These days, one can scarcely walk into any supermarket without walking past a rack of fashion magazines, featuring a mixture of gaunt looking celebrities and airbrushed models. Many people with eating disorders are drawn to this literature, which has been described by sufferers as akin to 'anorexic porn.'
Celebrity Fashion Magazines Promote Eating Disorders
Pick up any celebrity fashion magazine and it is very easy to see how many of the pictures, headlines and stories may be viewed as promoting life-threatening eating disorders. Female celebrities are regularly ridiculed, yet not for making a mistake in their acting, singing, or dancing, but simply because the size of their waist has increased. It is as if it truly does not matter one iota what someone in the spotlight does, so long as she remain stick-thin.
The stories featured in such magazines, which may be seen to glorify eating disordered behaviour, are often as damaging as the digitally enhanced, airbrushed images. For example, do we really need to know what everyone from Tori Spelling to Posh Spice allegedly weighs or how little x or y actress ate in a day? What is truly heinous and incredibly offensive to recovering anorexics and bulimics is the issues where an article is included on how dangerous anorexia and bulimia are on one page and several pages later yet another poor woman is absolutely ripped apart for being a size ten.
Airbrushed Images Damage Self-Esteem
According to Susie Orbach's Bodies, we receive between 2,000 to 5,000 images of bodies which have been manipulated through digital enhancement every week. When these photos have been stretched, airbrushed and Photoshopped, Orbach highlights how what actually goes to print ends up conveying an idea of a body that simply does not exist in the real world. Rather than vulnerable young women only comparing how they look to their peers, they are now constantly bombarded with fake images, resulting in young minds being warped by something they cannot live up to and damaged self-esteem. The sad truth is that without restricting, purging, excessive exercise and other harmful eating disordered behaviours no one could even come close to looking like airbrushed pictures covering the pages of celebrity fashion magazines.
Research undertaken by the University of Missouri in Columbia has identified women to be negatively affected by watching magazine images of models for just three minutes. This certainly suggests that reading an entire issue would likely cause much damage to feelings of self-worth, a common problem among eating disorder sufferers.
As highlighted above, celebrity fashion magazines often appear to actively promote eating disorders, with endless sniping and ridiculing of anyone who dares to be a healthy, normal weight. It is hardly surprising therefore that conditions such as anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder are on the rise, making it high time all images be labelled as digitally enhanced to remind readers that they are fake.
Source:
Orbach, S. (2010) Bodies London: Profile Books
Kate Le Page - Kate Henning-Le Page writes about eating disorders, body image and recovery issues. She specializes in anorexia recovery.
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