A young woman with flagging self-worth, she already had enough to grapple with in Paris, where fashion dictates ultrathin ideals.
“I’ve lost 12 kilos [26 pounds], but I feel heavy,” wrote a blogger identifying herself only as Leila this month in an online journal devoted to her eating disorder. “Heavy, and at the same time, empty.”
But the fact that Leila’s blog advocates anorexia has made her something of an outlaw overnight. On Tuesday, France’s lower house of parliament passed a bill that makes it a crime to promote “excessive thinness” or extreme dieting.
Coming on the heels of related initiatives in Spain and Italy, the ban is the latest and most far-reaching attempt to stem a disorder ”“ and an image of womanhood ”“ with which hundreds of thousands of Europeans wrestle. But how effective will the measures ”“ and some are quite creative ”“ be?
Think what you like about the cult of thinness, etc., this is just another example of the nanny state stifling freedom of speech. Quite common in Europe (and increasingly in the US) when the pc crowd sets policy and controls the legislative bodies.
Agree with 1. Certain behaviors may be dumb, but that does not mean that legislatures have to jump in.
Governments should not outlaw this sort of thing.
But public officials and other opinion leaders should speak out against it.
I commend the international fashion shows (e.g., Milan) that have established their own rules aimed at curtailing anorexia chic. Anyone dismissive of that should think back a decade or so to when edgy designers consciously promoted the heroin-waif look.
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If a man may venture a further thought about women in popular culture, we might do well to bear in mind these words from Screwtape:
I would like to give you some hint about the type of woman—I mean the physical type—which he should be encouraged to fall in love with if “falling in love” is the best we can manage.
In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist—making the rôle of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!
“I would like to give you some hint about the type of woman—I mean the physical type—which he should be encouraged to fall in love with if ‘falling in love’ is the best we can manage.
“In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual ‘taste’. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male…disagreeable to nearly all the females….. As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being ‘frank’ and ‘healthy’ and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist—making the rôle of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!†—Screwtape Letter XX.
Pray for me, brethern, that my ideals may be suitably thick.
In related news, Bridgette Bardot was charged with inciting hatred and bigotry and insulting Muslims when she made public a letter she had written to French Foreign Minister on the dangers of allowing Islam a wider role in French culture:
[blockquote]PARIS (Reuters) – French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of “inciting racial hatred†over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers.
Prosecutors asked that the Paris court hand the 73-year-old former sex symbol a two-month suspended prison sentence and fine her 15,000 euros ($23,760) for saying the Muslim community was “destroying our country and imposing its actsâ€.
Since retiring from the film industry in the 1970s, Bardot has become a prominent animal rights activist but she has also courted controversy by denouncing Muslim traditions and immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.
She has been fined four times for inciting racial hatred since 1997, at first 1,500 euros and most recently 5,000. The latest charges came about after the star publicly published a letter she sent to French president Nicolas Sarkozy last year, lambasting the Muslim religious festival of Eid al-Adha – due to its traditions of slaughtering a sheep.
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Have you noticed not only that models look like concentration-camp survivors, but that their make-up looks like death?