Mixed message
I read this anorexia-child celebrity story in the Guardian because anorexia interests me, and the intersection of it with women, celebrity, fashion, conformity, the pressures on women to be hot and emaciated both at once interests me a lot. So I read down and read down and – get to this ironic juxtaposition.
Gee, I wonder why so many young women are anorexic. I just can’t figure it out, can you?
The Met Gala is a loathsome celebration of egotism and raw consumerism.
The pressure kids grow up under is ridiculous. It’s a form of cultural child abuse. Girls have to slim and pretty and feminine and nice. Boys have to be muscular and manly and heroic and good at sports. We twist the poor little bastards psyches almost from the moment they pop out of the womb.
As for Terry Wogan calling a perfectly normal (and actually quite slim going by the photos) teen girl ‘chunky’, what an arse.
I went to the guardian for the full thing and got an advert for reusable dog pee pads in that spot. It’s not much of a defence, but at least it was not a human who put the photo of the near naked skinny woman next to that article.
Anyway, the other thing that’s interesting about anorexia is how similar it is to today’s craze for girls desperately wanting to be boys as a way of rejecting what they think life has in store for them. And how the two things are treated in such an opposite way – nobody is insisting that we should validate the identity of anorexics by telling them rhat they are right, they are indeed overweight, and let’s get them on some weight-loss pills ASAP.
How much of the anorexia is gender erasure rather than cosmetic? The pressure to be improbably thin runs parallel with the fetishizing of ‘plump’ body parts. And with relentless objectification. From the anorexics I know, I’ve got the impression that they were trying to achieve invisibility as much or more than they were trying to be ‘hot.’
I can vouch for that. I didn’t expect or want to be “hot” when I was anorexic; I wanted to disappear.
It also gives someone a feeling of control in an out of control world. When you are a woman in the family I grew up in, and the husband (ex now) I married, you begin to feel you are controlled by everyone else. So you stop eating; now one thing is under your control.
Which is why I’m not sure force feedings are a good idea. Now you just put me out of control again, and I’ll find something else. (As OCD, i didn’t have difficulty finding something else to obsess over.)