E!'s New Eating Disorder Reality TV Show

The latest from E! Entertainment Network — which brings you stunners like "I Can Make You Thin" and "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" as it astutely polices the bodies of celebrities — is a reality show called "What's Eating You?"

It almost sounds like a campy 70's game show until you realize, wait, it's about eating disorders. The whole basis of the show is to follow people who have eating disorders, marvel at their exaggerated weirdness (one huge paragraph of the press release is devoted to chronicling the kinds of exciting, abnormal behaviors viewers can enjoy), and then, awwwwww, help them to recover by filming a few heartwarming scenes of white coats patting the newly cured patients on the back and family members tearing up and hugging.

I know we live in an age when any value, any issue — even the most abstract and personal ones — can be glossed over and turned into a spectacle for consumption, but still, isn't a reality show that feeds off of the serious illnesses of eating disordered women something we should collectively balk at? In fact, reel back from and reject in horror, like we did from MAC and Rodarte's fashion lines "inspired by" the rapes and murders of women in Ciudad Juárez?

Be it the Rodarte/MAC collaboration exploiting the very real, very gruesome deaths of young women in Juarez or the E! Entertainment Network selling sick women ("watch them puke! watch them eat gum!" "watch their weird starvation behaviors!"), our media culture has grown dependent on converting women's tragic, often heinous struggles against the pressures society places on them into fodder for shopping and entertainment.

Whether they are the women of Juarez who are forced to work 12-hour days in factories and must live with the insouciance of governments and officials who could care less that they are being raped and murdered, or whether they are American women whose way out of our society's crushing need for thinness is to allow disordered eating to destroy their lives, they are by no means something we should be watching on TV or thinking mistily about as we paint our nails with "Factory" polish.

The E! show is the latest in what seems to be an alarming trend towards impervious, airy disregard for the concrete battles women must fight everyday. The reality-as-spectacle and suffering-as-spectacle industries have branched out from manufacturing pseudo-suffering (i.e., Survivor) to feeding off of real suffering.  In doing this, they trivialize, belittle and ultimately render this real suffering — which should be something the public is concerned and informed about — as meaningless, curious, and mundane as anything else on cable TV.

I think this trend needs to be stopped ASAP. The more we're willing to let E! and MAC usurp women's battles and turn them into products, the more we're sliding down a disastrous slope at the bottom of which women's struggles lay abased, simplified, "solved," and forgotten.

Photo credit: DanielleHelm