Thursday, October 28, 2010

Back to Basics

Eating disorders - most notably anorexia and bulemia - are the most fatal of all mental illnesses. Those who develop anorexia rarely fully recover from the disorder, and many fall prey to the ill effects of heart arrhythmias, hyponatremia (or water intoxication), hypoglycemia, and/or kidney stones. It afflicts millions of Americans, and is rapidly spreading to other countries where food abounds. Only a small percentage of the victims are male. It is mostly our young girls and women who are dying of starvation in a land with the highest obesity rate.

How did this country end up with an epidemic of starving young children when they have more than enough food to eat? Why are children as young as 10 years old dieting? Why are middle schoolers convinced that they are too fat, despite being of perfectly normal weight? And why isn't anyone paying attention?

The greatest irony of it all is that those who suffer from anorexia often disguise their skeletal bodies in too-large sweatshirts. Rather than showing off the body they work so hard to attain and maintain, they are ashamed of it. So why are these young women starving themselves?

Dove recently started a campaign aimed to raise the self esteem of women and girls - showing real women in their campaigns rather than models, and in one commercial showing men agonizing over their bodies they way we so often do. Most notably there is one in which a young girl is staring at an ad on a bus stop, when a barrage of images of women in various forms of the media fly at you.



How can women learn to love themselves, and their bodies, when the world around us is desperately trying to tell us that we're too fat, too ugly, too covered, too pure? Where are the half naked men dancing in rap videos, nameless, faceless, barely covered men advertising women's deodorant?

Eating disorders have become the illness, with the media as the virus. A virus - a rapidly reproducing semi organism that lives off the demise of its host - unable to procreate without the help of a host, a host it inevitably destroys.

Men and women both maintain this society that fosters low self esteem, and through it, eating disorders. Women's magazines try to tell their readers to be strong in their own bodies, yet opposite those articles are ads for makeup and weight loss aids. These ads are imperative for the magazines to continue publication, and money is always more important than morality.

Women, girls, are dying. The virus destroying them is not an unbeatable scourge. It's not an unknown cancer, or a unstoppable invasion. It's a lack of empathy. It's the objectification of females through advertisements, music videos, movies, music...Through strip clubs, pornography, and playboy. Instead of fighting to be like strong women role models, we look to those placed in front of us.

Impossible ideals.

Fatal ideals.

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