Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

fostering a deep loathing for female flesh, applauds them for doing so.
     
Saintly starving sisters
    In 1991, Naomi Woolf described in The Beauty Myth how the epidemic of eating disorders plaguing the women of the west had been ignored by the media and governments, rightly identifying the omission as evidence of the sexist priorities of healthcare and strategists across the world. This is no longer the case.
     
    Two decades on, the same culture is saturated with films, books, documentaries, plays and endless harrowing newspaper articles all claiming to ‘expose’ eating disorders – chiefly anorexia, the more glamorous and alien sister in the toxic family of deadly gendered disorders. Open any magazine, click on any gossip website, and you’ll find speculations on the latest celebrity’s suspected bulimia running alongside columns on what Madonna doesn’t have for breakfast these days. The media has turned anorexia and bulimia into the diseases of the moment – gruesome and disgustingly cool, evidence of the supposed fragility and incompetence of successful women in the public eye.
     
    Concern for the mental and physical health of the youth of tomorrow is clearly not the priority here. In fact, recent attempts by the international media to ‘raise awareness of the dangers’ of eating disorders have looked less like a genuine campaign than a series of mad, gory collisions between a famine relief documentary and a porn movie. In the promotional posters for the 2008 ITV documentary Living With Size Zero, a model with rake-thin limbs stands with one leg cocked on a set of scales, wearing nothing but skimpy underwear and pouting provocatively at the camera, aping a sexual attraction her emaciated body appears to bechemically unable to produce. A tape measure is wound tightly around her torso. This is not ‘raising awareness’ – this is idolatry.
     
    The ‘size zero’ woman is a capitalist fantasy of subsumed femininity, a media fiction spawned in the twisted imaginations of fashion editors and tabloid shysters – and a dangerous fiction, at that. It’s a fiction that perpetuates tired gender stereotypes and feeds back into the cannibalistic ethos of the fashion industry. It’s a fiction that centres upon the degrading idea that women are stupid, frivolous and impressionable. And it’s a fiction that undermines the seriousness of the real epidemic of eating disorders that is devastating the lives of women across the world.
     
    The ‘size zero debate’- referring to the American clothing size 0, the equivalent of a UK women’s dress size four or an European 32, indicating a body-mass index typical of a severely underweight young woman- has been raging since August 2006, when two South American models, Luisel Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston, died from the effects of starvation-diets designed to keep their weight horrifically low. In response to the tragedies, Madrid Fashion Week 2006 banned models with a body-mass index lower than 18 from the catwalk, and since then many fashion houses, celebrities and designers have made statements opposing the use of unhealthily underweight models in the industry.
     
    It’s a story with all the classic ingredients of a good scoop: it has the glamour of high fashion, the tantalising whiff of institutional conspiracy, and, of course, the tragically premature deaths of gorgeous young women. Conveniently, it also cries out to be illustrated with ogle-worthy shots of stick-thin, half-naked teenagers.
     
    The ‘size zero’ myth is largely irrelevant to the vast majority of sufferers from eating disorders who are not catwalk models or fashion heiresses. Meanwhile, the number of women and, more invisibly, of men with the disorders continues to grow. The charity Beat estimates that there are 165,000 people with serious eating disorders in the United Kingdom alone, and they are outnumbered many times over by the millions who, whilst not technically eating disordered, live their lives in a permanent state of shame, self-denial and yo-yo dieting; by the thousands of harassed middle-aged women who have gone hungry for decades as the imperative to hate their own beautifully aging bodies grows ever louder; by the thousands of teenage girls who would rather cut short their lives by years and risk painful death by suffocation than chance the weight gain associated with quitting smoking. Schooled by the circumspective propaganda of the fashion, diet, beauty, music, media and