Eating disorders as entertainment? E!'s "What's Eating You?" isn't exactly "Keeping Up With the Kardashians."
Interested in watching a girl eat ant-covered food out of the garbage? Or how about a guy who continually chews and swallows entire packs of gum? Stellar entertainment, right?
It may sound like a “Fear Factor” ripoff, but it’s actually “What’s Eating You?”–the E! network’s new eating disorder reality show.
Oh boy.
The always-classy E! (“classy” as in, “I can easily name three of their resident stars who have starred in homemade sex tapes“) is promoting its new show as if it centered around a bevy of circus freaks.
Unfortunately, the “bizarre rituals” described in the network’s press release aren’t wild and wacky stunts, but just a couple of the “extreme habits” exhibited by participants on the new show.
So what the reality genre is sorely missing is an exploitative exploration of mental illness? Not really. We already have “Celebrity Rehab,” “Hoarders,” and a slew of “True Life” episodes documenting the anguish of addiction, obsession, and more. But this is about eating! And it’s on E! Surely it couldn’t be a bad idea!
Judge for yourself. Executive Producer JD Roth swears that “this show really is about the incredible fortitude and strength of people with intense obstacles to overcome, and how they strive to get their lives back on track.”
E! should stick to what it does best and continue only exploiting those who ask for it.
Really? Then why does the lengthy first paragraph of the press release about this show chronicle the gory details of each person’s disorder with the perverse glee of, as Hortense at Jezebel.com brilliantly asserts, “a carnival barker”? I’m surprised the statement doesn’t start with “step right up!” and go on to announce the participants alongside the bearded lady.
Personally, I’d like E! to stick to what it does best and exploit only the people who actually asked for it (i.e. the Kardashians of the world). Let’s leave the real issues to those actually qualified to present them tastefully.
Told from the perspectives of plus-size models Anansa Sims, Leona Palmer, Julie Henderson, and Lizzie Miller (remember her from the now-famous Glamour nude shot?), the videos are part of a new Girl Scouts initiative to address the image of girls in the media.
As if we needed any more proof that females are constantly bombarded with distorted messages, a survey from the Girl Scout Research Instituterevealed some disturbing statistics. Though almost 90 percent of the 1,000 girls polled, ages 13 to 17, said the fashion industry and/or media place a lot of pressure on them to be thin, 3 out of 4 girls still consider fashion “really important.”
Furthermore, nearly one-third said they have used drastic methods such as starving themselves to lose weight, and more than one-third know someone their age who has been diagnosed with an eating disorder.
Rather than sit back and stare at the startling statistics, the Girl Scouts are doing something major. They’re partnering with the Dove Self-Esteem fund to offer programming for girls nationwide and will focus their core leadership program to address issues of body image in the media and its relation to self-esteem.
And according to a press release, the Girls Scouts have also “been instrumental in the introduction of The Healthy Media for Youth Act (H.R. 4925) to Congress…this bill will work to promote healthy images of women in the media through a grant program that will support youth empowerment groups, media literacy programs, and further research into the effects of the media on women and girls.”
We can’t wait to see where their leadership takes us.
Ladies! This is OUTRAGEOUS. I hope none of you will stand for being told such a thing, in such a way. Being healthy, eating right, and staying active is one thing. Being told to starve yourselves by a fashion company? Not cool.
UO,
I have been a supporter of your store for many years, but now I’m through.
I am fortunate enough to star on a wonderful TV show called “One Tree Hill.” I play a fashion designer named Brooke Davis, who started a campaign on the show called “Zero Is Not A Size” and the outpouring of love and gratitude that came my way from girls and women ALL OVER THE WORLD who have body image issues brought me to tears.
To promote starvation? To promote anorexia, which leads to heart disease, bone density loss, and a slew of other health problems, not least of all psychological issues that NEVER go away? Shame on you.I will no longer be shopping at your stores. And I will encourage the tens of thousands of female supporters I have to do the same. I have fought to boycott BP. I never imagined I would also be boycotting affordable fashion.
You should issue a public apology, and make a hefty donation to a women’s organization that supports those stricken with eating disorders. I am sickened that anyone, on any board, in your gigantic company would have voted “yes” on such a thing, let alone enough of you to manufacture an item with such a hurtful message. It’s like handing a suicidal person a loaded gun. You should know better.
The t-shirt in question.
I sincerely hope that next time you decide that making fun of serious issues is comedic, or “snarky in a cool way,’ that you rethink your decision.
With Sincerity but NO respect,
Sophia Bush
Here is my letter, in defense of all of us who have ever looked in a mirror and felt less than fabulous…
That was pretty fabulous, Sophia. Thanks for sticking up for us.
“I didn’t mean to be a role model,” says Margaret Cho. “I just speak my truth.”
Well Margaret’s truth is blunt, brazen, and hilarious, and anyone who’s seen the comedian in action can attest to her role-model-worthiness.
From her humble beginnings in San Francisco to her current mega-success with the TV show “Drop Dead Diva” and her upcoming comedy album Cho Dependent, Margaret’s racked up a lot of life experience. While she’s had her ups and downs with body image and self-esteem, it looks like Margaret has finally emerged on top. And whether or not she considers herself a role model, we sure do.
Check out our interview with the insanely talented star:
About-Face: Are there any celebrities you admire for being strong role models, despite constant media scrutiny? You’ve said that Paula Abdul was a celebrity you admired and that watching the media tear her down about her weight was very traumatizing.
Margaret Cho: With Paula Abdul, that was actually the first celebrity that I recognized people talking about her weight incessantly.
She was the first person I think that made a real impact with her talent and then at some point, was under fire with a lot of criticism that was totally directed at her physicality, and had nothing to do with her talent or her music or anything. And so that’s when I started to see how distorted it was, and how unfair it was.
In terms of positive role models, I don’t think that there are a lot, because there aren’t a lot of images of different looking women in the media. They don’t really exist. And people get criticized when they don’t conform.
I mean, even women who are beautiful, like Jessica Simpson. People are so insane about the way that she looks, and she looks great. I don’t understand.
The cover of Margaret's fifth concert film, "Beautiful"
I think that the way that the Internet is now, and the way that people leave comments about the way that people look, you can be so nasty without ever having to be accountable for it. And I think that kind of environment is really destructive for young women and [their] body image in general.
A-F: What do you hope “Drop Dead Diva” will accomplish in terms of challenging beauty stereotypes?
MC: It’s just about providing images of different-looking people, which I think is important. And you have this dialogue about the body and a way to talk about it. And ittreats women’s bodies with a lot of dignity and with a lot of respect and with a lot of heart, which I think is what our show does a lot.
A-F: As you’ve gotten older, how have you learned to build your sense of self-worth beyond your body image?
MC: Well for me it’s mostly personal. When I don’t eat, when I am anorexic, then I just turn to other things that are far more destructive.
I’m so hungry all the time that I’ll just drink alcohol or use drugs in order not to be hungry. And to me, all of the destructive elements in my life really just stem from my lack of eating and me wanting to be thin. That’s always what it’s about. I don’t have the same kinds of issues that other people have with addiction. Mine totally relate to my relationship with food and my relationship with my body.
So when I’m doing well, that means that my body image is doing well.
For me, I think it’s more about age and getting older and feeling good in my skin, which is really important.
A-F: Was there a moment you realized you were ready to move beyond focusing on your weight, or has it been a slow struggle?
MC: No, I think it was cumulative. It wasn’t really one thing. It was just, after a while, you start to make connections.
A-F: What has belly dancing done for your life?
MC: Well it’s a great art form and it’s a great way to celebrate the body for women, or for anyone.
Also, there’s a lot of bigger stars in Middle Eastern dance – they don’t want the stars to be skinny. That’s just really not the ideal look for belly dancers. The body type is usually voluptuous and bigger, which looks very comfortable. That’s a very wonderful ideal to have.
It’s a great dance form and it’s very traditional. And the aspects that I love, the kind of belly dance that I like, are sort of the more folkloric stuff, which is really beautiful.
But the ideal body is the one that’s much more voluptuous. And also older. There’s dancers that are very famous that dance well into their seventies and eighties, which is really cool.
A-F: I read on your blog that you love Latisse. What is your “beauty line”? How far are you willing to go in terms of societal standards of beauty?
MC: I don’t think I would get plastic surgery. … it never looks right. I just don’t think I would. I mean, I’m kind of curious also to see what it’ll look like. I’m curious about old age.
Margaret's upcoming comedy album, "Cho Dependent"
I use Latisse, which I think is a weird drug because it literally makes me grow eyelashes out of other parts of my face. That’s really weird. But I will do it. I will definitely do it for eyelashes.
A-F: Do you have any judgment on other people electing to have cosmetic procedures?
MC: No, I don’t have any issue with that. … And I have a lot of body modification with tattooing, and to me, that’s the way that I scratch that itch, so to speak. I don’t really have any issues with people who want to do that.
A-F: You participated in the making of a documentary film called Miss Representation by Jennifer Siebel Newsom [not yet released].
MC:I did an interview for it a while ago that was about women and identity and all those body issues and all of that was in there too.
A-F: I read in an interview you said you spent so much of your life trying to be skinny that you don’t remember your 20s. In another you said that living in Atlanta with the “Drop Dead Diva” cast is like reliving your 20s. If you could say anything to the 20-something Margaret, what would it be?
MC: Well I would probably just tell myself to eat something. Which is really, that was kind of all I needed in my 20s, and I really missed a lot of it because I was so concerned with all this other stuff which really ultimately doesn’t matter.
Kai Hibbard after her experience on "The Biggest Loser"
They laugh, they cry, they shed half their body weight!
Okay, admittedly I have never seen a full episode of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” but apparently, I’m in the minority. Since 2004, viewers in more than 90 countries have watched overweight contestants swap unhealthy habits for wholesome lifestyles, often emerging as toned and taut finalists vying for the ultimate clean-living reward: cold, hard cash.
While the contestants clearly and very, very literally work their butts off for the glory of being crowned “The Biggest Loser,” the breakneck speed at which some shed pounds can often seems too good to be true.
And apparently, it is.
Body Love Wellness founder Golda Poretsky recently spoke with Season 3 finalist Kai Hibbard about her experiences on the hit show, and Hibbard’s side of the story isn’t pretty. Nor is it anything like the warm and fuzzy accounts I’ve heard from “The Biggest Loser” fans who tune in every week.
Hibbard exposes a long list of behind-the-scenes transgressions, but the most startling is that participating in “The Biggest Loser” led her to develop an eating disorder.
You can read the full three-part interview at Poretsky’s site (warning: it’s full of potential triggers for anyone struggling with an eating disorder), but below are a few choice quotes:
“There was a registered dietician[sic] that was supposed to be helping [the contestants at the ranch] as well…but every time she tried to give us advice…the crew or production would step in and tell us that we were not to listen to anybody except our trainers. And my trainer’s a nice person, but I have no idea what she had for a nutritional background at all.”
“It gave me a really fun eating disorder that I battle every day, and it also messed up my mental body image because the lighter I got during that TV show, the more I hated my body… I do still struggle [with an eating disorder]. I do. My husband says I’m still afraid of food…I’m still pretty messed up from the show. It doesn’t help that when I go in public…the first thing they usually ask me is ‘what do you weigh now?’”
“I feel…that I have a responsibility to counteract some of the harm that that show does. Because I took a piece of being that problem, I now own a piece of being the solution…When I have people come to me crying, telling me how hard they work and how they log their food and how they’ve done everything they could and [they ask] ‘Why can’t I lose 12 pounds in a week like you?’ I feel a responsibility to get out there and go, ‘You know what? Sue me if you want to, NBC, but I’m telling these people, I didn’t lose 12 pounds in a week. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t a week. And even when it looks like I lost 12 pounds in a week…I was so severely dehydrated that I was completely unhealthy.”
Those are some serious allegations, and whether or not you believe them is up to you. But to complicate the sticky situation further, Kai promotes a line of diet pills and gushes about them on her web site.
She claims she lost weight “without exercising or changing my diet!” Ugh. Isn’t this contradicting every reason she might have had to expose the harsh extremes on the set of “The Biggest Loser”? If you’re speaking out against the show because you “feel a responsibility” to divulge the dangers of overboard weight-loss tactics, what are you doing promoting an appetite suppressant?
But as Poretsky points out on her site, “She may think that weight loss is an appropriate goal, and still be offended and harmed by her treatment and the treatment of her fellow contestants.” Good point. And something to think about next time you tune in to watch a too-good-to-be-true TV moment.
In case you were looking for one more reason to loathe Perez Hilton, the self-proclaimed “Queen of all Media” has once again put himself at the center of controversy. In lieu of utilizing his inexplicable success and wealth to finally develop into a decent human being, Perez recently began hawking t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels!” The quote, famously attributed to supermodel Kate Moss (you know, that exemplar of healthy living otherwise known as “Cocaine Kate”) has come under fire for purportedly being touted as a pro-anorexia mantra.
In an unexpected (and unprecedented?) act of moral responsibility, Perez quickly removed the t-shirts from his online store and offered a quasi-apology where he utilized his most shrill, dumbfounded tone to obstinately deny ever knowing the phrase had anything to do with promoting eating disorders. “I heard Kate Moss say it and I thought it was funny!” Perez ever-so-eloquently retorted. Such a compelling clarification.
Now Perez has found a way to capitalize on his newfound appreciation for wholesome health by selling a revamped line of shirts that proclaim, “Nothing Feels As Good As Being Healthy!” Besides being fugly (a term Perez is ever so fond of), the new shirts are too little, too late.
Even if most of his younger, more impressionable readers were smart enough not to shell out $18.99 (plus shipping and handling) to look like walking pro-starvation billboards, the damage is done. The “funny” phrase has already once again infiltrated our culture and likely planted the seed of hyper-body consciousness into plenty of people’s minds.
So thank you, Perez Hilton, for proving you can indeed do more than just doodle cartoon bodily fluids on unsuspecting celebrity faces. You can also effectively aid in the rapid destruction of young girls’ and boys’ self-esteem throughout the world—a true feat!
Man, remember when whether or not Donna Martin graduated was her biggest problem? (I’ve just aged myself, haven’t I?)
Oft-criticized, suspiciously slender Beverly Hills 90210 alumna Tori Spelling is drawing attention to her famous frame once again in her new book, Uncharted TerriTORI. Tori is going on the record, blaming her dwindling weight on a bout of swine flu (to her credit, Spelling can at least recognize a good punchline saying, “First I had a horse face, now I had the pig flu.” ZING!) USA Today reports that Tori was hospitalized at least three times in the past year for ailments including the aforementioned “pig flu,” stomach pain, migraines and nerve problems, which all caused her to drop pounds (anyone care to places bets on how soon other starlets investigate methods of swine contamination?).
Spelling says the constant media speculation surrounding her weight has been hurtful and she continues to deny accusations of an eating disorder. “I’m a role model for a lot of women out there, so I hate that they say these things unwarranted, without any research and facts. I think it’s doing a disservice to women out there that look up to any celebrity,” Spelling says. True. It’s better that women know the exact methods behind achieving the protruding bones on display in your reality show, your ubiquitous paparazzi bikini shots, your magazine cover stories, your fleeting guest stints on the new, horrid version of 90210…but I digress.
Tori may think she’s helping women by revealing the truth behind her emaciated frame, but she’s (perhaps unknowingly) doing us all a disservice by unleashing the gory details. Back in October, Spelling took to her Twitter account to adamantly deny a Star Magazine cover story that cited her weight at 95 pounds. She made good use of her Caps Lock key and punctuation abilities, tweeting, “Star Mag…LIES! Literally not 1 factual thing in entire article. And, come 2 my house&weigh me Star! I’m 107lbs. if you care about FACTS?!?”
Thanks for clearing that up, Tori. Those 12 pounds were absolutely relevant to my peace of mind and I can now sleep better knowing exactly where the needle on your scale lands.
Tori’s now again nitpicking numbers saying, “I weigh 101 (pounds)—my goal weight is 115. Finally I feel there’s hope.” Hope, indeed. Now that all those young women you’re a role model to can use your precise Body Mass Index to berate themselves for being pounds away from even your healthy “goal weight.”
While I appreciate your honesty and humor, Tori (not gonna lie, So NoTORIous was a television gem), maybe it’s time to focus on something besides your body…like maybe acting?
Michelle Konstantinovsky is a San Francisco native with degrees in Psychology and English from the University of California, Davis. She is a pop culture junkie, but has a critical eye for negative representations of women in the media (hint: there are a lot). Her work has been published on SPIN.com and SheKnows.com, and she frequently contributes to 7×7 Magazine and 7×7.com. When she’s not watching The Hills or reading US Weekly, Michelle can be found managing the About-Face blog.
New T-shirt from Urban Outfitters: publicity stunt?
Urban Outfitters’ latest gasp-inducing product is a form-fitting v-neck tee that screams “Eat Less” across the front. It’s another example of clothing corporations trying to be hip and edgy without realizing the influence their clothing has on impressionable young girls, especially when it comes to body image. [Note: As of 10:55pm PDT, the shirt photo did not appear on the Urban Outfitters web site, but the page was still posted. Does this mean Urban Outfitters just did this as a publicity stunt? --Editor]
What is Urban Outfitters trying to say? Eat less to look like this model? Skinniness is cool? If you want to buy our clothes, you should really consider slimming down?
The clothing industry already promotes sometimes-unattainable body images, what with skinny runway models and size 00 clothing. Now those messages are blazoned across a $30 t-shirt. What happens when this girl sees this shirt or when her friends wear it at school? What happens when she puts it on? Urban Outfitters promotes itself as being a cutting-edge store breaking the molds of other big, traditional clothing retailers. But Urban Outfitters needs to be aware of the influence they have on youth.
Just as American Apparel, in the name of edgy fashion, overly sexualizes their models, Urban Outfitters has had its share of controversies. Along a similar “pro-ana” vein, as some bloggers are saying, pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton was under fire just days ago for promoting a t-shirt that read, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
In a Huffington Post poll, a little over half of readers actually say the t-shirt is tasteful. Some commenters claim a shirt is just a shirt, and that if anything, the t-shirt is meant to comment on our country’s over-consumption and obesity issues. But that totally negates the millions of people who suffer from equally destructive body image diseases that focus on thinness as an ideal. Urban Outfitters must realize that promoting eating disorders is not hip. It is not hip to under-eat and it is not hip to be malnourished. There’s hardly a doubt that simply seeing this t-shirt on a thin model will cause some young girls to equate eating less and being skinny to being hip, leading to major emotional and physical problems.
A note to Urban Outfitters: There’s edgy, and then there’s disrespect for the dread and self consciousness millions of girls feel every day, merely by thinking about entering your dressing room.
About-Face readers: What do you think? Can a t-shirt be just a t-shirt? Do you think Urban Outfitters intentionally means to promote losing weight by unhealthy means? How do you feel that stores like American Apparel and Urban Outfitters equate being skinny with being hip? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
An earlier version of this post appears at the author’s personal blog.
There is a scale in my bathroom. It is not my scale, but it is in my space. Every time I take a shower, I drop my clothes next to it and look at it and feel it look at me. Like it’s challenging me.
I have an interesting history with scales. Although I can remember being dissatisfied with my body from a young age, I can’t ever really remember being dissatisfied with my weight, specifically. I can’t remember a time where I weighed “too much” or even a time where I was aware of what I weighed at all. I was aware that I was fatter than the other girls, but there was no number attached to it. It was an idea, a notion. But it was strong enough, even without a specific number, to affect the way I felt about my body and myself and to keep me locked in disordered eating patterns for years.
Even at the height of my disordered eating habits, I wasn’t weighing myself. It wasn’t because I wasn’t concerned with how fat I was—trust me, I was—but because in everything I had ever read about eating disorders, a preoccupation with scales was one of the biggest symptoms, and I refused to be sick. I refused to be disordered. I stepped on the scale at the doctor’s office and that was it. I told my friends how I didn’t weigh myself, how I didn’t care about some stupid number. I acted like this made my eating behaviors OK, like there was nothing wrong with me or the way I treated myself as long as I wasn’t focused on a number, like nobody would notice how much trouble I was in as long as I wasn’t outwardly obsessed with my body. And for the most part, it worked.
It’s important to note that I have never had an officially diagnosed eating disorder. For a year in high school, I secretly kept a food journal and restricted myself to 900 calories a day. I watched myself turn from a size 18-sometimes-16 to a size 14-sometimes-12 and acted like I had no idea where the weight was going, like it was some natural occurrence that I had no part in.
I was so good at hiding my behavior behind my anti-scale rhetoric. In fact, I was downright body positive, encouraging my friends to throw out their own scales and embrace their figures and ignore the sizes stitched into their jeans even as I obsessively tracked the number of calories going into my body every day. Those behaviors continued into college, where I eventually ended up limiting myself to one meal a day. I was hungry so often that I lost my ability to recognize what hunger felt like. But I fit no diagnostic criteria; I did not weigh myself; I even wrote term papers about fatphobia in feminism: as far as I was concerned, I was nowhere near sick.
Through a lot of struggle and reflection, I eventually recognized that I had a problem and took steps to overcome it. Now I eat well. I count nothing. I focus on how foods make my body feel rather than how they make me look. It’s been a struggle, but I’m the happiest with my body that I have ever been; 99% of the time I think I look fantastic.
So yesterday, I got on that bathroom scale. I got tired of it challenging me, so I stepped onto it, confident that I was finally ready to see what it had to tell me. I wasn’t ready for what came next.
The number that came up was the highest I’d seen on a scale since I was 17. As soon as that realization hit me, I felt sick. As though by reflex, I started considering the possibility of skipping breakfast, thinking about how easy it would be to replace lunch with coffee, imagining myself explaining to my roommates that I was eating a tiny dinner because money was tight.
It took me ten minutes of mental calorie-counting to realize what I was doing. Suddenly, I was angry. I was ashamed at myself for immediately falling into those thoughts, thoughts I hadn’t had in nearly two years. I was furious that something that I thought I had beaten had come back so effortlessly, had reappeared and taken control as though it had never gone away at all.
And that’s the point of this, I suppose: these things don’t just go away. Not after six months or a year or two years. Maybe not at all — I don’t know.
I’m mostly good at fighting off my food demons, good at ignoring or counteracting anti-fat messages, good at loving my body and loving myself. But there are still moments that catch me by surprise, where the voice of my past sneaks in and whispers to me: “Well, you did it once and you turned out alright, didn’t you? What’s the harm in doing it again? You weren’t even sick, really.” Those moments are hard. They are scarce, but they are scary.
I thought facing the scale would be a victory. I thought it would be a sign of my full recovery. I thought I was ready, that I was better. Now I realize that perhaps I’m not, that perhaps facing a scale on a regular basis is not something that I can handle. More importantly, I think, is that it is not something I need to handle. I don’t need to “beat” that scale. I have nothing to prove, except that I am here, and that I am happy, and that I am healthy. And if staying healthy means never stepping on a bathroom scale again, then so be it.
Mauritanian girls forced to gain large amounts of weight so they will be more appealing to men
Some things simply exhaust me. An article in the October 2009 issue of Marie Claire magazine, titled “Forced to be Fat”, is one of them. It also made me sad, angry and horrified. And you know what? It made me a little bit jealous.
In the country of Mauritania, girls and young women are often force-fed up to 16,000 calories a day to make them fat. The article states:
Now big women are back in vogue, and the custom of funneling rich food into young girls like geese farmed for foie gras is once again thriving unchecked…Government figures from before the 2008 coup put the rate at 50 to 60 percent in rural areas and 20 to 30 percent in cities. “The practice is re-emerging because men still find mounds of female flesh comforting and erotic,” explains Seyid Ould Seyid, a Mauritanian male journalist. “The attraction is ingrained from birth.”
Let me be clear: The practice of force-feeding is barbaric and abusive. It’s an invasion of your body no less violent than rape. Picture a young girl in Mauritania sent by her parents to a remote hut where she is force fed gruel and animal fat. She feels sick, scared and alone.
But while you’re at it, also picture a young girl in the United States, laying alone on the bathroom floor after binging on so much food she vomits it all up. She feels sick, scared, and alone. Both are equally painful and unfair. Neither girl is able to have a healthy relationship with their own body.
Here is my disclaimer: I am a fat woman. I weight over 250 pounds and wear a size 22. And I have wrestled the eating disorder monsters most of my life. I have binged to the point of vomiting. I have starved myself dizzy on lemonade and maple syrup fad diets.
This Mauritanian women fits her cultural beauty standards.
Can you blame me for fantasizing about living in a country where men would flock to my “mounds of female flesh”? Ironically, I think I even experienced this cultural difference when I took a cab and was actually proposed to by the Somali cab driver who, upon finding out I was single, replied that he would marry me because I was the “perfect size”.
I am struck by the realization that women’s bodies are considered beautiful only in how they appeal to men. As the article states, Mauritania’s view of beauty is the United State’s obsession with super-thinness in reverse. We are valued in a way that makes our bodies nothing more than fetishes.
What is missing in Mauritania as well as the United States is the idea of choice — the choice we are all entitled to regarding our own bodies. Do any of us really feel we are able to choose what we would like to look like and be okay with our bodies? How much does each of us prescribe to what society is telling us we should look like?
I believe in my own worth and my own beauty whether I’m a size 22 or a size 2; it’s been a hard-fought battle, and I have to renew my commitment every day. I keep thinking about how every time I watch the evening news there is a story about the obesity epidemic. It is drummed into us on a daily basis accompanied by those infamous anonymous headless photos of fat people walking down the street.
Now I can picture the same news story in Mauritania, only the headless photos depict skinny idealized Western images of physical attractiveness. In the end it feels like none of us win and quite frankly, that exhausts me.
