Saturday 10 March 2012

Going through the motions

Another example of how zeroing in on weight is a low percentage gain and easily goes way beyond it's usefulness. Instead leading to a rampant discourtesy too often bordering on dehumanizing.

Even if this woman;

[Aymeline Valade]

Ayemeline Valade has some kind of eating disorder or is going through some period of weight loss due to personal or even professional circumstances, shouting epithets such as "corpse like" is about the shouters.

Apart from a potential issue surrounding working conditions and industry standards, the appearance of weight concern is largely disingenuous. Part of the habit of using bodies as representations of the state of one's eating, in this case to suggest anorexia, rather than representing an actual person who's body happens to look like other people's bodies too.

The dogma of "thin models causing anorexia in young girls" has been undermined mostly by how children's weight is defined by the 'obesity' crusade. It insists the weight of children is caused mainly by parents. This expresses an underlying thesis of parenthood and childhood. It either works for all, or it doesn't work.

Babies are formed, nurtured and grow in the womb. After exiting, 'obesity' lore posits children as the product of a kind of extended ontological womb. They are formed as people, grow and are nurtured as an extension of this metaphysical womb.

What parents feel in their own bodies and think about is passed in some direct way to the child and in this way the parent is the main force in creating the weight of the child as an extension of their own attitudes especially if that is reflected in the parents own weight.

This also has to go for other things like mental function. Things like depression and other mental issues and so on. We aren't talking about being a little upset because the parent wouldn't by the latest toy, we are talking a child who's functioning mood is stuck in a dip. If the extent of a child's weight poses questions of family circumstance and abuse, the same must hold for a child who for a child's mood as this is more directly reflective of parental influence.

Those who accept the idea of parents creating the fatness especially defining it as a product of disordered eating, are defining parents relationship to their child and vice versa. Now I know there are separate lower standards applied to slim people, whilst being held to be better people than fat people. I know some feel they need to pay tribute to both this and the fact that fat people are held to a far higher standard of responsibility yet are held to be worse people.

I don't. Fat people set the standard for being human as much as any others. The standards set for them set the standards for everyone and vice versa. The rules applied to them apply where they apply to others equally.

I'm personally curious and believe in finding out all you can about potential cause/s. I am not motivated by blame and am interested in it, mainly in how it affects cause/s. So I'll leave those who are offended by what I've said, to be offended by having the standards they apply to fat people, applied generally.

Either way, It's past time to graduate from bodies cause other people's weight by now. Remember the 'obesity' contagion, accusations of 'promoting obesity' by merely posting pictures of fat people? Same line of reasoning mostly.

The weight of models is not what's fuelling the relentless rise of anorexia and other eating disorders. It's not even the desire for thinness as such, it's the route being pushed as the (only) way to attain it, restricting and expending calories. That is basically the same route as anorexia, increase the social and health value of slimness and you increase lifestyles that uses the same things as anorexia.

If anything the weight of models just reflects society's overall obsession from the top down and back again with slimness and thinness even better.

I'm sure we know this, but we have a desire to let some people off the hook, because understanding has become accusation and responsibility blame. It has become so toxic as to become a threat to the mental health of people.

The answer then is to leave it alone and look at understanding cause. If you trust people make available resources to help them understand, they invariably come to understand any part they may play in a useful productive and healing way.

Wishing to make that destructive is a desire to avoid actually dealing with the issues and an intent to allow them to get as bad as circumstances allow.

If it's acceptable to ask the parent of a fat child to transcend their food milieu, existence and life then it's hardly a trial to ask parents and other adults to explain to their children that models are professionals and are paid to be/remain rather slender.

They can admire them all they want, but as that isn't their life they don't need to look like them, what they need to look like is themselves because that is their life. It is unlikely that is too demanding therefore one has to conclude a lack of conviction and that is commitment to the crusade. And that comes first.

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