I was thinking about a serious issue that affects us all nowadays, but New Yorkers in particular. Not to be presumptuous, but NYC is a city where media is excessively consumed. There is no Times Square in Boston or Chicago or any European city, at least not to this length.We are bombarded with an imagery of perfection and thinness; we are obsessed with the celebrity culture, and heavily influenced by it, trying to imitate it. The media here is inescapable. Even if in America as a whole one in three Americans are obese, it’s a totally different story in New York, I can’t remember the last time I saw an obese person here.
New York City is one of the few places in the world, where you walk down the street and you see tall, stick thin hugely successful models, that just made a couple of thousands for a job a few hours ago. They are young, beautiful, thin, earning the big bucks and the world is at their feet. Things may not be perfect for them; they might also be extremely insecure of themselves and turn into drug addicts, but they are IT for a few years and women aspire to be like them, for different reasons. The thin body, perfect face and hair become the standard for beauty, or have become so for the past decades. People have become so consumed with body image that women, especially, would do anything to look and feel good about themselves. This is when anorexia and bulimia come in. In a place like New York City, where nothing is shocking anymore, these types of diseases become a standard. If you work in an image-based industry, such as fashion, advertising, television, film, fashion magazines, having women coworkers vomiting their lunch-break meals is not uncommon. It has become something normal, and no one feels the need to do something. “I’m fasting this week,” they would say, and believe me, it’s not for faith purposes. This is a vicious circle; if these women feel insecure about their bodies, well, then, advertising has just the solution for them; they will sell them something to make them feel all better.
I was extremely surprised to find out that in my Women & Media class, a women’s studies class, there are at least three extreme cases of image consciousness. The first woman, now in her forties, admitted to have been anorexic for about 10 to 15 years, due to the fact that she is naturally very very tall and people would make fun of her for being big, so she just starved herself to at least be thin. She was a model for an international European modeling agency, and was kicked out, once her disease became so obvious to everyone, that she “almost died a couple of times.” Each time she managed to gain a little weight, people would tell her she looked healthy, and that to her equaled fat, so she relapsed several times. The second one participated five years ago in “America’s Next Top Model,” an incredibly popular show here, moderated by former supermodel Tyra Banks, for which I was tempted to apply. The things she had to say about that experience made me think it over. Before the show started, they had to do a coloning (I was told this is the term), a procedure that detoxes the body YET also helps to lose a couple of pounds. Exercising extensively was encouraged, while eating wasn’t. The third girl mentioned that even as a bartender, she had to hit the gym before going to work to keep her weight controlled, otherwise she could risk losing her job. So, I wonder, if even bartenders working in a regular bar have to look a certain way, i.e. the girl/guy that simply hands you a drink in a bar, then we certainly have a serious problem here.
I am particularly interested in this topic, as I have always been naturally very thin; I moved to NYC and started modeling, and lost even more weight. What is different in my case is that I never purged in order to lose weight, or starved myself, or exercised strenuously. I just don’t eat much, especially since I moved here, and I skip meals sometimes, involuntarily. I don’t have a weight problem, and I can eat anything I want at any time I want to. I just ate pizza. And I also cook sometimes, and I eat at 1 am and so on. And I don’t eat only salads and fruit, not at all. My weight simply dropped after I moved, as a result of a normal culture shock, and the stress associated with moving the country, getting married and adjusting to a new school, new surroundings, etc. Since then, I can’t really gain weight, whatever I do. I have never dieted in my life, because I didn’t have to. On the contrary, I’m trying to gain weight. So I guess I’m lucky. However, I did run over some pictures of mine taken a year and a half ago, at the height of my thinness. I was a bit shocked of how thin I looked in those pictures. I have included a picture in this post. It’s at the beginning of a six-hour photo shoot, we were just testing lighting and stuff, so it’s not the greatest shot, it hasn’t been retouched, but it proves my point. If I were a runway model today, I would most definitely be banned because of the new weight regulations. I’m probably just three to five pounds heavier now. Scary…
