Sunday, July 29, 2007

Rant: Body image, society, and disease

We live in strange times. There is an obesity epidemic, and eating disorders are more prevalent than ever before. Women, in particular, bear the brunt of increasingly unrealistic social expectations about their bodies, where they must be thin and strong, and the average model is increasingly small compared to the average woman.

Models are suppsoed to be thin because "clothes hang better" on very thin women, but their thinness has a negative impact on the health and well being of women who see them, and average sized models don't, and yet average sized (or heaven forfend even plus sized) models are treated as a curiosity, and it is considered news when runway shows ban models that are too thin.

continued in next post

1 comment:

TRR said...

This is the front page article I saw the other day that I think I mentioned.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22126614-5012974,00.html

So, the article taught me that, despite what I thought to be true, a) perfection in indeed achievable, and that b) nothing to do with kindness or intelligence or anything like that, said perfection had a lot to do with factors nobody has any control of. '(gasp) it's all natural'!

It was accompanied with a big photo of her and little labels pointing to different parts of her body - her boobs, her hips, etc.