We are in a crisis, and it would be taken more seriously if weren’t happening mostly to women. Eating disorder admissions have almost doubled in six years, and parents and patients speak of agonies trying to find treatment that even approaches adequate. All over the country, all over the world, women and girls are starving themselves, sometimes to death. What are we going to do about it?
It’s eating disorder awareness week right now, which means that yet again the papers will be full of concern-trolling pieces wondering what could possibly be setting these silly young ladies on their courses to slow suicide – accompanied by lavish pictures of nubile and underdressed waifs posing for stock photos, and a few handwaving platitudes about how girls really need to work on their ‘body image’ and possibly stop reading all these magazines. We can also expect invasive first-person accounts with before-and-after images and fascinating details of exactly what the survivor did and did not eat, with weights and stats, gory stories of when and how they finally collapsed. When I was a teenage anorexic well on my way to hospital, I’d read that shit for tips. As Hadley Freeman pointed out, “the problem with anorexia is that it’s so photogenic”, raw crack for the media- economy of misogyny. A lot of this ‘awareness’ seems to help us understand eating disorders in the way that a subscription to Nuts will help you understand sex, to whit: not at all.
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