Halley Suitt bemoans the stick-thin bodies of magazine models and wonders, perhaps tongue in cheek, if gay men might be responsible:
Think of Kate Moss — as a "biological mature woman", she’s sub-par because she looks more like a skinny little boy. She does NOT have that aspect which mature women SHOULD develop as they grow — their shoulders should be more narrow than their hips. But as a model, she’s a raging success. Of course, tell me about the art directors who choose the pictures. I’m generalizing, but aren’t a few of them gay men? Is there possibly a reason they prefer women who look like skinny little boys?
She writes more about the magazines’ influence on young women in another post, lamenting "lots of messages [sent] daily along the lines that THEY ARE NOT OKAY." I’m in agreement on the basic points: the emphasis on thinness for women is unhealthy, gay male art directors probably have pretty messed up notions of what their models’ bodies should be, and the media does amplify, reinforce, and echo self-images. But one thing the mass media do not do, except in a literal sense, is transmit. They’re like a one-sided conversation in which there has to be a listener, attentive and nodding along, for them to work.
In other words, the women "receiving" these media messages have to actively receive, even desire, them. For all that we understand anorexia as a psychological disorder, it is also completely sociologically readable. My own armchair reading is that ultra-thinness abstracts the kinds of activities women do routinely in the sexual marketplace (try to stay young-looking and thin) and raises it to a means of distinction. Instead of being on sexual display for a particular male, the rail-thin woman is on social display. That’s the paradox of anorexia and the thinness fixation - it’s not for the specific benefit of male desire (most straight men seem to profess a sexual attraction to more buxom types), but is no less patriarchal for it.
Which brings me back to the subject of this post: do gay men cause anorexia? I say they do not: if anything, these art directors are hired because they serve a function in the grander social scheme of things. I don’t think that we have to minimize the operation of power to recognize that in certain respects the transmitter is in fact the receiver.
FULL DISCLOSURE: The Edie Sedgwick biography happens to be one of the most influential books in my life. Make of that what you will.
UPDATE: Speaking of gay men and anorexia, Diana links to a site offering Todd Haynes’ excellent Superstar
No comments have been added to this post yet.