Rent The Runway Rocks Real Non-Airbrushed Models: Us!

Like many of you, I have tried ordering clothes online.  And it never goes well.  They are always too tight or too long.  They immediately make you feel bad about yourself.  And of course- it is a huge pain to have to pack it up again and mail it back.  And after all that- you still don't have anything to wear!!  Weird, right?  The clothes looked great in the pictures.

 

The frustration of online shopping is a symptom of a larger problem.  Many fashion lines are not made to fit the average woman.  Rader Programs, a group of  eating disorder treatment facilities, estimates that the average model weighs 117 pounds at 5'll and the average woman weighs 140 pounds at 5'4.  No wonder my purchases are too tight and too long!

 

However, I'm feeling optimistic about change being possible in the fashion world.  As of last week, Rent The Runway, an online service that lets users borrow current season high-fashion, has expanded their  use of real women as models on their site.  Users can upload pictures of themselves in the clothes, and include details about their height, weight, and chest size.  The site will also have the capacity to allow users to search for women of similar body type, so that they can see how the clothes actually fit.  I think this is fantastic.  Not only will it hopefully cut down on the dreaded returns, but women will see models that look like them.  It can reduce the shame and stigma that many women feel for lacking the 117 pounds at 5'll "ideal".

 

This initiative follows what I hope is a pattern of push back on pop culture for upholding women to unrealistic ideals that may lead to unhealthy body image.  For example, we are seeing opposition to magazine airbrushing.  Earlier this year, an ambitious eighth-grader put the pressure on Seventeen Magazine to review its policies on airbrushing and consider the impact it could have on young readers.  Her online petition led the magazine to sign an eight-point "Body Peace Treaty", which outlined a commitment to never change models' body or face shapes. 

 

We are seeing celebrities (especially recently!) disclosing their battles with eating disorders- often discussing the pressure they felt being in the entertainment industry.  Over the past few months, we've heard from Katie Couric, Nicole Scherzinger, and Stacy London.   Last year, Pop Health reviewed Portia De Rossi's book- Unbearable Lightness, which discussed her life-threatening eating disorder in much detail. 

 

I hope that we are continuing to see a shift.  I hope that there is less stigma in disclosing or discussing body image concerns and eating disorders.  I also hope that the public continues to make their voices heard...whether they are fighting the magazine airbrush or the high fashion gown that will look terrible on anyone under 5'10.

 

What do you think:  With the initiatives above and their predecessors (e.g., the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty)- do you see evidence of a shift in pop culture from "thin" to "real women"?  What else needs to change to keep this initiative moving forward?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tumblr Contemplates A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs: Let's All Weigh In

Tumblr is a popular microblogging platform.  It lets you share anything from text to pictures to video.  According to their website, the average Tumblr user creates 14 original posts each month, and reblogs 3. The "reblog" button on all Tumblr posts allows a meme to spread rapidly across thousands of blogs with just one click.

As with other social media platforms, tumblr has an enormous reach (18,878,347,183 total posts as of the time of this blog).  Therefore, it has great potential to help and hurt the public's health as it facilitates communication among millions of people.

A few weeks ago, Tumblr presented to its users a challenge (and possible solution) regarding blogs that promote self-harm.  Their users are being asked to weigh in on the policy.  I think that is a smart move.

Here is an excerpt from the Tumblr staff blog: 

Our Content Policy has not, until now, prohibited blogs that actively promote self-harm. These typically take the form of blogs that glorify or promote anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders; self-mutilation; or suicide. These are messages and points of view that we strongly oppose, and don’t want to be hosting. The question for us has been whether it’s better to (a) prohibit them, as a statement against the very ideas of self-harm that they are advancing, or (b) permit them to stay up, accompanied by a public service warning that directs readers to helplines run by organizations like the National Eating Disorders Association.

We are planning to post a new, revised Content Policy in the very near future, and we’d like to ask for input from the Tumblr community on this issue.

The blog goes on to say that they currently think the right answer is to implement a policy against pro self-harm blogs.  They aim to focus only on blogs that actively glorify or promote these behaviors. They also intend to start showing public service announcements (PSAs) on specific search terms like "anorexic" or "thinsperation".  It is unclear from their post how this policy will actually be implemented.  It would take enormous staff resources to comprehensively review their site and remove concerning materials. 

Other online and social media platforms have struggled with similar issues regarding how to respond to users that may be searching for or posting worrisome content.  Here are a few examples of other challenges and solutions:

• When someone uses Google or Yahoo to search for the term "suicide", the link to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is provided as the first result.
• In December 2011, Facebook began a new service that allows "Friends" to report concerning posts.  Facebook then sends an email to the person who posted the suicidal comment encouraging them to call the hotline or click on a link to begin a confidential chat. Note that Facebook does not troll the site itself, but instead waits for reports to come in.  
• Pop Health has previously posted about the debate regarding Twitter's duty to restrict hate speech vs. its duty to promote free speech among its users.

From these examples, you can see that there have been a variety of approaches to address potentially unhealthy or unsafe posts on social media platforms.  Sites can decide to be inclusive of all posts, they can let users police each other and report concerns, they can post resources in response to keywords, they can actively prohibit certain content...or they can use some combination of these strategies.

• What strategy or combination of strategies is best for the public's health?  
• If users are prohibited from posting, does that make them more isolated and less likely to connect to services?
• Should the overall health of the user group outweigh the health of that individual?

Tumblr is encouraging users to weigh in on their plan...so I ask you to both comment here and contact them at policy@tumblr.com. 

A Pop Health Book Review of “Unbearable Lightness”

Welcome back readers! After a holiday, bronchitis, and work travel hiatus- Pop Health is back with a new feature- reviews of books which examine public health and popular culture issues.

Over the weekend I finished reading “Unbearable Lightness- A Story of Loss and Gain”, by Portia De Rossi. I actually mentioned this book back in a November post when it first came out. The story chronicles Portia’s struggle with both Anorexia and Bulimia from approximately age 12 to the present. The strength of the book is in its ability to portray the absolute complexity of an eating disorder. Sometimes these disorders (and other mental or physical health issues) are over simplified. For example, the commonly held belief that someone is Anorexic simply because she/he needs to “have control over something”. However, in Portia’s case, she wove an incredible story that examined causes at multiple levels. And in public health, this multilevel thinking is essential for the development of effective interventions. I have decided to begin with the causes most closely associated with Portia herself and work my way out.

Intrapersonal:

Portia endured a complete lack of healthy coping mechanisms. She dealt with a lot of sorrow and changes in a short amount of time as an adolescent growing up in Australia. Her father passed away and she changed to a more affluent school district. She worked to cope with these challenges by identifying a way to be “special” and “stand out”. She chose modeling because models are special. She also changed her name when she was 15. There was another girl her age with the same name (Amanda Rogers), so she changed it to Portia De Rossi to be more unique.

Portia also felt intense guilt and shame over being gay. Although she realized her sexual orientation early on, she kept this secret until her late 20s. Much of her self hatred focused on feeling as if she was disappointing her family and would ultimately ruin her chances to have a successful career and “normal” life.

Interpersonal:

Portia’s relationship with her mother is examined in quite a bit of detail. Throughout her modeling career as a teenager, her mother was definitely her accomplice in yo-yo dieting. Her mother taught her “dieting tricks” to lose the weight quickly for jobs, but also rewarded her with McDonald's after auditions. However, her mother’s strongest influence seemed to be over the guilt and shame she felt over being gay. After she came out to her mother, the response was “let’s just keep this to ourselves”. Portia was told to keep it from the family and from employers/co-workers.

Besides 1-2 friends and her brother, Portia is very isolated. In addition, her relationships with co-workers on Ally McBeal and other colleagues in the industry seem to have contributed to her eating disorder as well. For example, two of her co-stars (Calista Flockhart and Courtney Thorne-Smith) were famously accused of being Anorexic and underweight throughout the show’s run. So Portia was constantly working with and compared to an unrealistic ideal. In addition, many people who could have and should have recognized the problem and intervened- stayed silent. For example, as Portia dropped from a healthy 130 lbs to sub-100s, her costume designer told her she looked fantastic and asked for her secrets to weight loss. Portia also sought the help of a professional nutritionist. Even though she confided to binging and purging on the first visit, she was still given a food scale and a diet to help her lose weight. The nutritionist did not try to intervene until Portia was almost down to 82 lbs.

Community/Society:

Portia’s existence in several “communities” contributed to her struggle with eating disorders. Her first professional affiliation in the modeling community in Australia is where she developed a strong knowledge of dieting, purging, and excessive exercise. The “older girls” taught her this. It was the norm in that group to be unhealthy in order to get ready for a job.

From Australia, Portia traveled to the United States and the “Hollywood Industry”. Unfortunately, it was a smooth transition from the unrealistic expectations of the modeling to the acting industry. She describes a particularly gut-wrenching fitting that she endured when a photo shoot had to be rescheduled after the client realized that she was in fact a size 8- so no selected clothes would fit her.

In addition to body size, she also felt Hollywood was not accepting of a homosexual lead actress. Several times she spoke of the paralyzing fear she felt after seeing how quickly Ellen DeGeneres’ show was canceled after she came out in the late 1990s.

This is just a brief overview of these complex contributors to Portia’s eating disorder- I could easily go on for many more pages. Overall, I think the book is a fascinating read…for those of us interested in public health, eating disorders, and/or Hollywood. It portrays Portia’s struggle, self hatred, and self destruction with brutal honesty- so be prepared.

A closing word of caution: this book may not be appropriate for someone with a current or recently recovered eating disorder, since it outlines her eating, binging, and exercise rituals in incredible detail.

Calling the Sugar Plum Fairy Fat and Other Ways To End Up on the Naughty List!

Back in the mid 1990's I first began getting interested in public health. One of my first areas of interest was around eating disorders, especially among female athletes. Many of you may remember the book that sparked my interest, "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes".

This book focused on body weight/image pressures among female athletes in elite gymnastics and figure skating. The book is heartbreaking, following several athletes along paths of injury and disordered eating...many of which lead to permanent injury or death. Even though the book is almost 15 years old, I sometimes wonder if we've even learned anything from those stories.

On NBC's Today Show this morning, Jenifer Ringer was a guest. She is a New York City Ballet principal dancer, currently playing the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. Her name has been all over the blogosphere in the past week after a critic for The New York Times Dance Section wrote that "she looked as if she'd eaten one sugar plum too many".

In response to the outrage over his comments, the critic (Alastair Macaulay) published a second editorial five days later called "Judging the Bodies in Ballet". His primary argument- judging the body is fair game in ballet. "If you want to make your body irrelevant to criticism, do not choose ballet as a career". And I would assume that he would argue that the same goes for gymnastics or figure skating, where the body is actually part of the art form. But if that is true, how does the cycle of pressure and expectation ever get broken? Are you asking for criticism if you choose to participate in one of these sports?

In public health, we often make much more headway by changing laws/policies versus changing any one individual's opinion. In that spirit, there have been some systemic changes that have made these types of sports safer for young female athletes. For example, a minimum age limit for Olympic competition was enforced (even though some countries have cheated), hoping that it will help with wear and tear on young bodies that can not yet handle the intense training. Changes have been made to make the equipment safer. For example, after many serious injuries occurred on the women's vault in gymnastics, their pommel horse was replaced with a "vaulting table" that was more appropriately sized and padded.

So minimum ages and safer equipment are wonderful, but what will help with the unrealistic body image problem? In her Today Show interview, Jenifer shared that the New York City Ballet has all types of bodies on the roster, including hers that is more "womanly". I guess that's a good start. If ballet companies can model variety and acceptance and strength for their audiences (including aspiring ballerinas), that can begin to change perceptions of what is "normal". And the outrage shown by readers of the critic's comments. I guess that's a good start too.

Shame on you Mr. Macaulay for picking on the Sugar Plum Fairy.