i am well aware of the absolutely fucked up things eating disorders do to people’s brains, and i am sympathetic, but I still think acknowledging publicly that these celebrities are promoting looking emaciated on death’s door is important. Can you imagine being 13 and seeing this shit? Every celebrity event looks like a thinspo board, it’s awful.
People talk about women's bodies far too much; this is true. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be addressing the elephant in the room of insane weight loss and eds. it isnt fucking normal or healthy
I'm gonna zoom out real quick and then back in to make a point here.
When we look at celebrities with eating disorders, we are confronted by two conflicting realities:
1) we know all the ways that the film industry has enforced eating disordered behavior among performers regardless of age, gender, or embodied risk, and ultimately every celebrity with an eating disorder is ultimately a victim of the industry, as are the people in the audience.
2) these celebrities have undue influence in our society and they often go on to actively push disordered eating behaviors firmly into the public eye where they go on to kill thousands. At best, this means these celebrities are collaborators in the film industry's behavior and, at worst, it makes them perpetrators. Regardless, they have some level of culpability for their actions.
I think that this is a question we never really successfully confront: what do we do with/to/about the victims who are also perpetrators of the violence they are victimized by? How do we acknowledge BOTH their status as a pre-existing victim, regardless of what they do with themselves after, and as someone who is presently making choices that endanger others?
It's a question I expect we're going to have to think about a lot in the coming while, across a lot of different realms of life. But eating disorders feel like such a clear cut example of how difficult this question really is. How do we intervene with victims of eating disorder culture who are so far gone from their own maltreatment that they are unable to see the harm done to others in their name and by their hand?
I think OP is spot on that we need to learn to talk about all this more. It's not easy to talkabout things this loaded, and that can contribute to the silence and the lack of vocabulary to express the violence being inflicted on us, a secondary victimization we all often suffer through in silence. It also means that when we DO speak on the subject, we are often limited by existing language, much of which is tainted by moral judgement and eating disordered cultural implications themselves. I think a lot about Lin Farley when she coined the term sexual harassment and how much more nuanced my own understanding of behaviors like that became when the phrase was taught to me.
January 26, 2018 – Lin Farley was a journalist and an instructor at Cornell University when she coined the term “sexual harassment” to summa
The more we talk about what eating disorders can do to us, what factors contribute to the culture of starvation and erasure, the acts we take to self-police and to police others in our communities, the easier it will become to challenge, interrogate, and change these very same toxic behaviors and environments.
It starts with trying to thread the needle here, you know? How can I talk about this thing in a way that acknowledges that me and the latest Ozempic celeb representative both have the same deconditioning, malnutrition, even a lot of the same health risks (yes, even with the financial gap, amazing what starving yourself can do to erode the wealth gap in healthcare), but we are all the same not having the same experience of our actions, influences, and needs. How do we acknowledge the full spectrum of victimization by these social trends without pardoning those who play a dual role? And when and why does it matter that we do so?
I would really love to see a massive change in how we talk about disordered eating behavior, and how openly we do that talking.
