Turning children into anorexicsIt seems that a good portion of the solution to the perceived problem may be found if we determine the driving force that causes young girls to submerge themselves in the fashion of becoming walking skeletons.
There is nothing anorexic about the girls from the early 1950s shown in the following photograph.
'Down Lambeth Way,' one March afternoon
(Photo: Bill Brandt)
The onlookers in that photo watch the girl in the forefront play at being an adult. Although the incident did show up in the photos contained in the International Photography Year Book 1956, that extent of coverage was hardly likely to have reached millions or tens of millions of people, least of all many or any children the age of the children in the photo. What does the girl in the 1998 photo shown next play at? 
The photo is from a 1998 Eaton's multimillion-dollar ad campaign designed to save the Eaton company from going under. The campaign didn't help. Eaton went under anyway.
Nevertheless, the girl in the ad with the caption "All the latest dresses that your boyfriend won't want you to wear" is selling sex — sex-appeal, if you want. How that is supposed to work for her boyfriend (why does a girl that age need one anyway?) is questionable, but then that is not the focus of ads like that. The idea is to create dissent, to establish superiority, to establish beyond any doubt that 9 to 14-year-old girls (the consumer group targeted by the ads) have sufficient sexual power to make their boyfriends jealous by wearing sexually provocative dresses.
To boot, not only did the ad campaign — heavily promoted under the concept of "diversity" — aim at eradicating differences between the sexes, but it underscored that objective by choosing a young girl with boyish looks, an obviously anorexic girl with a look that is far more likely to appeal to pedophiles than to boys her own age. No wonder the 129-year old T. Eaton Co. Ltd. went down the drain. The underlying message in its ad campaign may have much appeal with the ideologists whipping the fashion industry into a frenzy and with anorexics of all ages that are trying to get into clothing sizes meant to fit 9 to 14-year-old anorexics, but those do not represent the more sane, overwhelming majority of the consumers. The people turned on by the photo are a freakish minority chasing the "ideal of beauty" that the fashion industry indoctrinates them with — people such as those at the German-language chat room for pro-ana aficionados that swallow the bait, hook-line-and-sinker, and chose that photo as their Pic of the Week! (About Nov. 16, 2003; bottom of their page)
How odd that the people at Spiegelkinder (children fascinated with mirrors), the website containing that pro-ana chat room, chose as the introductory graphic for their website a photo of a girl engaged in a totally different kind of "play", sex. The doctrine of sex and empowerment — even though the girl in the title graphic at Spiegelkinder isn't anorexic at all (otherwise she would have insufficient sex appeal, I guess), driven by professional promoters of fashion ideals designed to do nothing more than stimulate spending by blatantly exploiting the very basest human emotions and instincts, compelling gullible people to become enslaved to consumerism under the pretence of sexual freedom. Childhood lost — How sad!
Nevertheless, unlike the play-acting of the girl in 'Down Lambeth Way,' the Eaton ads reached millions of people — many of them young children — during prime-time viewing hours. At least some of those children were most certainly motivated into accepting the life style of an anorexic child working — not playing — as a fashion model as being cool and enviable. Combine the Eaton ads with many others like them, and we should not be surprised that we have an epidemic of anorexic children on our hands. However, how encouraging it is to see that already in 1998 the commercial exploitation of such unnatural drives lost out against the common sense of the vast majority of the masses. Catering and appealing to the ugliness of the anorexia-nervosa mania did not prevent Eaton from going under. The health of neither businesses nor individuals will thrive through the pursuit of unnatural beauty ideals. Certainly, not all children become anorexic, but enough of them do to cause an industry to spring up that talks about them and claims to be able to "cure" them. Problems can be effectively cured only by exposing and cutting off their roots, not by pruning their branches. Let the fashion industry stop promoting the sexual revolution amongst the ranks of our young children, and the problem with anorexia nervosa will go away without much further ado, just as the industries that create and exploit the drives such as anorexia nervosa do.
The next page discusses ideals of beauty Back to Anorexia-Nervosa Index Page Back to Index of Health Issues
|
