February 12, 2007
The latest fashionable worry: underweight fashion models
I’m going to weigh in here on a topic that is about as far away from my life as humanly possible: the bodyweights of fashion models. As most of you will know, about six months ago it became politically correct to ban underweight models from fashion shows. The trend began in Madrid in September of last year. This month New York City Council member Gail Brewer took up the crusade, declaring, "We want the designers to offer some clothes that are a little bit more robust." Brewer also wants to place a ban on any model with a body mass index less than 18.5.
Politicians in New York have been watching out for all of us recently. (Last year, they passed an ordinance to ban trans fats from NYC restaurants.) This latest move is based on the fear that teenage girls will idolize ultra-thin models, and begin starving themselves to death, like the Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, who recently died from health problems related to anorexia. (Reston weighed 88 pounds when she died.)
To be sure, anorexia and bulimia are no laughing matters. But they aren’t new disorders, as all the media flap would suggest. They have been around at least since I was a kid, and I suspect that there will be cases of these eating disorders twenty-five years hence.
The “anorexia epidemic” is a public boogeyman that rears its head in the media every ten years or so----usually when a celebrity perishes from the disease. Following the 1983 death of Karen Carpenter from anorexia, the media spent six months obsessing on the topic. According to some commentators, we were all just a few Diet Cokes away from starving ourselves to death. In the 1990s, anorexia became a fashionable worry again after the death of gymnast Christy Henrich.
There will always be people who take things to extremes: ambition, sex, food, and yes----even thinness. The idealization of thinness has also been with us for generations. In the 1960s, the model/actress Twiggy was symbol of the thin body type. A picture of the stick-thin Twiggy from around 1966 would cause any number of New York City Council members to scream for a ban. (Where were these guardians of public wholesomeness forty years ago?) Twiggy, by the way, has not yet expired from anorexia. She is now 57 years old.
Anorexia and bulimia have never been epidemics. From a public health perspective, they are fringe issues compared to the larger problem of obesity----especially among the young. Anorexia kills a handful of people each year. But obesity is one of the top ten preventable causes of death in the United States. If you go to any shopping mall America and look around (especially in my native Ohio) you will see quite a few people who are unhealthily overweight. On the other hand, you’ll have real difficulty in finding half a dozen shoppers who are on the verge of self-starvation (again---not a major cause of mortality here in Ohio).
So why stop with banning underweight fashion models? Why not also ban overweight media personalities who might encourage the children of America to pack on an unhealthy amount of extra flab? The folks at Blockbuster can just start removing those Fat Albert DVDs from the shelves. We can also put CDs of the now disbanded hip-hop group The Fat Boys on the banned list. This album cover seems to glorify overeating.
Obviously, these proposals would be ridiculous----almost as ridiculous as our current obsession with banning featherweight fashion models.
One of the more annoying trends of the past fifteen years or so is the rise of social orthodoxies. Since the appearance of the Moral Majority in the 1980s and the advent of political correctness in the 1990s, we have been subjected to any number of pressure groups that seek to sanitize society to suit their particular agendas.
In many cases, these pressure groups begin with valid points. For example: I certainly don’t want anyone’s daughter to starve herself. But we cannot simply ban everything---unless we want to transform our society into the Soviet Union or Iran (or perhaps the ultra-politically correct world portrayed in the 1993 film Demolition Man.)
If you have a teenage daughter, teach her the importance of proper nutrition and exercise----and the need to develop an identity beyond her appearance. These steps will prevent her from falling into the traps of obesity or anorexia. But leave the women on the catwalks alone. They are fashion models----not role models. As a parent, the latter is your job.
