Both these arguments have their own merits, and often one can get entangled in an endless round of argument and counter-argument, charge and counter-charge, allegation and counter-allegation. However, what is more important than getting caught in that vicious cycle is the need to look objectively, at facts, and this objective look is what has brought forth a disturbing fact – the media is, in fact, guilty of projecting imageries that can have negative health connotations, especially given the fact that the audience that has access to this media is not comprised solely of adults, but many impressionable children and teenagers as well.

With more and more people being able to access the different forms of the media quite easily, the chances of borderline imageries being idealized by immature children and teenagers, thereby causing them to suffer from eating disorders is very real and very high. In simple words, if an advertisement or a television program used slim women as protagonists, chances are that a young girl seeing that program would immediately identify the ability to make an appearance on television to be directly related to looking good and being slim.

Eating Disorders and the Media’s Preoccupation with Skinniness

Whether we like it or not, the truth is that the media seems to be obsessed with the idea that being slim/skinny was the way to be. While one can do a detailed study on this issue and write tomes about it, as I am sure many a student of psychology and media studies must have done, I would just like to discuss the impact that this kind of imagery has had in terms of increasing the number of people with eating disorders, with a brief look at how and when this whole thing started.

The 20th century has had many twists and turns to it, some good and some bad. While we witnessed two World Wars during the course of the century, we also saw radical change in social consciousness and perceptions, especially with reference to women and their role and position in society. So we can pinpoint the starting point in the detection and subsequent explosion in eating disorder cases to be the 20th century. The perception of the perfect feminine body has changed quite a few times during this period – from slim being in during the 20s to out during the 40s to being in again during the 80s.

By the time we were in the 80s, the perception of ‘slim is good’ had been replaced by ‘thin is good’. This kind of perception saw more and more women trying to look good and stay trim by playing around with their diets, thereby falling prey to eating disorders.

Media, Eating Disorders and Science >>