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I dont understand why we still see stories about body image issues. The problems of bulemea/anorexia PALE in comparison to the continent of fatties we've got going on.

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i don't know about that... bulimia and anorexia receive a lot of exposure in the media because they're manifestations of society's fixation on thinness and what not, but the incidence of eating disorders is about 1% in the general population and no more than 5% in most colleges. has the media made girls more weight-conscious than in the past? sure. but i think that, in terms of endangering the health of the general population, obesity is much more problematic and the need to address it is much more pressing.

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This is why the idea of society having a "fixation on thinness" is a crock. We have a fixation on talking about it, but in real life, we have been rapidly moving in the opposite direction for years. What we do is completely disconnected from what we say, as a culture.

I think our expanding waistlines are the reason we are so sold on the idea of talking incessantly about things like anorexia when they are such uncommon problems. It goes with all this talk about "fat acceptance" and even the organizations springing up to promote it and legislate about it. As we grow fatter, we naturally like to talk about it as more and more normal and healthy instead of calling it what it is -- unhealthy and unattractive. And with that goes focusing to an exaggerated extent on how being thin can go wrong. By and large, when America talks about how terrible it is to be thin and tries to play up some kind of crisis of people starving themselves and how bad being skinny looks, we're really talking about how fat we are and how bad we feel about how bad we feel it makes us look.