The late Sir Richard Doll, who discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer, was ruminating some years ago on Desert Island Discs about how to stop children smoking. He said: "Find out what the tobacco industry supports and don't do it, and find out what they object to and do it." The tobacco industry, then as now, loved nothing more than a chance to sound decent by bugling its commitment to keeping children away from cigarettes. But however much you go on about the purity of young lungs, it is meaningless if you go on to make your bread and butter by polluting old ones. If you take Doll literally, this means encouraging eight-year-olds to smoke, then stepping back to see what happens. But given that he averted as many cancer deaths as any scientist in history, he's the boss, even posthumously.
I bring this up because the parallel between the media and its relationship to body image, and tobacco giants and their relationship to fags, is striking. A survey of 150,000 children, undertaken by Ofsted, does present some worrying data - it's troubling to learn, for instance, that 39% of respondents had been bullied at school. But the headline "concern" for the Daily Mail is that a third of 10-year-old girls are worried about their body image. "Just 10 years old ..." reads the headline, "and already anxious about body image."
Culture focuses relentlessly on three things: sex, buying pointless things, and how to eat and drink incessantly without getting fat. That's the beating heart of our collective existence, and the more shaming and trivial it is, the more call there is to protect children from it, from the very news sources that trivialised it. Their argument: children are insufficiently mature to process complicated and sometimes conflicting body image messages. But it is unrealistic to see childhood as, ideally, existing in a chamber of purity, insulated from the murky impetuses of the adult world. Who could live in this culture and not imbibe any of it? Who could read, day after day, about X's cellulite and Y's paunch, about carbs, sweeteners and pear shapes, and breathe none of this in? We should be pleased that 10-year-olds are fixating on their body shapes, because not to do so would make them alarmingly unobservant or else sociopathic.
Now I wouldn't mind that headline if it were followed with: "It's probably our fault; after all, we're the ones who just won't stop going on about sodding calories." But no, anonymous "critics" apparently blame "super-slim models in the fashion and advertising industries". It just gets more and more otiose. Does one blame a slim model for being slim? Nope, in all likelihood, she was born like that and, in the unlikely event that she is anorexic, you would no more blame her than you would blame anyone else with a mental illness. If you must find someone to blame, at least go to the industries rather than the clothes horses, but the idea that you could blame fashion and advertising, while ignoring a middle-brow medium that is pretty much kept afloat by those titans of thinness is daft. It's just hypocrisy shovelled upon wilful myopia.
But - and here's where the tobacco analogy is truly forceful - the more money an organisation makes out of a full-blossoming adult pathology (whether that's smoking or being on a constant, not very effective, diet), the more sincerely they wax about protecting the young from this same toxin. Find out what the Daily Mail supports and do the opposite, in other words: actively encourage 10-year-olds to worry about their body image. They are far more likely to end up fat than they are anorexic. Address adults instead: get them to stop worrying about their love handles, and see whether, somewhere down the line, 10-year-olds don't follow.
