Forbes Editorial Claims We Shouldn't Critique Thinness

In a recent Forbes editorial, Kiri Blakeley wonders why female celebrities are constantly asked why they're so thin, arguing that in a country in which nearly 75% of adult women are overweight or obese, we shouldn't be critiquing women for thinness. Blakeley insists that we should give stars (Tori Spelling and Angelina Jolie, for example) the benefit of the doubt, and shouldn't be attacking their skinniness when really, being underweight isn't a bad thing, whereas being overweight is much more insidious and common.

I agree with Blakeley that the obsession with celebrity bodies is unhealthy; it only reinforces the notion that a woman's body is an object to be critiqued. Constant nagging on the part of the same press that sells a new diet each week is also cynically ironic. Unfortunately, Blakeley's piece takes a nosedive into women-blaming, insulting, and shockingly simplistic assumptions, namely that a) women are overweight because they eat too much and b) having skinny role models dominate the media is a positive thing.

Blakeley seems to be writing from a vacuum in which insane social pressures to be thin — ubiquitous images of uber-skinny women and ads, magazines, and shows devoted to losing weight — simply don't exist. She cites one expert who has suggested that reading women's magazines could be linked to eating disorders, but she seems to find the idea a real stretch. Instead, she skips right on to saying that the Urban Outfitters t-shirt reading "Eat Less," which outraged many women for its celebration of a pro-anorexia slogan, should actually have red "Eat Much Less."

Yes, Kiri, if women would just stop stuffing themselves (and take a cue from our thin celebrity role models) they'd be thin! Our society's serious weight problems couldn't have anything to do with, say, the fact that we hold women to a standard of extreme thinness and encourage them to try a new diet every week to achieve it. They couldn't have anything to do with the marketing of food as either a guilty splurge, an indulgence a woman "deserves" to give herself once in awhile, or a sort of strict regimen suffered to achieve the golden status of skinny.

They couldn't have anything to do with the fact that our society puts so much pressure on thinness that women often develop complicated, painful, unhealthy relationships with food from a young age, and enter into a tunnel of body-image-fixation that's so consuming they forget what "normal" or "healthy" eating is and fall prey to cycles of indulgence and deprivation. They couldn't have anything to do with the thin celebrities and thinner models who are constantly held up as icons of beauty and whose skinniness is the only type of beauty our society permits.

For Blakeley, eating disorders are hardly a significant worry, since, she says, only "1% to 2% of Americans have an eating disorder like anorexia." Never mind that nearly half of all Americans know someone with an eating disorder, 3 in 4 adolescent girls are currently on a diet and millions — 8 million, to be precise, and that number is arguably under-reported — suffer from eating disorders, including bulimia, binge eating disorders, and the many others which fall under the category of Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS).These are similar to anorexia only in that they involve a similar pathos about weight; many of them actually inadvertently lead to weight gain, not weight loss.

This editorial sends three potent messages the thinness-selling media would love to believe: a) Women are thin because they're healthy! Thinness is rarely if ever achieved by dubious, dangerous means. b) Being overweight is the result of eating too much and certainly not an eating disorder or twisted body image. c) There's no relationship between fatness, thinness, and intense media and cultural pressure regarding female body image.

Fail, fail, and fail.

Photo credit: Cliff1066