19 out of 20 young women 'would change bodies'
By Kevin Rawlinson
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Girls as young as seven would like to change something about their appearance and half of 16 to 21-year-olds would consider surgery to achieve their perfect body, a study has revealed.
The research, carried out by Girlguiding UK, shows that 95 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds would change their bodies, with 33 per cent saying they wanted to be thinner and around a quarter of 16 to 21-year-olds said they would consider resorting to cosmetic surgery.
“We all compare ourselves to our peers, whoever they may be and for girls and young women, their peers are usually other young women,” said Dr Kerry O’Brien, a Psychologist at the University of Manchester.
“For them, as with others it is about finding their place in the world and wanting to compare favourably. Unfortunately, considering the approach of the media, that is often not the case.
“Many girls try to measure up to an image which is not a true reflection and can feel that they are coming up short,” he added.
A further 12 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds would consider having a gastric band or plastic surgery and five per cent would think about Botox to achieve the body image they wanted.
Weight is less of an issue for younger girls, with only five per cent of seven to nine-year-olds wanting to get slimmer. But the figure rose to 12 per cent of 10 to 11-year-olds, and 27 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds. Among 7 to 11-year-olds, 72 per cent said they would change something about themselves, the most common complaint being their teeth.
Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson, whose party wants to ban airbsrushing pictures, blamed the pressure young girls find themselves under on an “unrealistic idea of what is beautiful means.”
“This report highlights the worrying number of teenage girls who are going on extreme diets or even considering cosmetic surgery because they're unhappy with the way they look,” she said, adding: “Airbrushing means that adverts now contain completely unattainable images that no-one can live up to in real life.
“Girls shouldn't constantly feel the need to measure up to a very narrow range of digitally manipulated images.”
Girlguiding UK quizzed 1,109 girls on topics including binge drinking, eating disorders, plastic surgery, sexual health and body image. The study also showed that more than a quarter of girls aged 11 to 16 had drunk so much that they had been sick or lost control. Chief Guide, Liz Burnley said: “Political debate is constantly grappling for solutions to these issues, under the intense scrutiny of the media spotlight, but the one group whose views are not sought are the young women they affect.”
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Friday, 27 November 2009
"The Guardian" article [3]
Less airbrushing, more reality
To inject more realism into the media's portrayal of women, adverts should be honest about levels of digital manipulation
Jo Swinson, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 August 2009 17.36 BST
Open any magazine or newspaper, and you're bombarded with images of "perfect" women, advertising everything from cars to alcohol, deodorant to face cream.
Many of these images are not realistic. As technology has advanced, adverts are ever more retouched, airbrushed and detached from reality. Spots and blemishes are removed, complexions made flawless, waists and legs made slimmer by digital liposuction. Yet these are the images that young – and ever younger – girls are aspiring to.
The pressure to conform to such a narrow ideal of beauty can lead to unhappiness and low self-esteem for many women and girls. In some cases, this can contribute to eating disorders. Last year there was a worrying 47% rise in under-18s admitted to hospital for anorexia or bulimia treatment. Cosmetic surgery trends also give cause for concern, with breast enlargements and tummy tucks up 30% last year.
Cindy Crawford famously said: "Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford."
We need to inject more realism into the media's portrayal of women (and men). We should protect young boys and girls from unnecessary body image pressure, so retouching models should be banned for adverts aimed at children. For the rest, the advert should be honest and upfront about how much digital manipulation has taken place. Real-sized models should be promoted.
Young girls should be encouraged into healthy lifestyles through education, with modules on media literacy and body image alongside health and wellbeing. Current high teenage dropout rates from sport should be addressed by a wider range of exercise options at school, such as dance, yoga and aerobics.
These proposals are part of the Liberal Democrat policy paper Real Women, which also has new ideas to help women in the areas of work, family life, money and safety.
Women have enough on their plates juggling caring responsibilities with work and home life. Let's at least take "get an impossibly perfect body" off the to-do list.
Jo Swinson MP chaired the Liberal Democrat policy group which produced the paper "Real Women", to be debated at Lib Dem Conference next month
To inject more realism into the media's portrayal of women, adverts should be honest about levels of digital manipulation
Jo Swinson, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 August 2009 17.36 BST
Open any magazine or newspaper, and you're bombarded with images of "perfect" women, advertising everything from cars to alcohol, deodorant to face cream.
Many of these images are not realistic. As technology has advanced, adverts are ever more retouched, airbrushed and detached from reality. Spots and blemishes are removed, complexions made flawless, waists and legs made slimmer by digital liposuction. Yet these are the images that young – and ever younger – girls are aspiring to.
The pressure to conform to such a narrow ideal of beauty can lead to unhappiness and low self-esteem for many women and girls. In some cases, this can contribute to eating disorders. Last year there was a worrying 47% rise in under-18s admitted to hospital for anorexia or bulimia treatment. Cosmetic surgery trends also give cause for concern, with breast enlargements and tummy tucks up 30% last year.
Cindy Crawford famously said: "Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford."
We need to inject more realism into the media's portrayal of women (and men). We should protect young boys and girls from unnecessary body image pressure, so retouching models should be banned for adverts aimed at children. For the rest, the advert should be honest and upfront about how much digital manipulation has taken place. Real-sized models should be promoted.
Young girls should be encouraged into healthy lifestyles through education, with modules on media literacy and body image alongside health and wellbeing. Current high teenage dropout rates from sport should be addressed by a wider range of exercise options at school, such as dance, yoga and aerobics.
These proposals are part of the Liberal Democrat policy paper Real Women, which also has new ideas to help women in the areas of work, family life, money and safety.
Women have enough on their plates juggling caring responsibilities with work and home life. Let's at least take "get an impossibly perfect body" off the to-do list.
Jo Swinson MP chaired the Liberal Democrat policy group which produced the paper "Real Women", to be debated at Lib Dem Conference next month
"The Guardian" article [2]
Lost youth: turning young girls into sex symbols
Toddlers in tube tops and naked teen pin-ups no longer seem to shock us. How the sexual image of young girls is being manipulated
M G Durham The Guardian, Friday 18 September 2009
Last Halloween, a five-year-old girl showed up at my doorstep wearing a tube top, miniskirt, platform shoes and eye shadow. The outfit projected a rather tawdry sexuality. "I'm a Bratz!" the tot piped up proudly, a look-alike doll clutched in her chubby fist. I had a dizzying flashback to an image of a child prostitute I had seen in Cambodia, in a disturbingly similar outfit.
I was startled, but perhaps I should not have been. In recent years, the sexy little girl has become insistently present in the media – from 15-year-old Miley Cyrus photographed draped in a sheet for Vanity Fair to websites "counting down" to the day that child stars, such as Emma Watson, reach the age of consent. And, of course, there was Britney Spears, aged 16, prancing around in school uniform and pigtails in her first music video. Their allure is that of "Lolita" – very young and very provocative.
Lolita has become shorthand for a prematurely sexual girl – one who, by legal definition, is outlawed from sexual activity. The Lolitas of our time are defined as deliberate sexual provocateurs, luring adults into wickedness and transgressing moral and legal codes. But the original Lolita – the 12-year-old protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's novel – was rather different; a powerless victim of her predatory stepfather.
Like many pre-adolescent girls, she is sexually curious, but has no control over the abusive relationship. Yet it is as though the very fact of her sexuality has made her into a fantasy, rather than the novel's sexually abused and tragic figure. She is eagerly invoked in the media as a sign of how licentious little girls can be. "Bring back school uniforms for little Lolitas!" demands the Daily Telegraph in an article condemning contemporary sexy schoolgirl fashions, while Tokyo's Daily Yomiuri refers to "the Lolita-like sex appeal" of preteen Japanese anime characters.
Increasingly, young girls are seen as valid participants in a public culture of sex. In some ways, this is not new: in the 1933 film Polly Tix in Washington, four-year-old Shirley Temple played a pint-sized prostitute. And it's striking that the role of child prostitute was the springboard for the careers of many of our sex godesses: not just Temple, but also the 14-year-old Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, 12-year-old Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, and 13-year-old Penelope Cruz in a French soap, Série Rose. All are commentaries on child sexual exploitation, but the titillating representations positioned these actors as sex symbols and reinforced the link between girls' sexuality and sex work.
Yet in the middle part of the last century, our icons of female sexuality were Marilyn Monroe, 27, as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Sophia Loren, 23, in Desire Under the Elms. Legally and physically adults, their much-admired bodies would not meet today's standards of sculpted muscularity and narrow-hipped leanness. The British model Twiggy is often cited for introducing the boyish, adolescent body type as a western feminine ideal. She was 16 when she started modelling in 1966 and by the late 80s the slender adolescent body had come to epitomise female beauty.
"A girl at the edge of puberty has a naturally hairless body that demands no shaving, waxing or chemicals . . . Her body is naturally small, supple and nothing if not youthful," observes sociologist Wendy Chapkis. The western ideal of female beauty, she writes, is defined by "eternal youth".
This emphasis on youthfulness has led to the use of very young girls as models in fashion and advertising, often in sexually suggestive contexts. Most catwalk models are between 14 and 19 – some, such as Maddison Gabriel, the official face of Australia's Gold Coast fashion week in 2007, are just 12.
Young girls are increasingly posed as sexual objects of the adult gaze, while numerous clothing ads feature women dressed as little girls, sucking on lollipops, kneeling, crouching or lying in positions of subordination. Witness the 20-year-old model Lily Cole, ribbons in her hair, clasping a teddy bear for French Playboy. Childishness is sexy, these messages seem to say. Ergo, children – especially little girls – are sexy.
The highly sexual poses imply they are "Lolitas" – knowledgeable, wanton, seductive. It sends a message that little girls should be viewed as sexy. The idea is that female sexuality is the province of youth. Writing in the New York Times, children's magazine editor Pilar Guzman observes, "The gap is diminishing between what's meant for children and what's intended for their elders."
It's called "kids getting older younger" – a marketing construct blurring the line between adults and children, especially with regard to sexuality. The problem is not with children, but with those who knowingly sell products with powerful sexual overtones to young girls, and with adults who then interpret girls' bodies as sexually available.
If these little girls can't feel sexual desire or understand much about it, why are we so obsessed with fetishising them? A possible answer is a backlash against feminism. Society has been forced to confront women as contenders in the social arena. This has generated resentment from men, as in Michael Noer's infamous 2006 column in Forbes, "Don't marry a career woman," in which he claimed that working women are more likely to cheat on their husbands. Little girls epitomise a patriarchal society's ideal of compliant, docile sexuality. In the media, girls are reduced to one-dimensional, wholly limited figurines.
But the motivation is also commercial. Cosmetics and fashion designers are finding ways to capture loyal consumers almost from day one. On the flip side, emphasising girlishness as desirable facilitates the multibillion-dollar sales of anti-aging cosmetics, creams and plastic surgery. Finally, there's the underground economy of little girls' sexuality: child sex trafficking and prostitution. According to the UN, sex trafficking is the fastest-growing area of organised crime.
I want my two young daughters – indeed, all girls – to grow up confident about finding and expressing sexual pleasure. But as a culture, we have few ways to represent or acknowledge children's sexuality, and we seem incapable of dealing with it outside the realm of sexual commodification and commerce. Sexual curiosity and even some experimentation are ordinary features of childhood. Realistic, strong, and non-exploitative representations of girls' sexuality would be a progressive social step, but images of girls posed and styled as objects of the erotic adult gaze can't be. They often employ the conventions of sex work, legitimising the use of young girls for prostitution and pornography.
I wish that Halloween costumes for little girls involving vinyl boots or corsets were just silly and fun. They may be, in contexts where girls are totally protected, safe from any misreading or violation. But I am not convinced such contexts exist. Instead we must create safe and supportive spaces for girls to understand their sexuality on their own terms and in their own time.
Toddlers in tube tops and naked teen pin-ups no longer seem to shock us. How the sexual image of young girls is being manipulated
M G Durham The Guardian, Friday 18 September 2009
Last Halloween, a five-year-old girl showed up at my doorstep wearing a tube top, miniskirt, platform shoes and eye shadow. The outfit projected a rather tawdry sexuality. "I'm a Bratz!" the tot piped up proudly, a look-alike doll clutched in her chubby fist. I had a dizzying flashback to an image of a child prostitute I had seen in Cambodia, in a disturbingly similar outfit.
I was startled, but perhaps I should not have been. In recent years, the sexy little girl has become insistently present in the media – from 15-year-old Miley Cyrus photographed draped in a sheet for Vanity Fair to websites "counting down" to the day that child stars, such as Emma Watson, reach the age of consent. And, of course, there was Britney Spears, aged 16, prancing around in school uniform and pigtails in her first music video. Their allure is that of "Lolita" – very young and very provocative.
Lolita has become shorthand for a prematurely sexual girl – one who, by legal definition, is outlawed from sexual activity. The Lolitas of our time are defined as deliberate sexual provocateurs, luring adults into wickedness and transgressing moral and legal codes. But the original Lolita – the 12-year-old protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's novel – was rather different; a powerless victim of her predatory stepfather.
Like many pre-adolescent girls, she is sexually curious, but has no control over the abusive relationship. Yet it is as though the very fact of her sexuality has made her into a fantasy, rather than the novel's sexually abused and tragic figure. She is eagerly invoked in the media as a sign of how licentious little girls can be. "Bring back school uniforms for little Lolitas!" demands the Daily Telegraph in an article condemning contemporary sexy schoolgirl fashions, while Tokyo's Daily Yomiuri refers to "the Lolita-like sex appeal" of preteen Japanese anime characters.
Increasingly, young girls are seen as valid participants in a public culture of sex. In some ways, this is not new: in the 1933 film Polly Tix in Washington, four-year-old Shirley Temple played a pint-sized prostitute. And it's striking that the role of child prostitute was the springboard for the careers of many of our sex godesses: not just Temple, but also the 14-year-old Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, 12-year-old Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, and 13-year-old Penelope Cruz in a French soap, Série Rose. All are commentaries on child sexual exploitation, but the titillating representations positioned these actors as sex symbols and reinforced the link between girls' sexuality and sex work.
Yet in the middle part of the last century, our icons of female sexuality were Marilyn Monroe, 27, as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Sophia Loren, 23, in Desire Under the Elms. Legally and physically adults, their much-admired bodies would not meet today's standards of sculpted muscularity and narrow-hipped leanness. The British model Twiggy is often cited for introducing the boyish, adolescent body type as a western feminine ideal. She was 16 when she started modelling in 1966 and by the late 80s the slender adolescent body had come to epitomise female beauty.
"A girl at the edge of puberty has a naturally hairless body that demands no shaving, waxing or chemicals . . . Her body is naturally small, supple and nothing if not youthful," observes sociologist Wendy Chapkis. The western ideal of female beauty, she writes, is defined by "eternal youth".
This emphasis on youthfulness has led to the use of very young girls as models in fashion and advertising, often in sexually suggestive contexts. Most catwalk models are between 14 and 19 – some, such as Maddison Gabriel, the official face of Australia's Gold Coast fashion week in 2007, are just 12.
Young girls are increasingly posed as sexual objects of the adult gaze, while numerous clothing ads feature women dressed as little girls, sucking on lollipops, kneeling, crouching or lying in positions of subordination. Witness the 20-year-old model Lily Cole, ribbons in her hair, clasping a teddy bear for French Playboy. Childishness is sexy, these messages seem to say. Ergo, children – especially little girls – are sexy.
The highly sexual poses imply they are "Lolitas" – knowledgeable, wanton, seductive. It sends a message that little girls should be viewed as sexy. The idea is that female sexuality is the province of youth. Writing in the New York Times, children's magazine editor Pilar Guzman observes, "The gap is diminishing between what's meant for children and what's intended for their elders."
It's called "kids getting older younger" – a marketing construct blurring the line between adults and children, especially with regard to sexuality. The problem is not with children, but with those who knowingly sell products with powerful sexual overtones to young girls, and with adults who then interpret girls' bodies as sexually available.
If these little girls can't feel sexual desire or understand much about it, why are we so obsessed with fetishising them? A possible answer is a backlash against feminism. Society has been forced to confront women as contenders in the social arena. This has generated resentment from men, as in Michael Noer's infamous 2006 column in Forbes, "Don't marry a career woman," in which he claimed that working women are more likely to cheat on their husbands. Little girls epitomise a patriarchal society's ideal of compliant, docile sexuality. In the media, girls are reduced to one-dimensional, wholly limited figurines.
But the motivation is also commercial. Cosmetics and fashion designers are finding ways to capture loyal consumers almost from day one. On the flip side, emphasising girlishness as desirable facilitates the multibillion-dollar sales of anti-aging cosmetics, creams and plastic surgery. Finally, there's the underground economy of little girls' sexuality: child sex trafficking and prostitution. According to the UN, sex trafficking is the fastest-growing area of organised crime.
I want my two young daughters – indeed, all girls – to grow up confident about finding and expressing sexual pleasure. But as a culture, we have few ways to represent or acknowledge children's sexuality, and we seem incapable of dealing with it outside the realm of sexual commodification and commerce. Sexual curiosity and even some experimentation are ordinary features of childhood. Realistic, strong, and non-exploitative representations of girls' sexuality would be a progressive social step, but images of girls posed and styled as objects of the erotic adult gaze can't be. They often employ the conventions of sex work, legitimising the use of young girls for prostitution and pornography.
I wish that Halloween costumes for little girls involving vinyl boots or corsets were just silly and fun. They may be, in contexts where girls are totally protected, safe from any misreading or violation. But I am not convinced such contexts exist. Instead we must create safe and supportive spaces for girls to understand their sexuality on their own terms and in their own time.
"The Guardian" article [1]
What girls really think
Girlguiding UK surveyed the attitudes of over 1,000 girls and young women, aged between seven and 21, about the issues affecting them. The answers reveal their attitudes towards health, education, families, society and the environment
Body image, bullying and cosmetic surgery, all scored highly in terms of importance for young girls today.
17-year-old Leah Parsons, was one of the 14 young advocates who formed a panel to look at the results and make recommendations
I joined the panel because I wanted to find out what other girls in the country are thinking. Body image was a big issue. I think airbrushing has a larger impact than anybody realises, especially the celeb images in magazines. Girls want 'quick fix' cosmetic surgery like the celebs, when they probably don't understand what is involved. They're not really interested in a healthy eating and exercise programme to keep them fit. What is scary is that younger girls are being affected, it used to be teens, now even 9 and 10-year-olds are worried about being thought fat.
Stress was another big issue. I think it's really significant that the survey showed that primary school was seen as an exciting place to learn, but 11 to 16-year-olds found school stressful, boring, and a waste of time. At school girls compare themselves to see if they've got the 'right' body. Stress isn't due only to exams, or bullying, which were also identified, but body image as well..
And as if that wasn't enough, you have to take care you're not seen to be too clever. It's all about fitting in, isn't it? Not to be seen to be different and a target for someone else to make fun of, or bully you. As we went through the results it became clear to me that a lot of the themes are linked by this issue.
Another area the Girls' Attitudes report investigated was health. The statistics for drinking alcohol and having unprotected sex were very high. Again it's about fitting in with a social group – it could be the group that goes out drinking, the group of skinny girls, the group that has unprotected sex. It's all about peer pressure and the need to belong.
I think doing what their friends do, explains why so many young people are going into higher education during these credit crunch times. I think more young people know about things like benefits, and so having a baby before marriage can seem like an economically sensible option. And then other people do the same, not being aware of the wider effect of having a baby.
As for the age at which people can marry, I would agree with the results there completely. It should be raised to an age where you are more responsible. At 16 or 17 you are only just into further education. When I am taking part in Guide activities I can be myself. Like all young women, I recognise these pressures happen to a greater or lesser extent in other areas of my life, but when I am a Guide I am free of it.
I think it's really important that people understand what Guiding offers girls and young women and how much it achieves. It looks like there are lots of girls and young women out there who could benefit.
Leah Parsons is a Senior Guide from Devon.
Girlguiding UK surveyed the attitudes of over 1,000 girls and young women, aged between seven and 21, about the issues affecting them. The answers reveal their attitudes towards health, education, families, society and the environment
Body image, bullying and cosmetic surgery, all scored highly in terms of importance for young girls today.
17-year-old Leah Parsons, was one of the 14 young advocates who formed a panel to look at the results and make recommendations
I joined the panel because I wanted to find out what other girls in the country are thinking. Body image was a big issue. I think airbrushing has a larger impact than anybody realises, especially the celeb images in magazines. Girls want 'quick fix' cosmetic surgery like the celebs, when they probably don't understand what is involved. They're not really interested in a healthy eating and exercise programme to keep them fit. What is scary is that younger girls are being affected, it used to be teens, now even 9 and 10-year-olds are worried about being thought fat.
Stress was another big issue. I think it's really significant that the survey showed that primary school was seen as an exciting place to learn, but 11 to 16-year-olds found school stressful, boring, and a waste of time. At school girls compare themselves to see if they've got the 'right' body. Stress isn't due only to exams, or bullying, which were also identified, but body image as well..
And as if that wasn't enough, you have to take care you're not seen to be too clever. It's all about fitting in, isn't it? Not to be seen to be different and a target for someone else to make fun of, or bully you. As we went through the results it became clear to me that a lot of the themes are linked by this issue.
Another area the Girls' Attitudes report investigated was health. The statistics for drinking alcohol and having unprotected sex were very high. Again it's about fitting in with a social group – it could be the group that goes out drinking, the group of skinny girls, the group that has unprotected sex. It's all about peer pressure and the need to belong.
I think doing what their friends do, explains why so many young people are going into higher education during these credit crunch times. I think more young people know about things like benefits, and so having a baby before marriage can seem like an economically sensible option. And then other people do the same, not being aware of the wider effect of having a baby.
As for the age at which people can marry, I would agree with the results there completely. It should be raised to an age where you are more responsible. At 16 or 17 you are only just into further education. When I am taking part in Guide activities I can be myself. Like all young women, I recognise these pressures happen to a greater or lesser extent in other areas of my life, but when I am a Guide I am free of it.
I think it's really important that people understand what Guiding offers girls and young women and how much it achieves. It looks like there are lots of girls and young women out there who could benefit.
Leah Parsons is a Senior Guide from Devon.
...Ageism Debate...
Selina stokes a diversity debate that needs addressing
It will come as a surprise to few but a delight to many that Selina Scott is suing Five over ageism in its refusal to hire her for a maternity cover role and choice of younger presenters instead. It is a delight not because Five is worse than anyone else in this respect, but because it stokes a debate which urgently needs to be taken more seriously. Casual sexism, ageism and racism are the collective dirty secret of the vast majority of media institutions, and they represent as much of an industrial challenge as they do a moral one.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's Report on Sex and Power, published last week, drew a depressing picture for women in the workplace. In general the progression of women at the highest level in the workplace is pitiful and the media are no exception: only 13.6% of national newspaper editors (including the Herald and Western Mail) are women; only 10% of media FTSE's 350 companies have women at the helm; and at the BBC, which has often been held as an exemplar of diversity, women make up less than 30% of most senior management positions. It puts into context Jeremy Paxman's deranged rant about the white male in television. Ethnic minority representation is even worse.
A couple of weeks ago Pat Younge, former BBC head of sports programmes and planning who left to work for Discovery in the US, caused a stir at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival by saying that diversity targets should be like financial targets - you don't hit them, you get fired. I have to say that as board champion for diversity at Guardian News and Media I would currently be firing myself and most of the board for some missed targets. But Younge is right - because diversity targets are not just a feelgood add-on, they are vital to the health of any media business. The temptation to hire in one's own image for most managers is as irresistible as it is subliminal - which is why there are a lot of opinionated women working in digital management at the Guardian, and why we all need targets to remind us to look beyond the mirror.
On screen, any number of unconventional-looking ageing blokes (Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles, Alan Sugar, Adrian Chiles, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan) are paid at a top rate for the talent they possess beyond their appearance. For women it is an altogether different story - appearance and age are clearly factors in choosing female presenters in a way that they aren't for men.
The media should be deeply concerned about this un-diversity - not because it represents moral turpitude on our part, but because it represents bloody awful business sense. What is happening to the UK population at the moment? It is ethnically diversifying, and it is ageing. It is also the case that it is, as of the 2001 Census, marginally more female than it is male. And we live longer - so older women, and non-white potential audiences are on the rise. In London, the major urban conurbation and key market for so many media brands, the population is around 37% ethnically diverse, yet this is nowhere near reflected in the management structures of media companies. Or indeed in their on-screen or in-paper representation.
How though, can you hope to address audiences for which you have no instinctive feel, and towards which you show casual discrimination? We are all in danger of becoming irrelevant to the changing demographics of our target audience at a time when holding any kind of audience is key to survival. If white men are so good at solving business problems - and given that they represent well over 80% of FTSE 100 directors we can speculate that this is a skill they must possess in measure - then I'm surprised they haven't grasped this one already.
It will come as a surprise to few but a delight to many that Selina Scott is suing Five over ageism in its refusal to hire her for a maternity cover role and choice of younger presenters instead. It is a delight not because Five is worse than anyone else in this respect, but because it stokes a debate which urgently needs to be taken more seriously. Casual sexism, ageism and racism are the collective dirty secret of the vast majority of media institutions, and they represent as much of an industrial challenge as they do a moral one.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's Report on Sex and Power, published last week, drew a depressing picture for women in the workplace. In general the progression of women at the highest level in the workplace is pitiful and the media are no exception: only 13.6% of national newspaper editors (including the Herald and Western Mail) are women; only 10% of media FTSE's 350 companies have women at the helm; and at the BBC, which has often been held as an exemplar of diversity, women make up less than 30% of most senior management positions. It puts into context Jeremy Paxman's deranged rant about the white male in television. Ethnic minority representation is even worse.
A couple of weeks ago Pat Younge, former BBC head of sports programmes and planning who left to work for Discovery in the US, caused a stir at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival by saying that diversity targets should be like financial targets - you don't hit them, you get fired. I have to say that as board champion for diversity at Guardian News and Media I would currently be firing myself and most of the board for some missed targets. But Younge is right - because diversity targets are not just a feelgood add-on, they are vital to the health of any media business. The temptation to hire in one's own image for most managers is as irresistible as it is subliminal - which is why there are a lot of opinionated women working in digital management at the Guardian, and why we all need targets to remind us to look beyond the mirror.
On screen, any number of unconventional-looking ageing blokes (Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles, Alan Sugar, Adrian Chiles, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan) are paid at a top rate for the talent they possess beyond their appearance. For women it is an altogether different story - appearance and age are clearly factors in choosing female presenters in a way that they aren't for men.
The media should be deeply concerned about this un-diversity - not because it represents moral turpitude on our part, but because it represents bloody awful business sense. What is happening to the UK population at the moment? It is ethnically diversifying, and it is ageing. It is also the case that it is, as of the 2001 Census, marginally more female than it is male. And we live longer - so older women, and non-white potential audiences are on the rise. In London, the major urban conurbation and key market for so many media brands, the population is around 37% ethnically diverse, yet this is nowhere near reflected in the management structures of media companies. Or indeed in their on-screen or in-paper representation.
How though, can you hope to address audiences for which you have no instinctive feel, and towards which you show casual discrimination? We are all in danger of becoming irrelevant to the changing demographics of our target audience at a time when holding any kind of audience is key to survival. If white men are so good at solving business problems - and given that they represent well over 80% of FTSE 100 directors we can speculate that this is a skill they must possess in measure - then I'm surprised they haven't grasped this one already.
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
HW- 3 articles from The Guardian in regards to critical investigation
Celebrities distort girls' search for ideal shape
Survey of teenagers reveals discontent with personal appearance and a preoccupation with the desire to acquire the perfect form
Wednesday 5 January 2005 07.29 GMT
Just 8% of teenage girls in Britain deem themselves to be happy with their body, according to a body image survey commissioned by a teen magazine.
A further 68% believe their faces to be unattractive, and their lives are preoccupied by the desire to acquire a "perfect" celebrity body.
Bliss magazine, which is aimed at girls aged 13 to 18, questioned 2,000 girls over 10 television regions, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The average respondent was 14, 5ft 4in tall and weighed 8st 8lb (163cm and 54.4kg).
The survey found that while 58% of teenage girls believe themselves to be of normal weight - with 35% describing themselves as overweight and 7% underweight - 66% think they need to lose weight and 71% claim they would be "100% happier if they could lose half a stone".
"We get a lot of letters from our readers about body image," said Chantelle Horton, deputy editor of Bliss. "There are letters about the extremes of obesity and anorexia, but in general body obsession is a defining factor.
"I think the female obsession with body image is not a new phenomenon, but young girls are now exposed to more images of 'perfection' all the time - in magazines, on TV, in films and music videos and advertisements."
The study also revealed some disquieting trends in teenage girls' eating habits. Just 48% said they eat vegetables every day, while precisely the same number said they ate chocolate on a daily basis.
A quarter of respondents admitted they had already suffered from an eating disorder - 6% citing anorexia, 5% bulimia and 14% binge-eating.
Ann McPherson, an Oxfordshire GP who treats teenagers with eating disorders, and runs the website teenagehealthfreak.org, was not surprised by the survey's findings.
"It's pretty awful, isn't it?" she said. "There's pressure on young girls [to look a certain way] and there's pressure on women - it runs the whole way through. One would like girls to feel good about themselves and not feel they had to conform to stereotypes."
The study found that 65% of girls had dieted in the past, with 14% describing themselves as constantly on a diet, and 32% saying they would consider plastic surgery.
"They don't think of long-term solutions to their body image problems," says Horton. "It's all about the quick fix - and that's drilled into them by the fact their mums might be on the Atkins diet or they see a celebrity with a wonky nose who gets it fixed with surgery."
Images of "perfect" celebrities were cited by 67% as a source of pressure to be slimmer. Similar numbers said they felt pressure from boys (65%) and other girls (63%).
Asked to nominate celebrities with the best bodies, the curvaceous J-Lo, Beyoncé and Britney Spears took the top three places.
Asked to construct the perfect female form, the teenagers plumped for Beyoncé's face, Jennifer Aniston's hair and arms, Christina Aguilera's breasts, Britney Spears's stomach, Jamelia's legs and J-Lo's derriere.
"J-Lo, Beyoncé, Britney ... none of them are stick insects," Horton observed. "They're all curvy and they've all spoken publicly about their physical flaws."
Ultimately, however, it is teenage girls' relentless exposure to images of celebrities that may be distorting their body image.
"Teenagers have always worried about their bodies," said Dr McPherson, "but I think now their worries are exacerbated with the whole promotion of the celebrity."
'I think that dieting is just silly'
Alana Barlow, 15, of Manchester:
I don't think I'm fat, I don't think I'm skinny. I hope I'm normal weight - I don't want to lose any weight. I like my height as well.
I'm not surprised by the survey, though. Sometimes I feel like that about my body, on a bad day, and I know a lot of friends who often feel that way.
I eat a lot of chocolate every day, but other than that I eat healthily and I do quite a lot of exercise - I walk a lot, do PE at school, and tai kwon do and kayaking.
I think dieting's silly and so does my mum. My friends aren't on diets, but a lot say they want to eat healthier. I think it's just a way of dieting, really.
The majority of girls at my school seem to feel happy with themselves, though I do know people who've made themselves sick.
I know girls who say they're too fat. But they don't do anything about it, just moan.
One girl I know went on a crash diet. She'd have a bowl of cereal for breakfast and say that was all she'd had to eat all day. She only kept it up three days.
Celebrities in general are too skinny - they're a bad example. Girls need a role-model who's positive about herself. Maybe like Pink.
J-Lo and Beyoncé - people say they're curvy but it's still a shape girls feel they have to look like. And that's not good.
Survey of teenagers reveals discontent with personal appearance and a preoccupation with the desire to acquire the perfect form
Wednesday 5 January 2005 07.29 GMT
Just 8% of teenage girls in Britain deem themselves to be happy with their body, according to a body image survey commissioned by a teen magazine.
A further 68% believe their faces to be unattractive, and their lives are preoccupied by the desire to acquire a "perfect" celebrity body.
Bliss magazine, which is aimed at girls aged 13 to 18, questioned 2,000 girls over 10 television regions, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The average respondent was 14, 5ft 4in tall and weighed 8st 8lb (163cm and 54.4kg).
The survey found that while 58% of teenage girls believe themselves to be of normal weight - with 35% describing themselves as overweight and 7% underweight - 66% think they need to lose weight and 71% claim they would be "100% happier if they could lose half a stone".
"We get a lot of letters from our readers about body image," said Chantelle Horton, deputy editor of Bliss. "There are letters about the extremes of obesity and anorexia, but in general body obsession is a defining factor.
"I think the female obsession with body image is not a new phenomenon, but young girls are now exposed to more images of 'perfection' all the time - in magazines, on TV, in films and music videos and advertisements."
The study also revealed some disquieting trends in teenage girls' eating habits. Just 48% said they eat vegetables every day, while precisely the same number said they ate chocolate on a daily basis.
A quarter of respondents admitted they had already suffered from an eating disorder - 6% citing anorexia, 5% bulimia and 14% binge-eating.
Ann McPherson, an Oxfordshire GP who treats teenagers with eating disorders, and runs the website teenagehealthfreak.org, was not surprised by the survey's findings.
"It's pretty awful, isn't it?" she said. "There's pressure on young girls [to look a certain way] and there's pressure on women - it runs the whole way through. One would like girls to feel good about themselves and not feel they had to conform to stereotypes."
The study found that 65% of girls had dieted in the past, with 14% describing themselves as constantly on a diet, and 32% saying they would consider plastic surgery.
"They don't think of long-term solutions to their body image problems," says Horton. "It's all about the quick fix - and that's drilled into them by the fact their mums might be on the Atkins diet or they see a celebrity with a wonky nose who gets it fixed with surgery."
Images of "perfect" celebrities were cited by 67% as a source of pressure to be slimmer. Similar numbers said they felt pressure from boys (65%) and other girls (63%).
Asked to nominate celebrities with the best bodies, the curvaceous J-Lo, Beyoncé and Britney Spears took the top three places.
Asked to construct the perfect female form, the teenagers plumped for Beyoncé's face, Jennifer Aniston's hair and arms, Christina Aguilera's breasts, Britney Spears's stomach, Jamelia's legs and J-Lo's derriere.
"J-Lo, Beyoncé, Britney ... none of them are stick insects," Horton observed. "They're all curvy and they've all spoken publicly about their physical flaws."
Ultimately, however, it is teenage girls' relentless exposure to images of celebrities that may be distorting their body image.
"Teenagers have always worried about their bodies," said Dr McPherson, "but I think now their worries are exacerbated with the whole promotion of the celebrity."
'I think that dieting is just silly'
Alana Barlow, 15, of Manchester:
I don't think I'm fat, I don't think I'm skinny. I hope I'm normal weight - I don't want to lose any weight. I like my height as well.
I'm not surprised by the survey, though. Sometimes I feel like that about my body, on a bad day, and I know a lot of friends who often feel that way.
I eat a lot of chocolate every day, but other than that I eat healthily and I do quite a lot of exercise - I walk a lot, do PE at school, and tai kwon do and kayaking.
I think dieting's silly and so does my mum. My friends aren't on diets, but a lot say they want to eat healthier. I think it's just a way of dieting, really.
The majority of girls at my school seem to feel happy with themselves, though I do know people who've made themselves sick.
I know girls who say they're too fat. But they don't do anything about it, just moan.
One girl I know went on a crash diet. She'd have a bowl of cereal for breakfast and say that was all she'd had to eat all day. She only kept it up three days.
Celebrities in general are too skinny - they're a bad example. Girls need a role-model who's positive about herself. Maybe like Pink.
J-Lo and Beyoncé - people say they're curvy but it's still a shape girls feel they have to look like. And that's not good.
HW- 3 articles regarding critical investigation
The incredible shrinking model
As New York fashion week kicks off the latest catwalk shows, the guidelines on model weight are debated more furiously than ever. Emily Nussbaum goes backstage and begins to suspect the skinny issue might be more loaded than we know. The celebrity supermodel has been replaced by the anonymous minimodel - nameless, voiceless, size zero and shrinking. Is her dwindling weight a reflection of her dwindling power, wealth and status?
Emily Nussbaum
Backstage at the Carlos Miele show at New York Fashion Week, all the accents are Russian. The models are rubbing off make-up, having been transformed from Miele's glamorous jet-setters back into harried teenagers. They look skinny but not cadaverous. Yet after a week in the catwalk tents at Bryant Park, I realise I can't trust my own judgment: It's already become impossible to see the difference between thin and thin.
I walk up to Nataliya Gotsii, who grimaces when I ask her about new industry guidelines on eating disorders. Everyone at Fashion Week makes this face when I raise the subject: After a year of media coverage criticising the size-zero model, fashion has got tired of explaining itself. But Gotsii has particular reason to worry. She was one of the models whose photos have been used to illustrate the controversy - a shot of her ribs was flashed on CNN in order to elicit shocked reactions from celebrities.
'It's all about the Ukrainian models,' she tells me with frustration. 'After last Fashion Week, I hear a lot about myself, in the news! I didn't come back here for two months because clients refused to work with me. Me and Snejana and the other Ukrainian models.' All of the runway models are thin, she points out, and she wonders why she was singled out. 'Maybe, some of the girls, they skinny, but they look natural? Some of the girls, they don't look healthy?'
Her mother cried when she saw those pictures, says Gotsii. But her body was digitally distorted, she claims. Those circles under her eyes (and I can see them: pale-brown half-moons) are genetic - her brother has them, too. 'Nobody cares, they just take a name and put a lot of shit. We're going out, we're having dinners, everybody's eating, there's no anorexia in this business!'
It's not true, of course. A week after our conversation, a perilously thin teenage model, Eliana Ramos, died in Uruguay, apparently of a heart attack, making it three model deaths in the past seven months. In August 2006, Ramos's older sister Luisel died after restricting herself to a diet of lettuce leaves and Diet Coke. In November 2006, Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died weighing just 88 pounds.
But Gotsii resents being dragged into the debate. In those notorious pictures from last season, she had worn a white halter top dangling from chains; you could count her vertebrae. In a taupe bikini she stood, hands on hips, staring into the camera, a tanned skeleton.
If she looked so terrible, if she looked run-down, it had nothing to do with food, she argues. Already today Gotsii has appeared in two shows, and she has another one scheduled for tonight. Her first fitting had begun at 6:30am. Next week, she's off to Paris, then Milan. 'You live for almost one month just about fashion. Fashion, fashion, fashion - it makes you tired in the head. In two weeks, maybe I will look tired again.'
I look at her and try to remember the pictures I've seen. Does she look too thin? She's not wearing a bikini right now, so I can't tell. She looks fine, if a little tired.
And then she looks me in the eye and asks, 'I'm not so scary, am I?'
Raise the issue of eating disorders during Fashion Week, and someone will inevitably bring up that lost, glorious era of the supermodel: Christy, Naomi, Cindy, Linda, the four-headed stompy-legged beast with big shiny hair, the one that wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000. Those were the days when models took up space. They were stars. They made demands. And their faces were everywhere. To paraphrase from Sunset Boulevard, sometimes it feels like it's not the clothes that have got small, it's the models. (Although, of course, the clothes have shrunk, too, sample sizes dwindling from a size 6 to a 4 to a 2 and below.)
These days, fashion people do not talk about models with awe. Instead, they speak of them with condescending affection, as if they were lovable circus folk. Again and again, I hear that they are 'beautiful freaks', 'genetic anomalies' - girls born to be bone-thin, with giraffe-like necks and the wide, pretty doll faces that are the latest visual sensation. But there is also pity for the models, who are, many people pointed out to me, basically high-school dropouts, teenagers from poor countries, whose careers last a very short time. They are infinitely replaceable. Although top girls can make up to $100,000 in a week of shows, the vast majority get nowhere near that; some of the more prominent designers pay the girls only in clothes.
In the great anorexia debate, models are talked about but rarely heard. Which is why it was so startling when Natalia Vodianova, one of those great and silent beautiful ones, the Cinderella from Russia, rose to speak at the Council of Fashion Designers of America panel on eating disorders. It was Monday, the first day of Fashion Week, at 8am. There was an air of anticlimax in the room, since the group's guidelines - released to the media weeks before - had already been picked apart like a chicken sandwich. Whereas Madrid and Milan had passed rules barring models whose body-mass index fell below 18 and 18.5, respectively, the US organisation presented non-binding suggestions. Designers should offer healthy food backstage, eliminate drinking, and ban smoking. They should stop using models under 16 and should not keep them up past midnight. The guidelines seemed at once a good first step and a bit of pre-emptive ass-covering, but even these mild suggestions were unlikely to stick: could an industry devoted to unrealistic standards of beauty really recognise an eating disorder, let alone prevent one? Already, designers like Karl Lagerfeld were grumbling about 'politically correct fascism'.
All through Fashion Week, the models told me they felt persecuted by the media conversation, as if they were being blamed for their bodies.
'There's always going to be that one somebody who has taken it too far,' Sophie told me. I asked her if she knew of anybody who had. No, she said. 'All the girls in my model apartment eat everything. We stuff our face.'
But another model, Marvy Rieder, told me she had no patience for that kind of talk. 'It's balls,' she said flatly on the phone from the Netherlands, where she was busily packing for a photo shoot in Zambia. A Dutch model who has worked to educate the public on the subject of eating disorders, Rieder beat 20,000 girls to be the face of Guess watches. Then she came to New York, where she was told that if she wanted to do runway work, she needed to lose weight. She dieted and exercised, but that wasn't sufficient.
'I started skipping things. I was still eating, but not enough, really not enough, and going to the gym every day.' Her roommates in the model apartment were eating a can of corn a day, Rieder said. 'Or an apple. Or whatever. And that's just one of the things I've seen.' I asked Rieder if models are open about restricting food. No, she told me. 'They hide it. By saying, "I just ate so much at home, I'm not hungry any more". I've heard it a million times.'
Why do models not speak out about these issues? 'In my opinion, I think it's because they're afraid of losing work,' said Rieder.
Sabrina Hunter, 27, agrees. I found the gorgeous Afro-Caribbean woman not strutting the catwalk but promoting mobile phones at a booth in the pavilion outside. She'd left runway modelling, she told me, because the pressure was so intense that it required her to eat in a disordered way. At five-ten, Hunter was expected to be '115 pounds or lower, preferably'. After she signed with an American agency, she was given a choice: Lose weight or gain and be a plus-size model. After trying to gain unsuccessfully, she went the opposite direction, eating just 600 calories and jogging five miles a day. 'It made me extremely moody and depressed. And I looked it, in the face. But that's how all the models look,' she says.
Both Rieder and Hunter have known models who are naturally skinny. But many of these girls are exceptionally young: a model who is effortlessly flat-chested and hipless at 14 will start to struggle as she hits her late teens. If she's already rising in the industry, she may find that she needs to take more extreme measures to continue to fit the bony aesthetic. And that goes double for the new breed of models, many of whom come, like Vodianova, from the poorest regions of Eastern Europe. For these girls, pressures to stay thin may be a small price to pay for escaping the small towns they came from.
'It's a far more complex issue than people realise,' Suzy Menkes, the British fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune, told me. 'You know, many of these girls were brought up in the postcommunist years on an extremely bad diet. From childhood, they've not been properly nourished. That may make them very appealing to designers, but they don't start off with a healthy body. And nothing is simple. I think it must be incredibly difficult to come from a vegetable stall in the Ukraine and find yourself in Paris among Ladurée macaroons. People have to accept that it's a much bigger picture than terrible fashion folk starving to get into frocks.'
Towards the end of the week, I feel sick of it all. I go home to watch Ugly Betty. Rebecca Romijn is strutting and bragging, having a fantastic time, as the transsexual brother of the editor of Mode. Here was the cocky strut I had imagined I would find on the runways. And I remembered back in the Eighties, when I thought the supermodels were bad role models. Who knew I could ever miss them this much?
So who banned size zero?How the fashion world reacted
Sept 2006 India's health minister says no to'waif-like' models on his country's catwalks. Major Israeli retailers avoid 'overly thin' models in their ads.
December 2006 Brazilian agencies say models must produce medical evidence they are healthy.
February 2007 Spain's biggest fashion show rejects five models for being too thin.
March 2007 Melbourne Fashion Week employs nutritionists to monitor models. French health officials say skinny models 'need special attention'.
April 2007 John Lewis says it will only use 'normal sized' models in ads. Australia Fashion Week won't use models who 'are unnaturally or extraordinarily thin', but won't use BMI rules.
May 2007 Unilever bans size zero models from ads. Australia Fashion Week is criticised for not following its guidelines and allowing very thin girls to model at a swimwear show.
July 2007 UK Model Health Enquiry reports that despite concluding that 40 per cent of models have disordered eating there's no BMI ban. Most models the panel spoke to said they felt pressured into losing weight. Africa Fashion International bans size-zero models from the catwalk.
Aug 2007 British Fashion Council says extra funding is needed to enforce the health enquiry's policy on minimum model age and drug use.
Rebecca Seal
As New York fashion week kicks off the latest catwalk shows, the guidelines on model weight are debated more furiously than ever. Emily Nussbaum goes backstage and begins to suspect the skinny issue might be more loaded than we know. The celebrity supermodel has been replaced by the anonymous minimodel - nameless, voiceless, size zero and shrinking. Is her dwindling weight a reflection of her dwindling power, wealth and status?
Emily Nussbaum
Backstage at the Carlos Miele show at New York Fashion Week, all the accents are Russian. The models are rubbing off make-up, having been transformed from Miele's glamorous jet-setters back into harried teenagers. They look skinny but not cadaverous. Yet after a week in the catwalk tents at Bryant Park, I realise I can't trust my own judgment: It's already become impossible to see the difference between thin and thin.
I walk up to Nataliya Gotsii, who grimaces when I ask her about new industry guidelines on eating disorders. Everyone at Fashion Week makes this face when I raise the subject: After a year of media coverage criticising the size-zero model, fashion has got tired of explaining itself. But Gotsii has particular reason to worry. She was one of the models whose photos have been used to illustrate the controversy - a shot of her ribs was flashed on CNN in order to elicit shocked reactions from celebrities.
'It's all about the Ukrainian models,' she tells me with frustration. 'After last Fashion Week, I hear a lot about myself, in the news! I didn't come back here for two months because clients refused to work with me. Me and Snejana and the other Ukrainian models.' All of the runway models are thin, she points out, and she wonders why she was singled out. 'Maybe, some of the girls, they skinny, but they look natural? Some of the girls, they don't look healthy?'
Her mother cried when she saw those pictures, says Gotsii. But her body was digitally distorted, she claims. Those circles under her eyes (and I can see them: pale-brown half-moons) are genetic - her brother has them, too. 'Nobody cares, they just take a name and put a lot of shit. We're going out, we're having dinners, everybody's eating, there's no anorexia in this business!'
It's not true, of course. A week after our conversation, a perilously thin teenage model, Eliana Ramos, died in Uruguay, apparently of a heart attack, making it three model deaths in the past seven months. In August 2006, Ramos's older sister Luisel died after restricting herself to a diet of lettuce leaves and Diet Coke. In November 2006, Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died weighing just 88 pounds.
But Gotsii resents being dragged into the debate. In those notorious pictures from last season, she had worn a white halter top dangling from chains; you could count her vertebrae. In a taupe bikini she stood, hands on hips, staring into the camera, a tanned skeleton.
If she looked so terrible, if she looked run-down, it had nothing to do with food, she argues. Already today Gotsii has appeared in two shows, and she has another one scheduled for tonight. Her first fitting had begun at 6:30am. Next week, she's off to Paris, then Milan. 'You live for almost one month just about fashion. Fashion, fashion, fashion - it makes you tired in the head. In two weeks, maybe I will look tired again.'
I look at her and try to remember the pictures I've seen. Does she look too thin? She's not wearing a bikini right now, so I can't tell. She looks fine, if a little tired.
And then she looks me in the eye and asks, 'I'm not so scary, am I?'
Raise the issue of eating disorders during Fashion Week, and someone will inevitably bring up that lost, glorious era of the supermodel: Christy, Naomi, Cindy, Linda, the four-headed stompy-legged beast with big shiny hair, the one that wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000. Those were the days when models took up space. They were stars. They made demands. And their faces were everywhere. To paraphrase from Sunset Boulevard, sometimes it feels like it's not the clothes that have got small, it's the models. (Although, of course, the clothes have shrunk, too, sample sizes dwindling from a size 6 to a 4 to a 2 and below.)
These days, fashion people do not talk about models with awe. Instead, they speak of them with condescending affection, as if they were lovable circus folk. Again and again, I hear that they are 'beautiful freaks', 'genetic anomalies' - girls born to be bone-thin, with giraffe-like necks and the wide, pretty doll faces that are the latest visual sensation. But there is also pity for the models, who are, many people pointed out to me, basically high-school dropouts, teenagers from poor countries, whose careers last a very short time. They are infinitely replaceable. Although top girls can make up to $100,000 in a week of shows, the vast majority get nowhere near that; some of the more prominent designers pay the girls only in clothes.
In the great anorexia debate, models are talked about but rarely heard. Which is why it was so startling when Natalia Vodianova, one of those great and silent beautiful ones, the Cinderella from Russia, rose to speak at the Council of Fashion Designers of America panel on eating disorders. It was Monday, the first day of Fashion Week, at 8am. There was an air of anticlimax in the room, since the group's guidelines - released to the media weeks before - had already been picked apart like a chicken sandwich. Whereas Madrid and Milan had passed rules barring models whose body-mass index fell below 18 and 18.5, respectively, the US organisation presented non-binding suggestions. Designers should offer healthy food backstage, eliminate drinking, and ban smoking. They should stop using models under 16 and should not keep them up past midnight. The guidelines seemed at once a good first step and a bit of pre-emptive ass-covering, but even these mild suggestions were unlikely to stick: could an industry devoted to unrealistic standards of beauty really recognise an eating disorder, let alone prevent one? Already, designers like Karl Lagerfeld were grumbling about 'politically correct fascism'.
All through Fashion Week, the models told me they felt persecuted by the media conversation, as if they were being blamed for their bodies.
'There's always going to be that one somebody who has taken it too far,' Sophie told me. I asked her if she knew of anybody who had. No, she said. 'All the girls in my model apartment eat everything. We stuff our face.'
But another model, Marvy Rieder, told me she had no patience for that kind of talk. 'It's balls,' she said flatly on the phone from the Netherlands, where she was busily packing for a photo shoot in Zambia. A Dutch model who has worked to educate the public on the subject of eating disorders, Rieder beat 20,000 girls to be the face of Guess watches. Then she came to New York, where she was told that if she wanted to do runway work, she needed to lose weight. She dieted and exercised, but that wasn't sufficient.
'I started skipping things. I was still eating, but not enough, really not enough, and going to the gym every day.' Her roommates in the model apartment were eating a can of corn a day, Rieder said. 'Or an apple. Or whatever. And that's just one of the things I've seen.' I asked Rieder if models are open about restricting food. No, she told me. 'They hide it. By saying, "I just ate so much at home, I'm not hungry any more". I've heard it a million times.'
Why do models not speak out about these issues? 'In my opinion, I think it's because they're afraid of losing work,' said Rieder.
Sabrina Hunter, 27, agrees. I found the gorgeous Afro-Caribbean woman not strutting the catwalk but promoting mobile phones at a booth in the pavilion outside. She'd left runway modelling, she told me, because the pressure was so intense that it required her to eat in a disordered way. At five-ten, Hunter was expected to be '115 pounds or lower, preferably'. After she signed with an American agency, she was given a choice: Lose weight or gain and be a plus-size model. After trying to gain unsuccessfully, she went the opposite direction, eating just 600 calories and jogging five miles a day. 'It made me extremely moody and depressed. And I looked it, in the face. But that's how all the models look,' she says.
Both Rieder and Hunter have known models who are naturally skinny. But many of these girls are exceptionally young: a model who is effortlessly flat-chested and hipless at 14 will start to struggle as she hits her late teens. If she's already rising in the industry, she may find that she needs to take more extreme measures to continue to fit the bony aesthetic. And that goes double for the new breed of models, many of whom come, like Vodianova, from the poorest regions of Eastern Europe. For these girls, pressures to stay thin may be a small price to pay for escaping the small towns they came from.
'It's a far more complex issue than people realise,' Suzy Menkes, the British fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune, told me. 'You know, many of these girls were brought up in the postcommunist years on an extremely bad diet. From childhood, they've not been properly nourished. That may make them very appealing to designers, but they don't start off with a healthy body. And nothing is simple. I think it must be incredibly difficult to come from a vegetable stall in the Ukraine and find yourself in Paris among Ladurée macaroons. People have to accept that it's a much bigger picture than terrible fashion folk starving to get into frocks.'
Towards the end of the week, I feel sick of it all. I go home to watch Ugly Betty. Rebecca Romijn is strutting and bragging, having a fantastic time, as the transsexual brother of the editor of Mode. Here was the cocky strut I had imagined I would find on the runways. And I remembered back in the Eighties, when I thought the supermodels were bad role models. Who knew I could ever miss them this much?
So who banned size zero?How the fashion world reacted
Sept 2006 India's health minister says no to'waif-like' models on his country's catwalks. Major Israeli retailers avoid 'overly thin' models in their ads.
December 2006 Brazilian agencies say models must produce medical evidence they are healthy.
February 2007 Spain's biggest fashion show rejects five models for being too thin.
March 2007 Melbourne Fashion Week employs nutritionists to monitor models. French health officials say skinny models 'need special attention'.
April 2007 John Lewis says it will only use 'normal sized' models in ads. Australia Fashion Week won't use models who 'are unnaturally or extraordinarily thin', but won't use BMI rules.
May 2007 Unilever bans size zero models from ads. Australia Fashion Week is criticised for not following its guidelines and allowing very thin girls to model at a swimwear show.
July 2007 UK Model Health Enquiry reports that despite concluding that 40 per cent of models have disordered eating there's no BMI ban. Most models the panel spoke to said they felt pressured into losing weight. Africa Fashion International bans size-zero models from the catwalk.
Aug 2007 British Fashion Council says extra funding is needed to enforce the health enquiry's policy on minimum model age and drug use.
Rebecca Seal
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