Friday, September 16, 2011
Eating away your feelings... or not
So, while I was commenting on someone else's post, I thought about the idea of eating disorders and decided that I wanted to look into it a little more. According to http://www.eatingdisordershelpguide.com/causes.html, "as many as 10% of girls and women in the US have eating disorders." Also, around 50,000 people with some type of eating disorder will die because of it. While there are some genetic reasons and physical reasons for eating disorders, a lot of girls develop them because of tv and magazines. They see all of the models and actresses looking picture perfect, no matter what, and they want to be like that too. They can never be skinny enough, or pretty enough to please themselves, so they starve themselves, or make themselves sick to try to change it. It's horrible that society has come to that- to girls having to look picture perfect. Boys rarely, if ever, feel the need to look perfect like girls do. Even here around Cornell on a Friday or Saturday night, when I see a group of people going down to college town, the girls are all in little skimpy outfits while all of the boys are wearing jeans and t-shirts. It's sad that society has come to making girls feel this kind of pressure to the point that they make themselves sick over it.
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It is ridiculous how much the emphasis of outer looks differs between men and women. Like in comic books, most of the women leave absolutely NOTHING to the imagination, while the guys easily get by with looking buff and fierce. This social norm is to the degree that it looks weird if guys do anything to show off their bodies...but with women, it's basically an expectation that both genders kind of expect...
ReplyDeleteLinking this to the comic books, it's interesting that most of the women in them look like they have eating disorders, while, considering what they do in the realm of fighting crime, it is necessary for them to be healthy. There's no way Wonder Woman could beat up Captain Nazi after starving herself for three days; yet, in the new comics, that is how she looks. She is impossibly thin. And Wonder Woman is not even the worst of them - look at Azi's post about the new X-Women. All the girls have stick-thin waists (especially Psylocke - she is definitely not healthy). Despite the physical impossibility of it, all of these comic book women are portrayed as thin as if they had eating disorders - therefore inspiring real girls to try to look like them.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I do think women feel more self-conscious about their bodies and shapes than men due to all the pressure they get from media, etc., I think part of this has to do with the way men look at women. Lots of men judge women by their appearances. Even though this does not apply to all men, they are very conscious about how girls look like...Bigger boobs, longer legs, skinnier waists... They prefer them because guys are also very exposed to the ways tv shows and magazines depict women. This sort of makes girls wear tighter clothes and eat less because they want to be liked. Even though I am not saying that girls try so hard to lose weight only because they want attentions from guys, the ways men judge women do make women feel more self-conscious about the way they look.
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