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What we do to please


             I have never had an eating disorder. I, like many other females, learn at young age that I am supposed to be beautiful, thin and bubbly. I grew up with a Barbie doll like most girls from ages three to eleven do, an early role model figure that is "unattainable in real life" (qtd. Dittrich about-face.org). If Barbie were a real woman she would have to walk on all fours due to her proportions. Then I grew up into a world filled with super thin men and women. If our society as a whole uses skeletal people to display everything from cars to clothes, the population will believe that being undernourished is what we are supposed to look like. I had never really thought about how these images affected me. But, I am now a five foot, six inch, 135 pound weighing girl who feels completely overweight. Sadly, I too strive for that perfect body.
             One out of every four college aged women has an eating disorder. A survey of 232 female undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university in 1994 found that about fifteen percent of the women met criteria for disordered eating---signs of anorexia or bulimia, body dissatisfaction, a drive for thinness, perfectionism and a sense of personal ineffectiveness (Harrison 1994). Their condition could be due to the fact that the women they see in magazines that they are trying to mimic have eating disorders themselves. Models twenty years ago weighed eight percent less than the average woman. Today they weigh twenty-three percent less (qtd. Dittrich, about-face.org). These women are making money from starving themselves. It's simply barbaric. It's funny to me that these are the women we call perfect, when they are actually airbrushed to their untouchable perfection.
             "A study, which appeared recently in the Journal of Communication shows that magazine reading and television viewing, especially exposure to thinness-depicting and thinness-promoting media, significantly predict symptoms of women's eating disorders," (Harrison 1994).


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