Isabelle Caro, whose image is shocking Italy in an anti-anorexia campaign, was 12 when she first started to use eating as an outlet for her mental distress. As Susie Orbach argues, this is a bold attempt to turn the visual culture that creates the conditions in which eating disorders seem attractive against itself. It is long overdue. The latest research shows that girls as young as seven think that being thin equals being pretty, happy and popular. What is even worse, far worse, is that they think being fat is planet sad stuff. No friends, unhappy, likely to be bullied, the embodiment of bad.
The adult world's obsession with appearance, which is really an obsession with self, has become part of the pollution of childhood. One result is a 40% increase in the number of people with eating disorders (typically young women under the age of 20) since 1990 in Scotland, the only part of the UK that's keeping track. But eating disorders, devastating a symptom as they are of the mental pressures children are subjected to, are only a small part of a much more complex problem. How do parents disentangle sensible encouragement to eat healthily and take exercise from its darker message about the consequences of failure?
Beat, the eating disorder charity that with the Guides commissioned research into body image attitudes among 7- to 10-year-olds, which was unveiled at a Bournemouth fringe yesterday (it is to be published at the end of October), found that the children they talked to merged the two things together. Shown pictures of slim children of their own age, they thought not just pretty/happy, but "eats lots of fruit and vegetables" and "plays a lot of sport", and shown chubbier contemporaries they immediately said "lazy". They have got the positive message about healthy eating and integrated it with the negative one of body image and self-esteem: sunshine and shadow. Pick away a little at this, and it is self-esteem that emerges as the key factor. Later, low self-esteem is a major predictor for unfilled potential and damaging relationships. In childhood, it is invariably a concomitant (though of course not invariably a cause) of eating disorders.
Not surprising, when the image of "successful" woman is a celebrity stick insect. Beat's research reads like a prequel to the work on teenagers and the media published last week by the campaigning organisation Women in Journalism. Girls who at seven, influenced by friends and family, already associate thin with success, feel pressured as teenagers to judge themselves by the bizarre standards set by celebrities like Victoria Beckham, famous mainly for being thin.
They are savvy enough to understand it's not the real world, but not secure enough to reject it. And with good reason. They live in a lookist world. Appearance has become almost overwhelmingly important, even in areas of life where it would seem there is no justification at all. The late Robin Cook might once have joked that he was too ugly to be prime minister: a decade later we find the media unblushingly discussing the home secretary - the home secretary - in terms of her cleavage. There are multiple explanations for this. In the age of the consumer, we are each, individually, in the market - for friends, for lovers, for jobs, for success. The Women in Journalism research, backed by the evidence of 200 16-year-olds who came to a conference organised by the British Library, found the allure of celebrity (the shiny side of skinniness) so powerful that to be a model, or a Wag, or a TV presenter, or at the very least on reality TV, seems like the perfect reward for all that effort they put into passing their GCSEs. Group identities other than celebrity have lost their traction. Tell girls about feminism, Katherine Rake from Fawcett reported in Bournemouth last night, and they grab the idea with both hands. But putting down the other ideas, shaking off a lifetime of conditioning is as hard as - well, as hard as they find sticking to their diets.
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