Anorexia

Introduction

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder syndrome which happens mostly to women. It is a cause of concern for our society because this disease can ultimately lead to death from malnutrition. In order to sell more merchandise for profit, fashion advertising exploits audiences by glorifying extreme thinness using famous waif models, such as Kate Moss to promote the ideal figure. These top fashion models are synonymous with the glamorous lifestyle. They are young, rich and beautiful. Many young women choose to practise crash dieting these days because they want to achieve such impossible skinny figures. They learn from the fashion images and hope that they can become the next supermodel if they are thin. In other words, they take these fashion icons as their role models. This trend is dangerous because these women often end up being anorexics. As a result, the number of eating disorder continues to rise in recent years. The aim of this paper is to examine if regular exposure to fashion images can increase the likelihood of having anorexia nervosa.

Bandura (1986) suggests that humans have evolved an advanced capacity for observational learning that enables them to expand their knowledge and skills on the basis of information conveyed by modeling influences. Virtually all learning phenomena resulting from direct experience can occur vicariously by observing the actual behavior of others and the consequences for them. However, a great deal of information about human values, thinking patterns, and behavior is gained from models portrayed symbolically through verbal or pictorial means.

Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur (1976) state that in observational learning, a single model can transmit new ways of thinking and behaving simultaneously to many people in widely dispersed locales. There is another aspect of symbolic modeling that magnifies its psychological and social impact. During the course of their daily lives, people have direct contact with only a small sector of the physical and social environment. They generally travel the same routes, visit the same places, and see the same group of associates. Consequently, their conceptions of social reality are greatly influenced by vicarious experiences by what they see and hear without direct experiential correctives. To a large extent, people act on their images of reality. The more people's images of reality depend on the media's symbolic environment, the greater is its social impact.

Myers & Biocca (1992) conducted an experiment on 76 female university students. They were aged 18 to 24 and were members of affluent sororities in a large southern university. The subjects were chosen because their social class and age range are most commonly associated with anorexia. Fifty hours of television commercials were taped off the air over a 2-week period. From a pool of 770 commercials, 120 were selected by the experimenter, 60 as glamour body image commercials and 60 as neutral image commercials. The subjects were asked to view the commercials one at a time and then they had to estimate their own body size. The results show that the sample of young females tended to overestimate their body size after viewing body image commercials. This study also shows that a young woman's image of her own body is clearly elastic. Body shape perception can be changed by watching less than 30 minutes of television commercials. This experiment proved that glamour advertising does have negative effect on women. It can help to explain why they would choose to diet and often end up being anorexic. They learn from these images that it can never be too thin and therefore they often feel insecure about their bodies.

DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach (1989) found out that to get the complete picture of the human condition, sociologists must research on areas outside the usual psychological/individualistic level of analysis. This is because human beings are highly sociable: they live in a world full of intimate personal bonds and complex social interaction. In other words, they are far more than individualistic organisms responding to stimuli around them. This article mentions that people in groups organize with each other within mutually understood rules. Those rules provide definitions of acceptable behavior, predictability in what each member of a group is expected to do and understanding of what each can anticipate from others. Without such stability, this world would be complete chaos because every human encounter is based on a trial-and-error basis.

DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach mentioned that there are four fundamental concepts for any social organization: norms, roles, ranking and sanctions. The two concepts that can be applied to this study on the cause of anorexia nervosa are norms and sanctions. Norms are general rules that are understood and followed by all members of a group. They cover an enormous range of activities from simple rituals to behavior with significant consequences. These are the "rules" to tell people what is right and what is wrong in the community. Sanctions are used for the purpose of maintaining social control. This is because human nature gives people tendencies toward deviant behavior: they will always be tempted to break the norms which they fail to play roles according to expectations. As a result, any deviant behavior need to be punished to maintain the order of our society.

These concepts can help to explain what caused the increase in anorexia nervosa. Fashion advertising often projects the ideal image to persuade people to buy the product by making them feel insecure. Young women often misinterpret these messages and think that photographs of these images are the social norms for beauty and attractiveness. DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach discovered that these portrayals may not have authenticity and may be misleading or even distorted. Many women simply put too much pressure on themselves about what other people think. They fear that if they do not live up to these expectations, sanctions will be imposed on them. For example, they will not be loved or being criticized if they are obese. As a result, women often go to take these extreme measures, such as crash dieting, to live up to these false social expectations and hence the rise of anorexia nervosa.

Brumberg (1986) takes the issue of anorexia even further by arguing that fashion advertising does not single-handedly generates the compulsion to starve among young women. Anorexia is a multidimensional problem which should be approached from the cultural context. Her study found out that an overwhelming portion of anorexia patients come from intact nuclear families rather than from single-parent families. Almost all are white and relatively affluent: there are few black anorectics. In effect, anorexia nervosa