Essay about Eating Disorders: A Feminist Issue

Everyone wants to be accepted for who they are and it doesn’t matter if they’re thick, fat, thin, or skinny. Susie Orbach discusses her thoughts of being“fat” in her article“Fat Is a Feminist Issue”. She wants to persuade people and females in general that being overweight is not necessarily a troubling issue. She’s not supporting being unhealthy, but she’s also not supporting society’s opinion on how every woman should be thin. Orbach lets her readers know that society will trick a person's mindset into thinking that being skinnier or having a less amount of fat is better than having a curvier shape.

In America today, there are unrealistic beauty standards women must face daily. When women can not meet this idea of perfection pushed by society, some women will risk their health just to fit a cultural stigma. Women are held to an insanely high criterion when it comes to beauty which tends to lead to negative body image. Ten percent of women in The United States of America report symptoms consistent with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. Which concludes that a total of 75 percent of all American women endorse some unhealthy thoughts, feelings, or behaviors related to food or their body image-UNC Medical Department Although eating disorders are not subjective to women only, after reading “Beating Anorexia and Gaining Feminism” Marni Grossman and “Feminism and Anorexia: A Complex Alliance” Su Holmes, I will discuss how eating disorders coexist in the lives of women who struggle with body image, and what feminism can do to give these women a second chance.

     Something that Mary Pipher has brought up in the first chapter of her book was how society is causing young women to suffer many different problems. One of the most common and worst problems that arise is eating disorders. The media may be the culprit for this issue. Girls who are striving to be thin, and fit the mold of a star may never reach their goal, under natural conditions. As a result

i).Anorexia was considered a gender disease connected with male standards of femininity and devastating effects on women's self-image" (Aikens

In the article “Distorted Images: Western Cultures are Exporting Their Dangerous Obsession with Thinness,” author Susan McClelland’s mainly focuses on how many young women idolize the women they see on T.V. The media is making many women feel as if they need to look a certain way to fit in with the world. Also the fact the western culture is spreading to other countries is a big issue because sicknesses, like bulimia, were not an issue before. Many women in other countries are starting to look at the women in the United States and want to be just like them. In this article, the author says that television, magazines, and media show

Women in the American society become so obsessed with the idea of being thin and looking like the magazine models that they will go to extremes in order to achieve their goal. In other words, the obsession can sometimes lead them right into an eating disorder. However, solutions to these illnesses do exist.

In longing to reach the norm many people fall victim to these detrimental illnesses. Sadly, women are more subject to these eating disorders than men, the number of men suffering from eating disorders is on the rise. Our culture puts pressure on each of its inhabitants to attain this ideal body type that is unrealistic for most people. The images that pollute television and magazines make us all feel inadequate if we don't meet the credentials of slenderness; therefore, continuing the role of our society in the development of eating disorders.

Employing her essay with key terms like body image, anorexia, and bulimia among other disorders, the essayist has written her piece rife with appeals to pathos to define them; the essay’s introduction carries her readers into a girl’s mind who struggles with her appearance

Chronic dieting, low self-esteem, depression and, high levels of body dissatisfaction were among the major issues women face when addressing their body image (Gingras, Fitzpatrick, & McCargar, 2004). The severity of body image dissatisfaction have increased to such a dangerous state that it was added to the DSM-IV as a disorder now called body dysmorphic disorder (Suissa, 2008). One of the main reasons for the prevalence of these conditions in women was due to contemporary Western media, which serve as one of the major agent in enforcing an ultra-thin figure as the ideal for female beauty (Saraceni & Russell-Mayhew, 2007). These images and models presented by the media have become the epitome of beauty, pushing women who internalized these images to dangerous extent to attain these norms. According to evidence from previous studies, contemporary Western cultures have influenced women to an acquired normative state of discontent with their bodies, which have become the source of maladaptive eating practices, negative psychological outcomes, and, chronic health conditions associated with eating disorders (Snapp, Hensley-Choate, & Ryu, 2012). The seriousness of these body image conditions among youths and women have also led to congressional actions.

An eating disorder is an illness that involves an unhealthy feeling about the food we eat. “Eating disorders affect 5-10 millions Americans and 70 million individuals worldwide” (www.eatingdisorderinfo.org 1). They also affect many people from women, men, children, from all ages and different races. People who have eating disorders usually see themselves as being fat when they really aren’t. This usually deals with women or teenage girls mostly. They watch television, movies, read articles in magazines, and see pictures of the celebrities whom they want to be like because they have the “ideal body” that everyone wants and craves for. The media makes us all think we need those types of bodies to be happy with ourselves, be more successful

Magazines advertisements portray beauty using models that are usually abnormally thin. This makes most woman, especially those who are young, feel inferior and insecure about their own bodies. They believe they will only be beautiful if they look like the women in the magazines. Most women will try going on a crazy diets like the tapeworm diet, or the baby food diet, just to try to look like the models on the cover of magazines. Even young girls see the magazines as a reflection of what they should look like when they get older. Woman will stare at themselves in the mirror and find all kinds of things wrong with their body, face, and clothing. They will compare anything and everything from their weight to their hair to the models on

The female body image is highly influenced by the mass media and the media’s portrayal of women, ‘70% of college women say they feel worse about their own looks after reading women’s magazines’ (University of Massachusetts & Stanford University, 2006), the portrayal of women in the media has an unrealistic approach and brings out body dissatisfactions and this results in eating problems and disorders.

There is something obviously wrong with these statistics. Women who subject themselves to these circumstances are fighting against their own body make-ups in order to fulfill the standards put out by the media. In order to change these staggering statistics in the future, we must examine what the media does to make girls and women obtain eating disorders.

Thicker women face discrimination and pressures from society and their peers to lose weight because their bodies types are perceived as unhealthy this is the relative idea Beth MacInnis shared in “Fat Oppression”  in Consuming Passions. MacInnis discusses the health risk associated with weight loss and the misconception thicker women are unhealthy because of their body sizes. She points out that having a bigger body other than being thin the ideal beauty standard is seen as being unhealthy but for those women to lose weights by means that are risky and are shown to be unhealthy in her research. In simpler terms MacInnis is pointing out the hypocrisy in the idea that not being thin is unhealthy but for women that aren’t skinny face actual unhealthy and unethical means to lose weight.

The book breaks down the stereotype of what an eating disorder really is. In today’s society having an eating disorder means that you have some kind of “psychological frailty or illness” (1). When thinking about those that have eating disorders typically it is “young, middle to upper class, heterosexual white women” comes to mind (1). Their motivation is to take on the unrealistic appearance of models and reach the “standards created by advertisers and clothing designers” (1). The author in no regards is trying to down play women that have eating disorders because of the pressure of the media but is showing that there are other people and reasons for having eating disorders. This image that we currently have leaves out “women of color,