This week's reading,
Never Too Rich...Or Too Thin: The Role of Stigma in the Social Construction of Anorexia Nervosa, by Karen Way discusses the unsettling trend of increased dietary disorders among the U.S. population. Modern American culture focuses on the image of women, advertising pictures of girls so thin that it seems unnatural. However, the men of today have grown to desire the thinnest of women and this creates an unattainable goal for females. An even more disturbing trend is that society seems to be apathetic towards those who are anorexic, blaming their personality traits rather than the culture that influences their behavior. This is where a psychological perspective must be taken and it lies in people's tendency to blame the observed behaviors of others on dispositional traits rather than on situational traits and do the reverse to explain their own behavior. Rather than realize that social media and magazines portraying the "ideal" woman are a main cause of the rise of eating disorders, society says that there must be other underlying factors that have caused the disorder. Way argues, "In efforts to further legitimate claims that anorexia is a psychiatric illness, medical operatives have aligned anorexia nervosa with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders, fueling the stigmatized portrait of anorexics" (100). By tying anorexia nervosa to other disorders and family issues, society is preventing the issue from being fixed, as the real problem lies in the decline in women's self esteem as a result of the media.
I believe the claims made by Way in her article are accurate and she makes an interesting point about the growing apathy towards anorexics. She mentions the contestants for Miss America, and the women in the centerfolds of
Playboy, as she conveys the idea that the media puts too much pressure on women to lose weight. I agree that by individualizing the issue of anorexia, various industries are trying to cash in on the eating disorder and hinder society's ability to decrease the rate of those inflicted. Society must realize that the disease is a more a result of social media and societal pressures rather than the result of a specific gene or psychological disorder. This message must be relayed and people must understand that they are making a fundamental error of the human mind when attributing the problems of anorexics to their personality rather than to their environment.
What can be done to prevent the media from putting this pressure on women to consistently lose weight?
Can men do anything to help prevent females from becoming anorexics?
It is an interesting question, can men do anything to help the situation. From one perspective, it seems like men are mostly to blame, because many women develop eating disorders because they think that by being thin they will be more desirable to the opposite sex. However, this article emphasizes the media's role in this epidemic, and I believe that the media's message, rather than men's messages, needs to be altered.
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent summary and analysis of the article--you've really captured her main argument effectively, whereas many other posts for today seem to have confused it a bit. You do a good job of highlighting how a structural problem falls on the shoulders of individuals, which can actually bring a different perspective to your next post (about the steak you recently ate). As an individual you felt guilty for eating a steak, though as your paper (and a sociological perspective) indicates, these are structural--not just individual--problems. That's not to say we shouldn't make different decisions as consumers when we're informed about and have access to different options, but it's also not fair to be hard on yourself for partaking in a food chain that is all around you. I'm glad the class and your own paper about beef is giving you a different perspective. I hope you can still enjoy your favorite foods without thinking of them as being a "nightmare" :)
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