A study that sets out to identify the factors that influence eating disorders, body image and clothing choices collapses in a welter of contradictions
“Being fat isolates and invalidates a woman,” wrote Susie Orbach in 1978’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue. “What is it about the social position of women that leads them to respond to it by getting fat?”
It is an intriguing question, as is the reverse – what drives women to starve themselves into unhealthiness? In one chapter of Curvology, David Bainbridge mulls this point: “The most confusing aspect of eating disorders is why they occur at all – how humans evolved into creatures who could suffer them… no animal evolves specifically to suffer bouts of starvation, bingeing, emaciation, infertility and death.”
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SOURCE: Eating disorders | The Guardian – Read entire story here.
