Social Conformity and Eating Disorders

One topic I find particularly fascinating is the need for people to conform to society's view of beauty; and specifically, the need to be skinny. This was briefly touched on in Chapter 11on  Gender Socialization, but I feel like it's an important topic to be further discussed. Many women in America believe that to be pretty you must be skinny.  However, there is a price to pay for being too thin. A lot of American women have turned to eating disorders to keep themselves thin and "beautiful," but in turn have put their lives at risk. .

The media has always played a nasty roll in making women who were stick-thin seem to be the epitome of beauty and success. You see this in fashion magazines, TV, movies, runways, etc. You see it in ads that are for the newest diet pill fad; and these pills generally have a lot of bad side affects.

Anorexia and Bulimia are two diseases that can be blamed on society's norms of beauty; and also for the need to be perfect. This is predominately seen in middle-class white women. They starve themselves to be beautiful and to obtain the idea of "perfection."

During an in-class discussion, Amanda Zohar's response to the theory of personality could explain why some women turn to anorexia. She said,
   Social learning theory best describes the development of personality. Social Learning theory is the
   theory suggesting that the formation of an identity is a learned response to external social stimuli. This
   theory emphasizes how society shapes socialization, and therefore that identity is the result of
   modeling yourself in response to what is socially expected from others.

Figure 3: Anorexia Nervosa Ad

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738399107001504
This link takes you to a scholarly article outlining anorexia. It gives demographics of who are the prime victims of anorexia and how it's portrayed in the media.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178112001321
This is another scholarly article on anorexia and bulimia. This one shows a lot of graphs for research that they have done on the demographics.

http://www.anad.org/
This link will take you to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, Inc. Here, you will find information on the disease, treatment, help centers, etc.

http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illness&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7409
This link takes you to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Here, they give you a brief overview on the disease and also basic information, like who it affects and causes why.

http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/08/anorexia_a_media-borne_illness.html
This link goes to an article called, "Anorexia A Media-Borne Illness." It's a more recent article that talks about the pro's and con's on the media's involvement in Anorexia.

This video from YouTube, talks about anorexia and the Media. They talk about when it first became prominent in the 60's and 70's by the media's projection of skinny being beautiful. They also go on to discuss what type of women this draws in, and the effects of anorexia, and finally what we can do as a society to help.