Is this MPSIMS, CS, or IMHO? I figure this will end up here anyway:
He’s not so wrong.
He did completely miss the point, though.
I love his comment about hunters:
Thank goodness for the hunters who protect us from mink and chinchilla.
I can tell you’ve never been kept awake by the sound of mink scratching in the walls.
Gala, what is the point? 'Cause so far, I think the man has a point.
Which is that you shouldn’t do anything about anorexia until there are no more fat people. Everybody has a point, I guess.
He’s just trying to draw attention away from the fact that, by peddling their products on the back of a vast panoply of unrealistic depictions of femininity, the fashion industry is doing enormous damage to the self-esteem of innumerable young girls, some of whom go on to develop eating disorders.
I guess. But there was a time that anorexia was the media’s darling of the moment, and it did seem a bit strange to me, as I know of zero children suffering from it and knew of hundreds suffering from obesity. So if I were going to ‘raise consciousness’ or wage some kind of war on one or the other, I would think going with the anorexia would be the stupid way to go.
I have noticed the anorexia sensation has been dying down in the media, so I don’t really find his arguments that timely, but I didn’t really get from his quote that no one should do anything about kids suffering from anorexia.
ETA: George, thanks. I do wonder though…does it really seem fair to blame the fashion industry for anorexia? I always thought it was a disorder that made a person feel fat even when they are quite thin. Meaning, they are often many pounds thinner than the runway models and still feel fat. That doesn’t seem to me something that people should blame the fashion industry for.
I didn’t say anything about kids either.
Well, there are different manifestations of anorexia. Sometimes this comes with body dysmorphic disorder (where you mis-percieve your body) but not always. Plenty of anorexic people understand they look like walking skeletons.
I think most anorexia boils down to one person who is in pain, feels a lack of control, probably has some self-destructive urges and channels that all into controlling food intake. After it’s begun it becomes a psychological addiction. Honestly I believe that if our society did not value skinniness, many anorexic people would find another form of self-harm, probably drug or alcohol addiction. Anorexia is a social manifestation of an underlying disease, just like in modern times schizophrenics rant about the CIA and in the past they ranted about demons.
Where the media comes in is during those early stages, anorexic people get so much positive feedback that it encourages them to continue their behavior until the addiction takes hold.
There is, of course, the very famous case of Naomi Wolf, who in her book “The Beauty Myth” asserted that 150,000 American women a year died of anorexia. The actual number lied somewhere in the vicinity of 75. Not 75 thousand, just 75, making it roughly as common a cause of death as being struck by lightning.
Think about the hysteria, or intellectual laziness, that is required to make an error of that magnitude.
People were absolutely NUTS about anorexia back then, and to some extent still are. Last year (2007, I mean) we had someone start a thread on eating disorders and talked about how “Counting calories” was an eating disorder. No mention was made of the most common eating disorder in the Western World; gluttony.
I think the fashion industry should definitely shoulder some of the blame. The fashion industry swamps our society in a deluge of unrealistic images of female beauty, images they then spend a fortune digitally manipulating until the models themselves look less like people and more like alien invaders from planet Mannequin.
The prevalence of these images, along with the male attention they command, helps convince a lot of young girls that they cannot consider themselves desirable unless they look like the models. Since this is impossible (after all, the models themselves spend hours in make-up before each shoot, and the images are mercilessly photoshopped of all imperfections prior to publication), they settle for simply buying the products the models are advertising instead. This, after all, is how the adverts work. They encourage women to feel insecure about their looks and then they take advantage of that insecurity to better sell them cosmetics and suchlike.
Unfortunately, for some girls, their self-esteem is so low that no amount of cosmetics in the world is going to make them feel any better about themselves. To such girls, the only solution is to starve themselves, sometimes to death, in pursuit of the unreasonable physical standards set by the fashion industry. This involves months of stringent fasting and overzealous exercise under the yoke of unstinting psychological pressure which is reinforced every time they look in the mirror. By the time it gets to the point where they are actually thinner than the models, their self-perception has been distorted to the point where they’ll never be happy without outside help.
Of course, there are other contributory factors to consider. For instance, there is a strong correlation between anorexia and clinical depression. This is why I think the fashion industry is only partially culpable. Nonetheless, the link between anorexia and socio-cultural pressure for physical perfection is well known, uncontroversial, and has been substantiated by numerous studies in the past few years. For example, this study demonstrates that those in professions where there is a particular social pressure to be thin (such as models and dancers) were much more likely to develop anorexia during the course of their career.
Finally, here’s a true story: I used to teach high school and one day I caught a girl eating a sweet in my class. I asked her to put it in the bin and she readily obliged. This was rather odd, because this girl was a bit of a trouble maker and you always had to ask her twice to do anything. I didn’t have time to consider this, however, because her friends immediately started freaking out because, apparently, this sweet was the first thing she’d eaten in about 3 days.
I pulled her aside at the end of the lesson and asked her why she hadn’t been eating and she replied, as though it was the most reasonable thing in the world, “I wanna look like Kate Moss. Can I go now?”
Now this girl was thin as a rake. Kate Moss would have looked like a fat cow standing next to her, but this girl just didn’t see it. It seems obvious to me that while the overabundance of pictures of Kate Moss flouncing round giant perfume bottles (or whatever) may not have been the root cause of this girl’s self-esteem issues, they certainly weren’t doing her any favours.
Are you sure the number is that low? I’m sure it’s a lot closer to the truth than Woolfe’s insane number but it still seems very low. IIRC, the mortality rate for anorexia is 6%. If just 1000 women developed anorexia in a given year we could expect 60 to die from it, not including those women who committed suicide (I can’t remember the suicide rate for anorexics but it’s a lot higher than average). Of course, there are a lot more than 1000 cases of anorexia a year.
EDIT: I just checked on Wikipedia. Apparently the mortality rate for anorexia is 6% and the incidence is between 8-13 per 100,000. This means, if we lowball the figures, there are approximately 24,000 cases of anorexia in America per year and of these 24,000 patients 1440 will die.
Can someone please delete this post? Thanks.
I agree (is this ok, or do people hate it as much as “this”? If so, how do I express that the statement I’m quoting is exactly how I feel?)
There are far more fat people than skinny people so leave us skinny people alone. What, is there some sort of ‘caring’ deficit? Is it a zero sum sort of thing?
Looks like a major case of misdirection to me. Why am I all of a sudden remembering fashion designers pledging not to hire models with BMIs under the healthy limit? Yeah, Lager should not do that since there are so many more fat people.
To point something out that is probably obvious, obesity doesn’t have a mortality rate anywhere near 6% per year, and keeping in mind that mortality rate for anorexia is for a condition affecting a young population.
Karl Lagerfeld is a crazy person. He himself used to be fat, and since he lost a bunch of weight (according to Wikipedia, 92 lbs on a specially created diet!) he has embraced the skinny with a vengeance, scorning anyone who is disgusting enough to be fat.
Okay, so I got most of this information from Manolo the Shoe Blogger, who hates Karl Lagerfeld (his tag for anything Lagerfeld related is Pure Evil), but this kind of confirms this point of view for me.
Heh. I love Karl. I think he’s actually an alien. I’m not sure he ever has any idea, whatsoever, whats going on in the world around him so I give him a pass on just about everthing.
Also, just as an FYI - bulemia is associated with depression, anxiety, low self esteem, BPD, etc. Anorexia is not. In fact, the average anorexic (i.e. someone who restricts food intake only - no binging or purging) will typically test fairly normal on most test of depression, anxiety, esteem, etc. It’s a very strange disease and very difficult to treat. A few years ago there was a massive NIH meta study that concluded that there was NO treatment for anorexia that was successful enough to be considered a ‘best practice’. It seems with pure, restricting anorexia patients they either get better or they don’t. The type and variety of treatments thrown at them don’t seem to make any appreciable difference.
I was going to say, Lagerfeld seems to me to be as crazy as a bedbug. I’m not surprised he’d say something crazy.
What Wiki actually says is, “Anorexia is thought to have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, with approximately 6% of those who are diagnosed with the disorder eventually dying due to related causes.” [emphasis added]
This leaves the figures open to some interpretation, and I’m no mathematician or statistician, but I must disagree with yours. Couldn’t there be a discrepancy between a 6% fatality rate of anorexia [eventually, due to all related causes] and a 6% fatality rate per annum?
Imagine the hypothetical case of a woman who develops the condition at 18 and dies of it at 34. If all anorexics were like her, we’d have a fatality rate of 100% (as opposed to the actual 6%) and an average annual death rate of about 6%. OTOH, this statistic suggests that even an exaggeratedly high fatality incidence could still coexist with a prolongued duration of illness.
What would the situation look like if 6% of anorexics die of that condition, and they take an average of 16 years to die from it? From a control group of 100 such patients, 94 would live a normal life expectancy, and the remaining six would live 16 years on average from the onset of the condition. Without crunching the math, it definitely doesn’t mean that you can expect six of these patients to die from the condition in any given year!
I think the problem here is that the mortality rate (6%) only applies to the number of patients over the course of their lifetimes and not per year, while the 8-13 people per 100,000 [general population, not young women] said to develop anorexia in a given year is a per year [snapshot] statistic. It’s comparing apples to oranges.
Or to take another example, you could say that “life” is a 100% terminal condition, but we don’t estimate the number of dead per annum by multiplying the condition’s fatality rate (100%) by the incidence of the condition (the world’s population).