Funny how I have another post coming out having to do with "pretty" ideas. Anyway, I went to the Forester Lecture tonight in which Dr. Kimberly Gorman spoke about her journey of overcoming anorexia. After Dr. Gorman gave her pretty compelling story, someone in the audience asked how we as a society can take steps to prevent eating disorders.
I immediately thought of the commercials we watched that Dove has created that display the flaws in what our society has deemed perfect. I love that we watched those commercials, and I love that we watched them in class. While the second one was slightly explicit, I think it's important for us media makers to show how the perfect body isn't possible, and get it communicated as soon as possible.
Bringing body image onto the screen means engaging in a much more personal issue not only for me but for many other people. Eating disorder awareness is out there, it's being shown, and the message that a perfect body isn't out there is being communicated too, but I don't think that either of these are really hitting home.
I wonder if media makers showed the more powerful side of the disorder we could communicate the real message of the monster of anorexia. When you don't eat--if you're cutting your caloric intake down to just 1200 calories a day--your body 1) starts to lose fat 2) starts to lose muscle 3) stops producing hormones 4) blood pressure and sugar drop drastically--you can't stay warm 5) can't ever get enough sleep 6) organs start to eat themselves to sustain life 7) heart shuts down. And not to mention the social seclusion and the inability to focus. Suddenly your in this world of absolute emptiness, and all that's there is food. Food is your only friend, and you can't even have that friend.
There is no love here. There's nothing but depression and utter hate for yourself and whatever the heck it is you've become. And you figure, why try to change this anyway?
Wouldn't it be cool for media to give these people hope? The problem is, a person with an eating disorder doesn't want to hear it. They don't want facts, they don't want messages, they don't want love, they don't think they deserve it. But they will dream, and if somehow media can give them the right dream that gives them hope enough to accept some sort of love, that can be it, that can save someone.
Good point about how media might be able to help a person in this situation more than facts would help them. I mean, they've probably already heard some facts, right? and if they didn't listen, then media might help. Sometimes stuff in stories seems friendlier or easier to understand than plainly stated facts. One caution: how would you present healthy eating in media? I just watched Hairspray for the first time, (don't watch that movie), and it was about African Americans and people who are fat, and how they should be appreciated for who they are. However, the movie struck me as hypocritical for the following reason. There were some roles in the movie which had to be played by skinny girls in order to move the message along, and I understand that, but there were other parts which could have been played by fatter people, and yet those roles were filled by skinny girls, too. Basically, if somebody wasn't a main character who HAD to be fat for the sake of the story, then they weren't fat; they were all stereotypically pretty. Man, this is a long comment.
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