The Media's Relationship to Eating Disorders

On my blog, I use both my writing skills and videos of bootilicious women to make the point that we all need to take a more aggressive stand against the media's obsession with using skinny women in their TV shows, movies, and advertisements.

Eating disorder statistics reveal that over 1000 deaths a year are from anorexia and bulimia. True, no one meant for them to die—but they followed the examples of women in the media, emulating what thay saw, and the result was fatal. Consume body-fat reduction products, we are told. The media, Hollywood, the diet industry, the pharmeceutical industry, the exercise equipment industry, and the infomercial sellers are the culprits. They all try to convince the average American woman that her body fat and the fat in her diet are both evil. Her body fat is seen as ugly, unhealthy, unacceptable, and unstylish, and this gives her a negative body image. Body fat is equated to BEING fat.

There's enormous pressure to look like a skinny model. These models are held up as ideal body role models. TV stars sometimes quit because of the unrelenting, oppressive pressure to get skinny. A 21-year-old Brazilian model died from complications of anorexia in November of 2006. Fashion shows need to ban overly skinny models. But they are refusing, of course.

No TV shows or exercise DVDs have yet dared to take on these powerful industries head-on and pressure them to lay off. So, unique among publishers, Pin the Tail on the Culture is publishing 5 different exercise videos that challenge these industries by including 15 minutes of self-help material in each DVD designed to help women resist the pressures to use heroic measures to become skinny. We're also running a "Beautiful Walking Clips for Cash" opportunity for the same reason—and skinny women need not apply. We're also publishing 7 different comedies, and ALL the women in them are bootilicious--not a skinny or thin body anywhere. (No fat ladies either, of course.) We feel all this is newsworthy because it is so very opposite to what's going on in the normal media. We're making a statement and supporting women's health while they're making a bundle of cash and supporting the oppression of women.

Media brainwashing is, of course, not the only factor in eating disorder deaths. Genetics, body metabolism, and psychological vulnerabilities* all play a part in eating disorders being the most dangerous mental health condition. But this just means that it's easier to trigger eating disorders in these most susceptible of people than it is in the population at large. Making an effort NOT to trigger this disorder in the susceptible is the moral thing to do. Can anyone in the media, Hollywood, the diet industry, the pharmeceutical industry, the exercise equipment industry, or the infomercial sellers seriously state that they've made this effort?

Want to see some human sticks with little body fat? Look at the ads on TV and in magazines. Look at the clothing models. Examine the infomercials as well as the role models in ads, TV shows, and movies. The above industries know full well that it would be much healthier for all concerned if models and actresses were all of average body mass, weight, and body fat. But then they would make less money, because far fewer women would be trying to change themselves, far fewer would have low self-esteem and lack of body acceptance, and only fat people (those with too much body fat) in NEED of diets would be heeding the body-change pressures.

By choosing to trigger the dangerous susceptibilities of the vulnerable, rather than targeting only the legitimate overweight targets, the above-mentioned industries are exploiting and oppressing women—and this is wrong. Women who fail at dieting their way to supermodel status are more and more just giving up on their bodies and becoming fat or obese. The obesity epidemic is an indirect result of media pressure to be thin. Eating disorder treatment or recovery from these disorders are unlikely in the current climate of obsessive thinness inevitably resulting in an eating disorder. The media is the problem, in all this, The media is not the solution like it should be. Or even part of it. Please help our cause by writing and calling various media entities and expressing your disgust at their scrawny body role models.

My name is Michelle Taylor and I like to help empower women and girls by publishing videos, articles, and a blog that help to expose the oppression of women's bodies by the media's unhealthy relationship with eating disorders and women's bodies in general. My blog is Booties by Michelle.

NOTE: *According to Alfie Kohn, who in 2005 wrote a wonderfully insightful, award-winning book Unconditional Parenting, "In terms of how much they eat, then, children seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-regulation. Unless, that is, we try to run their bodies for them. Two nutritionists in Illinois conducted a fascinating experiment a few years ago. They observed 77 children between the ages of two and four, and also learned how much their parents attempted to control their eating habits. They discovered that those parents who insisted their children eat only during mealtimes (rather than when they were hungry), or who encouraged them to clean their plates (even when they obviously weren't hungry), or who used food (especially desserts) as a reward wound up with children who lost the ability to regulate their caloric intake. Some of the parents appeared to have their own issues with food, which they were in the process of passing on to their kids. But whatever the reason for their excessive control, it was beginning to take its toll even before some of these children were out of diapers. The children had 'few opportunities to learn to control their own food intake' and came to stop trusting their bodies' cues about when they were hungry. One result: Many of them were already starting to get fat." See Parenting is Learning.

So it's easy to see where these unnatural, unnecessary "psychological vulnerabilities," above, originate: conditional parenting, which uses rewards and punishments, forcing kids to learn how to form a false self with shakey self-esteem rather than empowering their real self. Conditional parenting has a whole slew of negative effects on kids. It makes them extrinsically motivated (rather than intrinsic), destroying autonomy in the process. The alternative to all this is unconditional parenting, in which love is unconditional. It produces a whole slew of positive effects on kids.