The BONES of contention

I would be dishonest if I said that the images I saw in fashion magazines that I pored over for years -- especially during my teen years -- didn't plant silly ideas in my head. What silly ideas? Several, such as "looks are and should be a girl's top concern." And "thin is in, stout is out." "Sex appeal equals happiness." "You're so out of it when you don't have the right clothes in your wardrobe." I roll my eyes just thinking about the misconceptions that most teen magazines (and many fashion/beauty mags) propagate -- purposely or not is beside the point. Fortunately, proper guidance and maturity quelled those silly ideas.

But girls these days get stronger messages from the media, and many of them don't have the benefit of proper guidance to help them navigate through those messages.

From "Do thin models warp women's body image?"

"This unnatural thinness is a terrible message to send out. The people watching the fashion shows are young, impressionable women," says van der Wal, host of Cover Shot on TLC.

Psychologists and eating-disorder experts are worried about the same thing. They say the fashion industry has gone too far in pushing a dangerously thin image that women, and even very young girls, may try to emulate.

It begins in youth

There's no question younger girls are getting this message, says Murnen, who has studied this for 15 years. "We have done studies of grade-school girls, and even in grade 1, girls think the culture is telling them that they should model themselves after celebrities who are svelte, beautiful and sexy."

Some girls can reject that image, but it's a small percentage: 18% in Murnen's research. Those girls were shown to have the highest body esteem. Murnen and her colleagues reviewed 21 studies that looked at the media's effect on more than 6,000 girls, ages 10 and older, and found those who were exposed to the most fashion magazines were more likely to suffer from poor body images.

Read the whole thing at USATODAY.com

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As if that's not enough to give girls and women wasted images to emulate (face it: at first, horrid images may look repulsive, but somehow they eventually morph into being, ahem, "attractive" and something to be aspired), here's another all-time low on trash TV. Jeannine Kellog of Modestly Yours blog relates an episode of America's Top Model she happened to see --

For Tyra’s judging, each girl had to do a “pose” for the competition. Each required pose had a prechosen title-- images chosen by the artistic directors, all pre-selected model stereotypes.

One girl had to pose as the “Bulimic Model.” They stuck her on what looked like a toilet seat, posing like she just vomited everything eaten in the last three days. She was surrounded by vomit on the floor, on her face, and on her hand. Her arm was extended and her hand was thrust towards the camera, covered with vomit. The girl looked destroyed.

The others? The “Narcissistic Model.” Then there was the “Jealous Model” in which the model posed walking down stairs while yanking the long blond hair of the model in front of her such that it all looked like a couple beat-up cheerleaders overdosed at a Rave party.

Another title was the “Drug Addicted Model” where the girl was made to look as though she had suffered a few violent blows by a drug pusher and was also about to overdose.

Another was “Anorexic Model” in which the model didn’t have to work hard to match that title and frankly looked like she might need to be hospitalized and hooked up to an I.V. And so on it went.

Really, to me all this gives a whole new meaning to the word "mutilation."