Looking at chapter 7, Cultural Obsession with Thinness: African American, Latino, and White Women by Becky W. Thompson, we learn of the three theoretical models used to explain and treat eating disorders. The biomedical model offers great insight medically about binging, purging and starvation. However if fails to actually help the person. It ignores social, historical, and cultural factors that we know play a role in this disease. The psychological model uses a combination of biological, psychological and cultural issues however still ignores, race, lesbian and the working women/poverty.
Thompson claims that through her studies she finds that many of these women if not all of them use their eating disorder as a coping mechanism. Could be to deal with having been sexually abused, being poor and the every day stresses of that life, being gay or suffering from racism and the feeling that they need to fit in with the “skinny white girl”. While I find all of these issues absolutely true to playing a role in why girls suffer from this awful disease, I do feel that Thompson missed a few crucial points! It is also possible that girls and women who believe they need to be thin may not have had a serious trauma in their life. They may suffer from extremely low self esteem. They may not have a horrible home life but it may also not be very supportive either. For me personally, I suffered with body image as a teen. I was athletic, never overweight nor underweight and short. As young girls that’s what we do. We look at other girls and compare ourselves. We look at the awful mass media that we can’t escape and compare ourselves to them. Thankfully I had a supportive mother and father who told me I was beautiful and distracted my mind with much more important aspects of life. As I just mentioned Mass Media, also has an effect on this disease. The media needs to focus, focus, focus on health, health, health, and stop defining people as either being thin, average, or overweight. Those are negative mantras that we focus on and we know that when we focus on negativity we get negativity. If the media and society as a whole were to focus on the words healthy and went from there, I would like to think that would have a more positive effect on our young men and women today who suffer from body image issues.
I included a link that I thought was an interesting read.