I must admit, it’s been a little difficult to relate on a personal level to our latest topics of dieting and eating disorders. What can I say? I’m a skinny, active kid with a fast metabolism, and more importantly I’m male. Now, I realize some men go on diets and can face eating disorders as well, but in my experience women are far more commonly involved in these issues. I have witnessed the effects of such things on the people around me, and all of them have been female. It is an unfortunate social stigma that women feel they have to be “Hollywood” thin, which is only exacerbated by the prevalence of diet fads in the media. Skinny Bitch is one such example of a fad diet guide that infiltrated the media and managed to become a best-seller. As the title loudly proclaims, it is clearly another diet guide aimed solely at women. The documentary Thin, which is about the gruesome realities of eating disorders, is again focused on recovering women. I’m not saying some men don’t struggle with these horrible diseases, but one doesn’t often hear of these clinics catering to men. However, I have been close with some of the girls fighting these diseases around me, so I can sympathize, even though empathy is out of the question.Though I’ve seen friends combat eating disorders, I’d never seen anything like what the documentary brought to light. I watched them talk cattily behind other girls’ backs, discuss how they need to eat less, and attempt to reject food in all ways possible, and couldn’t help but wonder how on earth people fall into these patterns of behavior. Are all the fad diets we’ve been discussing partially to blame? Is it caused primarily through “Hollywood” expectations? In any case, one can truly see that society needs to make a lot of changes in this regard. It’s difficult to see a specific proposal made, as discussed in Chapter 11 of Everything’s an Argument, in either the book or the documentary, but one can draw ideas of what they might be. One deceptive proposal that can be drawn from Skinny Bitch is that women should stop eating meat, because the animals are treated poorly and it will help them lose weight. What is disguised as a diet book is basically a guide for turning someone into a vegan. The documentary Thin is primarily meant to be informative, but in a larger sense it is arguing that society should pay closer attention to the seriousness of eating disorders, and the role popular culture has played in its development, as many women suffer from these diseases. One of the main ways it makes this proposal is “painting a picture [...] in memorable ways”, as described on page 335. The film forces the problem into your mind through disturbing visual imagery, like that of the hole in the girl’s stomach, or the appearance of the girls’ backs during weigh-ins. The problem’s significance is made perfectly clear through the bleakness in every one of the girls’ eyes.
