Courtesy of reader Adrian comes a great article on eating disorders titled “Does Too Much Exposure to Thin Models Cause Eating Disorders?”
This perpetuates the idea that looking at skinny models for too long leads to an eating disorder. It doesn’t. Okay, no one has said it explicitly, but nearly every article mentions ED-related deaths, and the impact on young impressionable girls. Images of thin models may perpetuate the drive for thinness in those already struggling with an eating disorder, but it certainly doesn’t cause an eating disorder.
Hallelujah. Finally, we are moving to a more intelligent understanding of eating disorders than the traditional “the evil media caused this.”
Eating disorders are a lot more complicated than such simplistic interpretations allow for. In my own case, for example, the conjunction of a historic trauma of mass starvation that impacted the attitude towards food of everybody around me + feelings of hunger I experienced as an infant + the early childhood experience of being force-fed resulted in an eating disorder. At the same time, I have the healthiest body image of anybody I know and wouldn’t register the weight of models even if you spent all day every day showing them to me.
Clarissa's Blog 
Censoring images sounds like another demand for others to mediate one’s emotions for one. I would say the root of many eating disorders is in the idea that an ideal femininity is ethereal and takes up as little space as possible. One represses one’s sexuality and other appetites in order to become spirit.
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“I would say the root of many eating disorders is in the idea that an ideal femininity is ethereal and takes up as little space as possible. One represses one’s sexuality and other appetites in order to become spirit.”
While this may be someone’s personal interpretation of their eating disorder–our prefrontal cortices are really good at making sense of our behaviours–it doesn’t hold much water: about 15-25% of eating disorder cases are in males.
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“about 15-25% of eating disorder cases are in males.”
– There are exactly as many men who suffer from eating disorders as there are women. Men feel to ashamed to report but that’s a different issue.
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Eating disorder… somehow unrelated to the specific topic of your post but it happened this morning and I wanted to share the story.
I was at the YMCA locker room with my son before his swimming lesson. My son wanted to stand on the scale and I said go. A little girl saw him and wanted to stand on the scale too. Her dad said no. The girl asked why. The dad answered that it is better to watch how much she weights after she went swimming because she would have made exercise.
The little girl is 3 y/o.
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And when the girl develops anorexia, this dickwad will rant and rave about the horrible “society” that made her this way.
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I think that in the case of anorexia at least it is (a) if you cannot control anything outside you, you can control weight — it gives a feeling of power, and thin is somehow powerful, light enough to fly … (b) a concrete metaphor for the idea that you should survive on less than what is necessary (c) a way to block thinking about whatever the real problem is: you can always say you are not thin enough, and focus on that, blocking out issues you do not have solutions for.
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And also — a reaction against force feeding, overfeeding, and other forms of invasion. Hyper-discipline as a kind of self-protection.
Then there is overeating or bingeing which people say they do as some kind of drug. I am not clear on how this works.
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“a reaction against force feeding, overfeeding, and other forms of invasion. Hyper-discipline as a kind of self-protection.” I think this is the explanation for why survivors of sexual abuse are more likely to develop eating disorders than others (a and c in your previous comment as well).
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Yes, although I would say of almost any kind of invasion — although I suppose one could have really broad definitions of sexual abuse.
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I’ve become one of the commenters who inspires a post! I feel honored.
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I don’t have an eating disorder but I see a similar pattern so I thought I’d share:
I used to be overly anxious when around women. This is a big turnoff for them and they rejected me over and over again which did nothing but increase this anxiety.
The source was a physically and psychological abusing mother. All women were one way or another associated back to my experience with her.
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I’m sorry you had this horrible experience! Understanding the roots of the problem is the most important step on the way to fixing it. So I’m sure you will vanquish this.
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My eating disorder was caused by several factors- most notably, surviving a sexual molestation, only to have the creep who did it come over to my house every day to fix the sink of my house because my parents didn’t believe me when I told them what he did. I would instinctively go into the kitchen to grab food and then hide in my room to avoid him. It was then aggravated by my mother criticizing my body for gaining the weight, refusing to admit to why I was so anxious and eating so much, calling me “fat as a pig”, making “oinking” and “suck suck” noises every time I ate or drank.Girls in school also bullied me for being fat, mocking my lack of a thigh gap, which meant that I didn’t want to leave the classroom during breaks or wear shorts for gym.
At no point did a slim model have any influence over this eating disorder, except when my mom would cut them out of magazines and tape them to the fridge with a note about how it should “inspire” me to lose weight. That wasn’t the poor lady in the photograph’s fault though.
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“except when my mom would cut them out of magazines and tape them to the fridge with a note about how it should “inspire” me to lose weight. ‘
– I’m so sorry to hear this. What a horrible experience. What do people think they are trying to achieve with this?
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It was a very early, pre-Internet form of what’s now called “thinspo”, I guess. The whole idea would be that I was unhappy with my body, and that if I saw another person’s body, it would make me realize that I should try to have that person’s kind of body instead of mine.
All it did was irritate me though. I’ve never, even at my most thin and miserable, wanted to look like a flavour-of-the-month model. I just wanted control over my life and wanted my mom to stop belittling my body.
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“wanted my mom to stop belittling my body”
This is one of those times I feel like an alien visiting a strange planet. Why would you care what your mother said about your body? I mean I really don’t get it.
I realize I’m the freak here but I’ve never really been able to care for very long what other people thought. I might care (depending on the person) a few minutes or days (maybe weeks in extreeeeeme cases) but the years it takes to develop something as weird as an eating disorder?
Help me out here. Why?????
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“This is one of those times I feel like an alien visiting a strange planet. Why would you care what your mother said about your body?”
– A parent’s rejection of any part of their child is experienced by the child as deeply traumatic. There is simply no greater trauma. The feeling of security in the universe, the capacity to feel valuable and good, all that is undermined by a parent’s critical gaze. See the discussion of the mother who sees her 2-year-old son as a potential rapist in the neighboring thread. She sincerely doesn’t get why this is not a hugely progressive and laudable thing to do on her part.
“I realize I’m the freak here but I’ve never really been able to care for very long what other people thought. ”
– We are not talking about any other people. We are talking about a parent, the single most important formative influence on any person’s life.
“the years it takes to develop something as weird as an eating disorder?’
– Yes, it usually takes a parent years of badgering to drive a child to this sort of thing.
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Hi Clarissa,
I’m glad you liked my blog post! It is interesting to see your comments and your readers comments.
I would like to stress though, that many, many studies have shown that heritability rates for eating disorders are around 50-70%, which means that genetic variation (the difference between my DNA, your DNA, Bob’s DNA, etc..) explains about 50-70% of the variation we see in eating disorder behaviour. That doesn’t mean genetics are responsible for 50-70% of the ED and it doesn’t mean that the number is stable across space and time (cultures and decades), but it is telling.
The rest is mostly explained by unique environmental aspects. (These studies are done in twins, so “shared” environment would be something like parenting, whereas “unique” environmental aspects would be something like unique friends, or events (like sexual abuse, or something). A tiny proportion is explained by shared environmental components (like the media). That does NOT mean the media doesn’t contribute, but as I wrote, it is insufficient to cause EDs and it doesn’t hold water either: we are all exposed to the media, but rates of anorexia nervosa are less than 1% (it depends how you count it).
Finally, as far as I know, there does NOT seem to be an increased prevalence of sexual abuse/rape in individuals with eating disorders. This, again, does NOT mean that for any individual person, rape didn’t “trigger” their ED. No. Of course not: it could’ve triggered it. And we know for may it does. But it is not a causative factor in a sense that it is not predictive of whether someone will develop an ED or not. What’s much more predictive are personality characteristics such as anxiety, perfectionism, and obsessive-compulsive traits which occur with high frequency in individuals with eating disorders, are highly heritability, and tend to occur in family members, too.
I think it is *really* crucial to separate factors that lead to eating disorders from our personal narratives of why we (those of us with EDs) starve, binge, or purge. Our personal narratives are important for ourselves, for therapy, to make sense of our behaviour, but they do not necessarily reflect the real true causes of eating disorders.
In the end, restriction and bingeing/purging are highly anxiety-reducing behaviours and act as negative reinforcers to lift dysphoric moods. That is what I think is common for all EDs. Personal narratives changes widely if you look at cross-cultural research in eating disorders and do qualitative studies in places like China, for example.
Again, I’m glad you liked the post and hopefully there’s more on the blog that will be of interest to you and your readers! I enjoyed reading the comments here.
Cheers,
Tetyana
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‘I would like to stress though, that many, many studies have shown that heritability rates for eating disorders are around 50-70%, which means that genetic variation (the difference between my DNA, your DNA, Bob’s DNA, etc..) explains about 50-70% of the variation we see in eating disorder behaviour. ”
– I even know who pays for these “studies.” 🙂 🙂
“That doesn’t mean genetics are responsible for 50-70% of the ED and it doesn’t mean that the number is stable across space and time (cultures and decades), but it is telling.”
– Hilarious!
“The rest is mostly explained by unique environmental aspects. (These studies are done in twins, so “shared” environment would be something like parenting, whereas “unique” environmental aspects would be something like unique friends, or events (like sexual abuse, or something). ”
– I haven’t laughed this much for a while. :-)))))))
“Our personal narratives are important for ourselves, for therapy, to make sense of our behaviour, but they do not necessarily reflect the real true causes of eating disorders.”
– Ha ha ha! 🙂 🙂 This is the best.
Thank you so much for this hilarious parody of the pseudo-scientific discourse that is being sold to the infantile and the brainless in the US today!!
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// Thank you so much for this hilarious parody of the pseudo-scientific discourse that is being sold to the infantile and the brainless in the US today!!
She is serious.
Do you think that personal narrative = reality ?
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“She is serious.”
– So am I. 🙂
“Do you think that personal narrative = reality ?”
– I think that people who try to solve the issue are at a much more advanced level of self-development than those who sigh impotently, “That’s genetics!” or “Those are hormones!” We all know how much respect I have for the later. 🙂
And by the way, the parts of my eating disorder that came from personal experiences are now finally gone.
The part that existed on the historical level remains, but that’s OK, I don’t mind it that much.
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I though I’d heard that people who were abused as children (maybe not specifically sexual abuse, come to think of it) were more likely to have EDs. Oops! Apparently I just made that up.
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