How far is society's image of beauty and perfection to blame for eating disorders?
All too often society associates “thin”, “skinny”, etc. with beautiful, hard working, perfect and self-disciplined, on the other hand “fat” is reference to lazy, ugly and weak; under stereotype we believe that what is beautiful is good and what’s under most people’s expectations is bad: the good princess is always beautiful, the bad stepmother is always ugly. This is an irrational, even though predominant, belief which states that physically attractive people possess the most desirable characteristics: intelligence, beauty, competence, confidence etc. Mostly due to this pressure and high, unachievable and unrealistic expectations women are hardly happy or satisfied with their bodies and sometimes this leads them to search for a “perfect imaginary appearance” that actually, is impossible to achieve. On account of what was mentioned before, women have been pushed to look for unhealthy and extremely harmful ways of satisfying society and ended up suffering from different kinds of eating disorders that destroy them not only physically but psychologically.
First things first: What is an eating disorder? There are mainly four different classifications for eating disorders, these are: Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder and finally other specified feeding or eating disorder (OSFED). Nevertheless these are all serious, potentially life-threatening diseases, there are not usually treated as serious as a usual, common sickness. Anorexia Nervosa consists on extreme food restriction, obsession and fear of gaining weight and often vomiting; Bulimia Nervosa involves cycles of binge eating, eating an extreme amount of food in a short period of time, then followed by a purging behaviour whether by forcing vomits, usage of laxatives, diuretics and many more alternatives; Binge eating disorder involves eating an unusually large amount of food in a short period of time and feeling a loss of control during this episode, binge eaters do not purge afterwards but often feel a lot of shame and/or guilt about their behaviour; lastly other specified feeding or eating disorder (OSFED) involves some combination of symptoms of the other eating disorders such as an intense fear of weight gain and a preoccupation with food (thinking about food or having food related thoughts most of the day), for example, many cases involve certain symptoms of the disorders mentioned before but may not follow the exact criteria. As a consequence it also leads to obsession; anxiety; depression; fear of gaining weight; body distortion, seeing something in the mirror that is not what it actually is; ever-exercising, much of a good thing sometimes turns out to be bad, specially if on top of that someone does not consume enough calories to use for energy at the time of exercising; and of course this can have serious consequences for health, productivity, and social relationships.
Since forever men and women from all around the world have been establishing standards of beauty and every culture had its own distinctive concept of the ideal physical attributes. In spite of the fact that this have always existed, nowadays it is harder and most dangerous than ever mostly to blame the massive media and technology growth, apart from standards being harder to achieve every second. Not only the fact that the standard of perfection is constantly being shown everywhere (television, commercials, books, magazines, web pages, etc.) but the fact that these are actually fake and actually, a hundred percent unrealistic, because they are modified and edited to be: taller, thinner, skinnier. So women fight to achieve an impossible wish that ends up harming and even killing them.
Despite the fact that there are men in this world who also suffer from these horrible diseases, as a percentage, much more women suffer from it due to the fact that a lot more pressure to look like a certain “accepted” way is put on top of their shoulders. And this is a heavy weight that not many of them can carry along well. Up to 8 out of 10 women will be dissatisfied with their reflection, and more than half may see a distorted image of their body on it.
As a conclusion women end up punishing themselves physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to society’s stereotype. Many women may not be suffering from an eating disorder, but are surely not entirely comfortable nor happy with their body and how they look in general. Because despite all the efforts, fighting, damaging and sacrificing, the standards established are higher than any woman can reach, because society will always expect more from women. As Naomi Wolf said: “No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.”. Eventually for a safer, happier and actually better world, what is needed is a drastic change in society and people’s expectations and standard. Therefore abolishing gender role expectations and stereotypes seems like the solution.
