people love the social cantagion/"only contagious mental disorder" model of restrictive disordered eating because it's a very clean comfortable pleasant way to ignore the fact that disordered eating is quite often just the most logical response to being inundated with the message that fatness is morally and medically repugnant, socially unacceptable, sexually repulsive, a fate worse than death -- and you can see this in the very way people express concern for the visibly anorexic, lamenting that they "weren't even that fat" and "didn't even need to lose weight." these are things you will never, ever hear if you're fat and your anorexia almost kills you, btw
like i think that "role modeling" and the glorification of dangerous thinness play a part in this, i do think it's irresponsible to model this behavior for young women, but placing the whole weight of disordered eating as a phenomenon on the shoulders of ariana grande or any similar figure falsely locates the problem within the superstructure. your average teenage girl is being put less at risk by waiting starlets than they are by constant, grinding, "well-meaning" daily fatphobic jabs about food and their weight by their parents, teachers, doctors, siblings, classmates, friends etc. and moreover by the general observation that life is actually made crueler and materially harder for fat people
