Ah, summer! Shorts and skirts are getting shorter; shirts are getting shorter; waists are getting more and more exposure. The sun is shining on all that exposed skin! Wohoo! If you are like me, a normal person, you can’t help but looking at all those skinny, shapely, half-naked bodies gracefully gliding down the street.
Have you stopped to wonder why most people think skinny = beautiful? What is the source of this? Why do so many women think they are fat?
Mass media influences what we think of as attractive. TV and movie stars are mostly underweight. Women (and men) buy fashion magazines full of underweight, rail-thin models. The constant media images of ‘beauty’ pressure people to try to become more like these ideal examples.
Dieting, surgery, drugs, purging (vomiting after eating) and starvation have become a way of life for some people, especially adolescent girls who are very self-conscious about their changing bodies. Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are the diseases ‘de jour’. But it’s not just the women: men are affected as well.
Actresses Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz meet the Body Mass Index criteria for Anorexia. Model/Actress Elizabeth Hurley stated in Allure magazine “I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat.” Pamela Anderson is 5’7” (170cm) and weights 120 pounds (54.4kg). She is supposed to be the voluptuous ideal yet she is 11% below ideal body weight. In contrast, a generation ago Marilyn Monroe set the beauty standard at 5’5” (165cm) and weighed 135 pounds (61.2kg). Today her agent would probably tell her she had to lose weight! The image of what is ‘ideal’ has changed because of the influence of mass media.
In September, Madrid Fashion Week banned models with a body mass index of less than 18. The standard accepted by the World Health Organization is that anyone with an index under 18.5 is underweight.
Italian government officials also got involved in this too-skinny model debate, apparently prompted in part by Spain's move and by the death in November of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston (172cm), who weighed 88 pounds (39.9kg) when she died at 21 years old. In a December deal with the Italian fashion industry, designers agreed not to hire models younger than 16, and to require all models to submit medical proof that they do not suffer from eating diso
rders.
Have you stopped to wonder why most people think skinny = beautiful? What is the source of this? Why do so many women think they are fat?
Mass media influences what we think of as attractive. TV and movie stars are mostly underweight. Women (and men) buy fashion magazines full of underweight, rail-thin models. The constant media images of ‘beauty’ pressure people to try to become more like these ideal examples.
Dieting, surgery, drugs, purging (vomiting after eating) and starvation have become a way of life for some people, especially adolescent girls who are very self-conscious about their changing bodies. Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are the diseases ‘de jour’. But it’s not just the women: men are affected as well.
Actresses Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz meet the Body Mass Index criteria for Anorexia. Model/Actress Elizabeth Hurley stated in Allure magazine “I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat.” Pamela Anderson is 5’7” (170cm) and weights 120 pounds (54.4kg). She is supposed to be the voluptuous ideal yet she is 11% below ideal body weight. In contrast, a generation ago Marilyn Monroe set the beauty standard at 5’5” (165cm) and weighed 135 pounds (61.2kg). Today her agent would probably tell her she had to lose weight! The image of what is ‘ideal’ has changed because of the influence of mass media.
In September, Madrid Fashion Week banned models with a body mass index of less than 18. The standard accepted by the World Health Organization is that anyone with an index under 18.5 is underweight.
Italian government officials also got involved in this too-skinny model debate, apparently prompted in part by Spain's move and by the death in November of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston (172cm), who weighed 88 pounds (39.9kg) when she died at 21 years old. In a December deal with the Italian fashion industry, designers agreed not to hire models younger than 16, and to require all models to submit medical proof that they do not suffer from eating diso
rders.
No comments:
Post a Comment