Normalizing anorexia perpetuates body image problems
As a 15-year-old, I was obsessed with Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls. Lia, the main character, was a skinny girl suffering from anorexia nervosa. She counted calories and measured her food, which she almost always threw away after a couple of bites. Her bones were visible beneath her skin. She did not let food control her. Wherever she went, people whispered about how thin she was. To me, she was perfect.
At the time, I read countless books featuring girls with eating disorders. They were all cautionary tales. The authors did not glamourize eating disorders. They described the individuals with bulimia or anorexia as gaunt, emaciated, wasted. But for me, and countless others with eating disorders, those books were how-to guides for getting thinner — and sicker.
When Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was published in 1990, it was an immediate bestseller. It was both acclaimed and criticized by experts and casual readers alike. Undoubtedly, it changed lives with its critical analysis of the detrimental effects of American culture’s fascination with the perfect body.
For Wolf, the beauty myth is the lie that the public — especially girls and women — has been force-fed, pun intended. The lie is the unrealistic set of standards of physical beauty that has been cemented as the “ideal” body every female should work to attain.
The Beauty Myth was republished in 2002 with a new introduction, where Wolf noted that 11 years later, much has changed for the better, but also for the worse.
“Most satisfyingly, today you would be hard-pressed to find a 12-year-old girl who is not all too familiar with the idea that ‘ideals’ are too tough on girls, that they are unnatural, and that following them too slavishly is neither healthy nor cool,” Wolf wrote in the 2002 introduction.
On the other hand, just as women and girls challenged the norm, the norm changed.
“In spite of this newly developed media literacy, however, I’ve also noticed that it is now an increasingly sexualized ideal that younger and younger girls are beginning to feel they must live up to,” Wolf wrote.
With the prevalence of pornography, body image issues have grown more complex.
According to Wolf, pornography’s effect on women’s sense of self-worth is so pervasive because “it is almost impossible for younger women to distinguish the role pornography plays in creating their idea of how to be, look and move … from their own innate sense of sexual identity.”
Many adult film actresses have silicone breast implants and tiny waists. This unnatural image has moved from such films to the rest of society, where GUESS Jeans and Calvin Klein ads now feature women with the same altered body type.
Since then, eating disorders have been written about many times. They have been analyzed and dissected to their root causes, the primary one being the popular image of the perfect body in the media, which is generally that of a skinny white woman. Positive body image enterprises, such as the USC Women’s Student Assembly’s Body Love Initiative and shows like Orange is the New Black, which features women of all races and body sizes, have popped up everywhere over the past few years.
But despite that, there are approximately 30 million people suffering from eating disorders in the U.S. alone, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. A survey at one U.S. college campus found that 91 percent of females dieted to lose weight, and 22 percent dieted on a regular basis.
Despite the widespread education about the issues of obsessive dieting and eating disorders, Wolf notes that such disorders are now so widespread themselves that they have become the standard.
“Not only do whole sororities take for granted that bulimia is mainstream behavior, but models now openly talk to Glamour magazine about their starvation regimes,” Wolf writes. “A newspaper feature about a group of thin, ambitious young women talking about weight, quotes one of them as saying, ‘Now what’s wrong with throwing up?’ And ‘pro-ana’ websites have appeared on the internet, indicating a sub-culture of girls who are ‘pro-anorexia,’ who find the anorexic look appealing and validate it. That is definitely not progress.”
The normalization of eating disorders means that they’re now somewhat acceptable. And like Wolf said, that is most definitely not progress.
As I was writing this, I caught myself humming the tune to Lily Allen’s “The Fear,” which used to be a song on my “weight loss motivation” playlist because it had one particular lyric: “Now everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner.” I’m still susceptible to the pitfalls of body image, but so is anyone who has ever hated their body.
Short of changing the way popular culture portrays women, little else will change the distorted beauty ideals society cherishes so much. But every step counts, whether it’s a campus-wide rehabilitation of body image, a diverse TV show that reaches millions, or even the small-scale but life-changing move of learning to love yourself — scars, fat, cellulite and all.
Noorhan Maamoon is a junior majoring in print and digital journalism. Her column, “The Hijabi Monologues,” runs on Thursdays.