HW 18: The Diet and Fashion Industry are to Blame for Your Anorexia

I chose Understanding Anorexia: A Thin Excuse by Naomi Hooke in the Blog, Feministing as my least favorite Blog of the week. This post was basically saying that you can’t blame the fashion industry and their anorexic models for the prevalence of anorexia. She states, “To believe that the fashion industry causes eating disorders is to completely misunderstand this most complex of illnesses” and then later, “The vast majority of eating disorder patients have numerous other difficulties, including low self-esteem or confidence, lack of self-care, and social difficulties” (Hooke 1). Basically what she is arguing here is that the media and fashion industry have nothing to do with her disease. Although it is commonly understood here in America and according to Terry Poulton who wrote No Fat Chicks, “Nearly 30,000 women stated, in the largest such survey to date, that they’d rather lose weight than achieve any other goal-despite the fact that only 25 percent were overweight and another 25 percent were actually underweight” (Poulton 13). In a country where the diet industry is raking in $50 billion plus a year trying to make us all, thin or not, diet you just can’t ignore their influence. In fact Poulton points out, “Most Americans alive today have no memory of a time when thinness was not a national obsession, and thus regard the artificial as normal (Poulton 13). Hooke is saying that her disease can be blamed on her low self-esteem and confidence, but what she is forgetting to do is to look at why her self-esteem is so low. It is the job of the media and the diet industry together to make her feel bad about herself so that she will spend all of her time and money at trying for an unattainable goal.
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