cultures.

Dieting isn't the same as anorexia, but can't you really see any connection between the two?

The reasons for doing the same thing are vastly different. Of course anorexia is about dieting, but taken to an extreme.

Internationally: Rates of anorexia nervosa are similar in all developed countries with high economic status. The disorder is far more prevalent in industrialized societies where food is abundant and thinness is a measure of feminine attractiveness.

i can believe this -- either way it's a matter of stats (which, um, will probably be more accurately measured in the industrial west but hey).

... where food is abundant and thinness is a measure of feminine attractiveness.

these are also facts, but the concrete links to anorexia are assumed. many other things differentiate the industrial from the semi-industrialized worlds: why the focus on images of female beauty in the west, when all sorts of other factors may be in play?

It should also be noted that I have a history of 'needing' to 'help' people, and grew up the carer of a disabled parent. I like the girl lots and lots, but am worried too that I might be indulging this tendency to 'rescue' people.

Maybe because it sounds like the most probable explanation for the difference?

Nathalie maybe you did misinterpret and she actually meant it had something to do with JEANS, because they make them so skinny these days and one has to be anorexic to fit into a pair!

so the solution is to not start dieting at all?

anorexia may start after dieting but it's still a different thing from anorexia. steroid abuse may follow a normal exercise regime, chronologically, but that doens't make excercising bad or unhealthy.

-- ken c

Ken, for fuck's sake can you just try, for once, not to make flippant jokes on threads covering sensitive issues?

yeah maybe.

oh, so it's not dieting that leads to anorexia but "dieting".

Off topic a little, but I've recently started dating a girl who is very, very thin, who has an eating disorder in that she vomits when she is extremely nervous and can't really handle eating in public places. But she's eaten at home with me, and ate everything and didn't seem to be sick afterwards. I don't really know what to do - maybe she is just very skinny, her brother is also very slim - but I feel that, if she does have a problem, I should do something, and that not pursuing my suspicions that she might be anorexic or bulimic would be ignoring what might be a problem, which seems wrong somehow.

Are you sure she doesn't vomit at home? People with ED are very skilled at hiding it. Also, lots of boulemics seem to have a normal weight (unless it's coupled with anorexia).

-- Tuomas (tuomas.alh...), December 7th, 2005.

i don't know, i haven't met them, but you don't have to be 'medically' overweight to want to diet. why should this very rough idea of an 'ideal' weight determine how they eat?

very paternalistic for a 'staunch' feminist.

basically i was thinking abt this earlier cos last week's heat was: wimmin who are TOO SKINNY. and this week's is LOVELY CURVY WOMENLY WOMEN. so basically two standards 'society' sets are 'health' and 'womanliness'.

'health' cuts both ways -- fat women and skinny women can be told -- 'this is bad for you'. but only larger women are womanly.

but then the third factor is sexiness, and no actually overweight person gets called sexy.

(x-post to Ken)

underweight: not menstruating, unable to have children, etc, overweight: at high risk for coronary disease, unable to do mild physical exercise, etc: that's not set by society, that's a medical thing.

it's cultural conditioning that says these are bad.

I think this is the most important point. As long as the dieting etc is healthy, then there isn't really anything wrong with it is there?

i can understand the point very clearly that if you have an eating disorder etc. it is something that is causing a problem. however when tuomas was talking how he is deeply saddened when his friends think they ought to lose some weight, i don't know the friends of course but it seems strange then to think somehow i know better than they do about their own body.

No, but there's something wrong when people feel bad because they're fat and ugly, even though they're not. And this is a far wider thing than eating disorders.

do people who want to diet really all think they're fat and ugly though? i think i'm fairly attractive, but I am still going to the gym because i reckon i'd look EVEN HOTTER if i have a little more muscle! But that's not to say I have self image issues!

(x-post to Eva)

-- Tuomas (tuomas.alh...), December 7th, 2005.

well, yeah, insofar as these are 'natural' things you can do nothing about. but as any fule kno 'ugliness', eg dowdiness, is quite often as much a sympton of unhappiness as a cause. fatness too.

but yes people shouldn't feel bad about being fat/ugly when they aren't fat/ugly.

(Not that men can't suffer from body issues - I know this personally - but there is a difference.)

xpost
*actually you might be on to something here.

(x-post)

this is really because i am slim but with a belly (it is a fact!)

Men are socialized not to think of their appearance as much as women. The things that are stereotypically found desirable in a man aren't the same as those in a woman.

And suffer from anorexia as well although it's less common which begs the question why that is... I think solve the control issues differently maybe?

There's a rise in REPORTED cases of male anorexia, which is not the same as a rise in male anorexia. ;-)

so this point still stands then? and the first question still begs to be answered. change it to "do girls who want to diet really all think they're fat and ugly though?" if you must!!

i've always liked slim girls, never said this. perhaps i am actually 'society' itself, telling ppl how to look.

ken is otm re. diet girls. my g/f, who is slim, started yogging, almost just cos, as a freelancer, she didn't always get enough fresh air in the week.

yeah that's pretty much just like saying hello in the morning isn't it?

Maybe not in those exact words, but apparently yes.

'oh, fuck society's rules, fat can be beautiful' (if you're a complete tool).

Oh dear...

My uncle likes his women SOOPAH SKINNY, as in no body fat at all.

it's probably a bigger dare than hari's peeing himself.

Roffles

xxpost

the evidence (which ok i haven't like reviewed or anything) that industrialized, mediated societies have more of this stuff doesn't mean much either way, i don't think, considering women in undeveloped societies may not have much ownership of their own persons, and their lives are actually really policed, so, better things to worry about there.

and what do we say to/about that thin sliver of industrialized women & men who swim in the same media sea as the rest and eat w/o disorder? i mean, if we really do want to lay blame at the feet of the society of images and abundance etc, my reactionary gut says "sfw d00ds" cos i'm a pretty big fan of the S of I and A, you know?

eh?

(x-post)

Yeah, I was gonna say the same, Enrique.

thing is i don't think that line of causality is so simple, and mega-macro environmental "it's the system, man" argts always rub me the wrong way.

the reach of media has certainly allowed the SAME images to reach more and more ppl, and allowed the range of comparison to be among billions and not just locally. ie in days of yore the hottest person alive was just the hottest one you'd happened to run into around your community.

maybe this is just academic; it's been drilled into my head that you can't just glide into talking abt "media effects" cos they are ungodly hard to map, to track, to understand in specific let alone in huge terms. it's all assumption.

i think that the malleability of attractiveness has its limits, yes. we have control over relatively little of ourselves.

The first sentence in this post is complete and total horseshit. Men absolutely ARE socialized to think about their appearance as much as women, or have you never, ever looked at a movie or television show, or read a book or magazine? Not every media image of a man is Dennis Franz or Ron Jeremy, kind of like how not every media image of a woman is Star Jones or Sandra Bernhardt.

The second sentence is completely foolish. Am I to assume that everyone in Finland is a hermaphrodite?

I think men are lying to themselves when they say that media images aren't trying to shape the way that they look at themselves to the same degree that they're trying to shape the way that women look at themselves; the fact that they don't have the same aim is completely immaterial.

I do agree that putting women's magazines in an anorexic clinic is stupid, so yay for my usual incosistency.

What is the point of pedantically pointing out that generalisations != fact?

What's the point of this entire fucking thread beyond a bunch of guys tut-tutting about how women look?

We can, for example, discuss about it, as we're doing now. Feminists have raised this very issue for decades now, and I think it has made some difference... For what's it worth, I think the beauty ideals are probably less strict today than, say, in the fifties. Also, mind me for being a bit rude, but isn't it kinda arrogant to say "that's the price we pay", when you belong to gender who has to pay the smaller price?

Dan, I know men who have body issues too, and I think in general these issues are in the increase amongst men, but I still think the ideals affect women more widely and deeply. Anecdotal evidence isn't going to convince me otherwise.

a thread about obese men would be unlikely to include info on his hair colour and handsomeness.

(this may of course just be Sick Mouthy but I think it's symptomatic)

I wondered this too, although it wasn't supposed to be strictly about women.

It's not LYING as such. Maybe I just haven't seen enough examples. What motivation would I have for saying it's worse for women other than the belief that it's a true enough reflection of the gender imbalance, even (especially) today? Just because a lot of women out there are executive directors, doesn't mean there's no longer an imbalance. Are there more female anorexics, members of Weight Watchers and similar, beauticians, fashion industry figures (inc. models and stylists), women on screen/stage rather than behind them? If so is that purely a statistic or are there particular reasons why their number is larger?

Is there some function, that can be built into ILX, to zap Tuomas every time he comes to proclaim about What Women Think and What Women Should Think?

Rates of anorexia nervosa are similar in all developed countries with high economic status. The disorder is far more prevalent in industrialized societies where food is abundant and thinness is a measure of feminine attractiveness.

I just wanted to point out that the last bit of that is a red herring. The first part of it is far more telling. You wouldn't develop anorexia in a country where people actually are starving en masse and you don't actually HAVE control over your food intake. Thinness was a measure of feminine attractiveness in the eastern bloc countries as well but there's nothing to indicate they had a very high anorexia rate in Russia.

I really, really wish people would stop trivializing eating disorders the way you men like to do on ILX. Women be so dumb that they starve themselves to death when they see Jennifer Aniston. Riiiiiiiiiight.

i'd never heard the term 'lanugo' before.

I so gotta try me this.

from what I can tell anorexia is a very deep and complicated syndrome that does not lie on a continuum with eyebrow plucking.

If women's beauty standards were the same as men's, anorexics would find other ways to exhibit their symptoms.

Why a dog, though? Poor wee thing.

Er, when did I say this? I said I was speaking for my friends and for myself. I do happen to believe that, very often, fashion etc images affect women in negative ways. I do not, however, claim to know what all women think or what they should do. I do not believe in universal womanhood or universal sisterhood, but I also don't believe that gender doesn't matter anymore. I think in many cases most women get the shorter end of the stick because of their perceived gender, and even if there are some women (like you?) who may feel they live in an equal world, that doesn't change the fact that many others don't feel that way.

I really, really wish people would stop trivializing eating disorders the way you men like to do on ILX. Women be so dumb that they starve themselves to death when they see Jennifer Aniston. Riiiiiiiiiight.

Again, who said this and when? I was merely trying to say that media images is one of the many causes of anorexia, because some folks here were claiming these two have no connection whatsoever.

Media images are NOT one of the many causes of anorexia, is what I am saying. Anorexia, bulemia, and serious overeating disorders are all sides of the same (err, 3-sided) coin! They are not CAUSED by any media image and sitting there and saying so is trivializing the issue. Call back when you become an anorexic woman, Tuomas.

Hey but yeah, there are kind of two levels of this thing, right? Anorexia (and lots of similar problems) at root seems to be totally about control and some deeply unhealthy form of self-discipline; this is what "they" say, and this is how it's been every time I've had any contact with the real thing. The media-images part is kind of a second level, having to do with what in particular that control and discipline get directed toward. And what's so slippery about all this is we kind of prize control and discipline in each of these ways -- in dieting, in muscle-building, in whatever -- in a way that makes it inevitable that some people will get more or less addicted to the thrill of doing it successfully, and just plain go too far. Stripping off the stuff they direct that energy toward doesn't really solve the problem -- though I suppose if we could shift some of our control-and-discipline issues away from the body itself, people who have these problems would at least be safer, health-wise. But yeah, the relationship of media images to anorexia is probably about the same as the relationship of heavy metal to certain teenage suicides -- it's more part of the milieu in which the problem wound up expressing itself.

Actual answer: I have maybe two in my neighborhood. One is a very ill-looking woman who I never really thought this about until I noticed her eating her daily croissant at the cafe -- she spends an hour and a half slowly dismembering and barely-tasting the thing, complete with lots of little rituals that one is better off not observing. (I suppose it's vaguely possible that she has some devastating digestive disease that makes normal eating impossible, though of course that would just be sadder.) The other one is a college girl, so far as I can tell, who is kind of proudly skeletal, and immaculately fancy in so many other ways (makeup, posture, clothes) that you can tell regimenting her appearance is a total neurotic focus of hers. It's difficult to see her, in part because of all that fanciness -- e.g., she wears jeans that actually cling to her non-existent legs, and I find it vaguely disturbing that anyone would even make fashionable jeans in such a shape. She's looked this way for at least two years, no particular changes, and seems publically and socially normal.

No shit, I briefly worked with a young woman who had a PARALYZED STOMACH! As in, it produced the usual kinds of acids and enzymes but didn't contract or move food around, requiring her to take a mostly-liquid diet or chew the hell out of baked goods -- I watched her gum a couple of bagels to death. But she was far from "anorexic-looking", actually, she was sort of pleasantly curvy in that good Jewish girl way. Possibly the most interesting part is that she said researchers are developing a pacemaker-equivalent for the stomach that would send a little shock as stimulus and fool the muscles into contracting, which I think is just plain cool.

So you won't accept Eva's personal testimony nor the medical papers I quoted as any sort of proof that there may be some connection between the two? Of course I'm not saying that media images are the sole cause of anything; however, psychological disorders probably never have one single cause at all. That doesn't mean we can't figure some things that probably may have something do with these disorders developing, at least in part of the cases. As for me calling back when I've become an anorexic woman - as I said, these things aren't gender-specific anymore, and I could say I have had some personal experiences of them, but that's something I'm not willing to share on this thread, and it'd probably be dismissed anyway.

the media is the last thing we need to worry about w/r/t eating disorders, if only cos pragmatically there's nothing that can be done concretely about it.

Anyway I don't think anyone's denying that media images have plenty to do with people's experiences with anorexia and possibly some of their routes toward it. It's just an argument of role and degree. And personally I'm usually just wary of oversimplifications that overlink media image with something much deeper / more personal / psychological. Not saying this is what you're doing, Tuomas, but there are some out there who seem to imagine that anorexia is strictly a matter of women being brainwashed into wanting to look like fashion models.

The problem with this is that lots of women would like to look like fashion models, and go about putting energy into making that happen. Most of them get as conventionally-pretty as possible without doing anything weird, and then stop; we consider this normal and healthy. Most of them, having gotten to the actual size of a fashion model, would congratulate themselves and work on maintenance; we consider that normal and healthy. There's some whole other factor involved in things like anorexia -- something that leads a person to seize on control of diet or body or whatever to an unhealthy extent, to try and make their control over that stand in for control over something they can't control. The images are completely secondary to that. Like I said before, if we didn't confer such cultural approval on people who can control their bodies, then maybe it wouldn't be quite as appealing as a realm in which to work out these issues -- but that wouldn't make the issues go away, it would just redirect them to different outlets.

Did you read the last text I linked? Here's another one. I guess I could post more of those, but I'm not sure what would be enough. Anyway, I have to redraw my original claim. All of those papers say that there's no definite cause for anorexia found, but most of them mention social pressure / environment as one of the possible factors. So anyone who claims anorexia is caused by this or that can't make a 100% sure claim. Personally, however, I think the connection between beauty ideals and eating disorders, at least in some of the cases, is a bit too obvious to be completely ignored.

I know several people who have suffered from eating disorders. Many of them were triggered into it by being fiercely competitive people who were in a sport/activity (dancing, singing, gymnastics, swimming) where they were told by a coach/instructor that they would never progress past a certain level unless they lost weight; the eating disorder arose out of a fixation to either please the instructor and do what they were told OR a fixation to prove the instructor wrong and succeed after having been told they were going to be a failure. Others had turned to eating as a comfort activity that relieved some amount of uncontrollable external stress, or more realistically replaced it with the "controllable" stress of "Oh, I've eaten XXXXX, I have to throw up before I get fat."

I'm not sure how that's "obvious," dude. Most women internalize the idea that being slender and model/actress-sized is a good thing. Of those women, it's only a small percentage who develop the separate problem of going beyond that into something like clinical anorexia, which has no intentions of conforming to model-sizing and usually accompanies psychological and emotional problems of much more real-life varieties. (Cf all the life-control discipline/fierceness stuff Dan and I have now both touched on.)

Maybe what we need to do is draw a distinction between stuff like clinical anorexia and more run-of-mill eating disorders. I hate using that phrasing there, but it's true -- there's a slight difference between serious illness and the kind of low-level bulimia you might find people using "just to stay thin." The latter is way easier to connect with beauty standards; the former has a little something extra at issue.

the 'larger subject' bit was almost the pun of the century

http://www.courttv.com/trials/pring-wilson/
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=217867
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Shin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinedu_Tadesse

Believing Vogue and the like to be a major contributor to the propagation of anorexia reminds me of those paretns who tried to sue Judas Priest and Ozzy for causing their son's suicide.

And Nabs, no amount of diet + self-control is going to make the average women achieve a supermodel figure.

Also, with regard to the claim that men get cultural pressure to live up to a certain physical standard, this is obviously true (and sadly, seems to be increasingly true), but it doesn't seem to me to by and large approach the same degree of...perniciousness as the women and weight thing. Except maybe when it comes to balding...but I'm not a dude, and maybe I'm talking out of my ass on this.

This certainly jibes with the personalities of the people I know who have battled anorexia.

-- Sick Mouthy (sickmouth...), December 7th, 2005.

really obviously creepy people who post on ile almost every day

Because it hasn't been reported it doesn't mean it's as prevalent in Russia. (I'm getting into hot water here, because I realize that if I say this, I may be saying that it's more to do with genes than culture. As has been proposed by some people. Actually I do think it has something to do with it... maybe... but of course also culture.)

I really, really wish people would stop trivializing eating disorders the way you men like to do on ILX. Women be so dumb that they starve themselves to death when they see Jennifer Aniston. Riiiiiiiiiight.

I don't know, do men really trivialize it so much (here or elesewhere)? I don't think gender has much to do with ignorance, I see girls spouting silliness on message boards and in real life as much.

I think the main problem is that ..(I was going to say we, but I can't speak for other anorexics, of course) are more occupied with other people's judgements and expectations of us than people without an eating disorder, or other control issues, for that matter.

I know my ED mostly started out because I felt a loss of control and terribly insecure. I just had a slow burning pannic attack and the only way I could control myself and show my emotions was through my ED. You also attach emotions with food and that takes a long time to overcome. It was about thinking I had failed, but not in the sense that I didn't live up to a certain image (of slimness), but that I had failed others. It was entirely in my head. It was never about wanting to be Kate Moss. This is why taking away a fashion magazine would not help at all.

Thought about having actual lanugo today. You'd be pleased to know to date there are still only 3 Google search results for it