Jumping someone’s bones may be a popular expression, but to someone sporting what my friends have affectionately termed ’Ethiopian child wrists’ it has a different meaning altogether.

Now, whilst I’ve never starved myself or worked out until my weedy, wobbly legs couldn’t hold me up, or counted calories in fits of self-loathing and obsession, I do have a metabolic problem, and I can tell you from the bottom of my palpitating heart that unnatural thinness equals happiness and sexual allure as much as two plus two equals seven.
Get this scenario, you wake up, stretch, and look down at your supine form in the early morning sun; no gentle curves of rosy flesh for me, oh no, I get a panoramic view of the Two Towers (the nickname I’ve given to my protruding hipbones) and the gristly sound of my ailing joints snapping back in.  Glamourous, it isn’t.

We’ve all seen the skinny pics, and tutted at the models posing on catwalks, flaunting their barely-there figures in a scrap of silk; some of us have grieved, truly grieved, at the recent deaths of two young models from kidney and heart failure brought on by starvation.

However, the size zero debate has just gone up a frightening notch. I’m no stranger to the more thought-provoking things that can be found on the internet, as misguided google-searcher extraordinaire I’ve come across some fairly dodgy sites, but even I, self-proclaimed veteran of the world wide web, was shocked to my repulsed core as I researched size zero.

Pro-Ana! The text proclaimed: Anorexia can be a lifestyle choice!
Forgive me if my dropped jaw leaks drool into your coffee, but I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.

Now, not all sites displaying the title ‘Pro-Ana’ are promoting this view, many use it as a working title for sites dedicated to helping sufferers through recovery and as eating disorder support groups, but it still holds true that ‘Pro Ana’ or ‘Pro Mia’ (pro-bulimia) typed into google will come up with some very, very scary links.
Links that offer such inspired advice as: ‘Keep your hair in good condition so that no one suspects.’ ‘Take sleeping pills to knock you out if you feel like eating.’ ‘Wear an elastic band around your wrist and snap it when you want to eat.’ And: ‘Eat naked in front of a mirror.’

Most of these sites claim to be run by young women under twenty, providing support for everyone who chooses to call their eating disorder a ‘lifestyle choice’ or actively seeks to have one; offering ‘Thinspiration’ in pictures of skeletal women who look soulfully at the camera through sunken sockets. Tips and tricks and mantras such as: ‘Empty is pure.’ And ‘Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.’

Christ on a bike, somebody pass me a sick-bag (one of the pro-bulimics has probably got one) and a couple of stun-guns. How can this be? Has society really become so palpably insane that our stick-thin celebrities and savage media have reared a generation of girls who are proud to have an eating disorder? I mean, I saw a photo of a celebrity beanpole (who shall remain nameless) in some hideous shocking-pink number recently, arms like those of a foetus on an ultrasound, and there are women out there taking it this seriously? Vibrant young women with their lives stretching before them, sullied now by the idea that they must be skinny to feel worthwhile, like societal smog on an otherwise clear horizon.

However, the judging of women not by intellectual or spiritual merit, but by how big they are is nothing new; the suffocating corsets introduced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were sadistic in the extreme, winching in the waist to horrifying proportions. The social cancer spreading amongst twenty-first century women is merely following in its’ bony footsteps, straitjacketing the mind and still, all these years later, inflicting grevious bodily harm.

As far as my (admittedly limited) knowledge of biology goes, I’m fairly sure the skeletal structure functions at its’ best on the inside. This ‘ideal’ being aspired to, taken in real context, is perhaps just a little distorted, no? I’ve suffered some unhealthy weight-loss and believe me, shoulder-blades sticking out like the wings of a vulture and a backbone so bumpy it’s hard to sit back in wooden chairs are about as attractive as the average male doing naked star-jumps.
The women of today stand up and fight against unequal pay, victim-blaming, harassment and discrimination in all other shapes and sizes, but many seem to keel over at the brain when told that we must be unhealthily thin to be loved and successful with barely a murmur. Fashion’s passion for the ‘Grim Reaper’ look and the unequivocal rejection of models over a certain weight and under a certain height smacks a little too much of the dirty f-word: fascism, for the liking of anyone with a few brain cells to rub together.
As someone who’s plumbed the depths of malnutrition, I can tell you it’s not worth buying that shampoo to make your brittle locks strong and glossy because your hair’s going to be falling out soon anyway, and don’t bother working out until you’re dizzy because you’ll be blacking out instead. Oh, and try and get some calcium down you as early-onset osteoperosis will give your bones the density of a twiglet before too long, no one could jump your bones even if they wanted to, because they might snap. The only way unnatural thinness is going to get you into print will be your obituary.

It’s a pity we can’t swap the pro-anorexics with some African exchange students to give them a taste (pun intended) of real starvation; it’s funny isn’t it, how eating disorders are only really found in countries where food is abundant? A Third World pin-up ideal would have plump breasts, generous buttocks and hips you can hang-glide with, because where starvation is a very real threat to existence, fat is a status symbol.

The fad for size zero women promoted by the western media has had a catastrophic effect on impressionable young women across the world. Anorexia and Bulimia are very real, soul-destroying, hell-on-earth diseases and to think that someone might actively seek out or promote such a disorder because constant visual bombardment has dictated that thin=loved/beautiful/happy/better makes my skin crawl like a newt on a hot griddle.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one going goggle-eyed and retching at the sight of exposed rib-cages and hollow cheekbones, the idea that men are going to find you more attractive the thinner you are was met with raised brows and incredulity when some mature males to test this on could be tracked down; and they certainly aren’t making puppy-dog eyes at a girl who looks like she’s in constant danger of blowing away in a strong breeze.

“I think it’s a combination of the lack of positive role models with the fact that we as humans don’t really seem to have rites of passage anymore, men don’t grow up and women are told they have to stay looking like adolescents to remain attractive, it’s weird, there’s no recognised break between being a child and an adult any more.”-Jon, 27, Devon.
“They think that’s sexy? They’re wrong, being that thin doesn’t make you happy, just stupid and really gullible.”-Sebastian, 28, Portsmouth.

“I’ll usually shag anyone but that’s practically necrophilia.”-Richard, 32, Devon.

“It’s really unhealthy, we’re programmed to be attracted to women who look like women, that’s why all those big goddess figures from Palaeolithic times keep turning up, a stick insect isn’t going to bear a strong genetic line, is she? Because as mammals that’s what we’re after really, love aside.”-Daniel, 30, New Forest.

“Yes, because I’m really attracted to women who look like twelve year-old boys, (eyeroll) you will put the eyeroll in there, won’t you?”-Kieran, 24, Birmingham. (bless)

So the fashion for ‘successful’ females to conform to children’s clothes sizes has spread like a picked spot, infecting susceptible young women along the way, convincing them that starvation will somehow prove their worth in a way that their intelligence cannot; and the most overwhelming shame is creeping over me as I write this, because the desensitisation has worked.

In the age that supposedly promotes equality and respect for the female form, this psychological war being waged on our young has slipped beneath the radar. We’ve become positively apathetic about models and actresses stalking around on legs that belong on a baby giraffe, perhaps some of us even think it’s normal; and I cannot even bring myself to wrathful boiling-point, it’s just too inexpressibly sad.

 

Copyright Natasha Kuler-von-der-Luhe 2007