Polly explains over the length of two glossy pages in GRAZIA, why being skinny will always win over being fat. She says: ‘we are obsessing over the skinny because we fear the fat. We fear our own fat. […] We want skinniness – we want to see skinny women, we want to be skinny women – and we then hate ourselves for wanting it, so we hit out at it. Denounce it as evil, sick, mad.’
What bothers me about Polly’s words is that in her attempt to validate her believes, she assumes how we feel about being thin and even suggests that those who speak up against it do so out of jealousy. But what’s even worse, Polly’s words sound like straight off a pro-ana website – the kind of website that offers advise on how to manage an anorexic lifestyle. The bottom line of her article (= being super skinny is great and if you think otherwise you are the one with the problem) is poison to an audience of young and impressionable women who struggle enough with body image, weight and their relationship with food as it is.
Polly acknowledges that ‘super-skinniness and obesity are part of the same horrible screwed-up mess, and we need to deal with them together’. However, she seems to be strangely detached from the fact that she is sitting right in the middle of that mess. She stresses that she isn’t a managed anorexic, but that she sees her excessively controlled behaviour as ‘managing my body’.
Polly:
a) Is a self-proclaimed size 6, who’s too tiny for Victoria Beckham’s denim collection
b) Avoids carbohydrates, stops eating when 80% full, drinks black coffee when ‘overwhelmed by inappropriate hunger’ and likes chilli ‘because it’s an appetite suppressant’
c) Fears gaining weight
According to the World Health Organisation, the diagnostic criteria for Anorexia Nervosa are:
a) Body weight consistently 15% less (or lower) than that expected for height and age, or body mass index of 17.5 or less
b) Weight loss caused by the avoidance of foods perceived to be fattening, along with one or more of the following behaviours: self-induced vomiting, purging, excessive exercise, use of appetite suppressants and/or diuretics
c) Distorted body image perception driven by an intense, irrational fear of becoming fat, leads to the desire to remain at a low body weight
d) Amenorrhea (abnormal absence of a minimum of three successive menstrual cycles) in women, and loss of libido in men. There may be changes in growth hormone, cortisol, thyroid hormone and insulin.
Personally, I don’t care if Polly Vernon is an anorexic or if she becomes huge like a house by April. However, I do care about what is being published in national magazines. Seeing them spread out over two pages gives Polly’s words the air of a certain truth. If you replaced the closet anorexic in the article with a closet alcoholic, I am sure GRAZIA wouldn’t have been so quick to print this odd idea of deluded reality.
