“Unless you can see her collarbone clearly, she’s too fat”.

After hearing my classmate spit that rude remark, I had to fight back the urge to yell at him because of his ignorance. Hasn’t anyone noticed the mass problem that Americans seem to be having with eating disorders? If only every American would look around the influences that teenage females face.

Why don’t you, yourself, look around? See that woman on the billboard advertising woman’s perfume? She’s a size two. The women walking on the beach who men whistle at? You can plainly see their ribs and their hip bones. Most of the actresses on the television? A size six or smaller. A large majority of the women walking down the runway as “models”? Size two or smaller. A size eight, in the modeling industry, is considered too fat. I mean, honestly who wants to look at a woman that actually might meet the standard of what women truly look like?

Newsflash for the men of the world: sixty-eight percent of American women wear a size twelve or larger and fifty-two percent wear a size fourteen or larger. Looking like something more than bones is unhealthy, though, right? I mean, that must be why thirteen percent of our high-school-aged girls take diet pills, and three percent of our middle school girls (yeah, that’s right. The girls which a majority haven’t even had their first menstruation) are bulimic, and one percent of our high-school females are anorexic.

Of course, don’t trust me on those figures. Don’t believe that your teenage daughter may be attempting to look like a walking stick? Here’s a dare for you. Look up “thinsperation” on Google. Go ahead. Now tell me that those results aren’t sickening. Our teenage women are trying to look like someone that looks like she needs hospitalization. One youtube’s video caption reads “love making these videos .. don’t know why .. but I hope they give you strength!” Or, if that isn’t enough to make you reconsider how you think about eating disorders, there’s always this comment that was left on a thinsperation video: “skinny is the best if you’re not under 100 pounds you may as well be dead”. Yeah. Great way for our society to be thinking.

On the same related topic, guess what’s become born of this “weight loss”. “Pro-ana” is the belief in thinking that anorexia is perfectly acceptable. That’s right. Girls encouraging other girls to completely starve their bodies of all food. It’s become a social and cultural “pastime”.

So now that our culture has glamorized eating disorders where does the negative come in? To be honest, it only does in little doses. More sites glamorize and perfect eating disorders than ones that tell the negative. Very few tell about the teeth decay, the rotting bones, the skin deterioration, the lack of control of the bowels and bladder, the uncontrollable vomiting.

So why not, instead of spending all this money setting up large scale fashion shows, spend some money on eating disorder education? Actually, don’t even bother educating teenage girls with the knowledge; teach them positive body image. If someone thinks they look gorgeous as they are, why would they starve themselves to change themselves into something else?

If only every teenage girl understood that they look just fine the way they are. Whether that girl happens to weight one-hundred pounds or three-hundred pounds, as long as she’s not at risk for health problems, she looks just fine. Why can’t society just teach people that whether you’re size four or size eighteen, there’s no reason to change who you are for someone else?

I propose a solution. Instead of using size two models for advertising products, why not throw in a size twelve or a size fourteen? What’s wrong with using the average woman instead of using a woman that very few women can match weight-wise? Do overweight people make your product less desirable? If it does, then, well, I wouldn’t want those people who are so easily swayed by appearance seeing my product anyway. Also, if you use the average woman in your advertisements, the average women will respect you for that and will be more likely to buy your product.

Clothing designers: What’s wrong with looking like a woman? Why is it that as soon as clothing gets labeled “plus-size” all that’s available is large t-shirts and dresses that look big enough to house an entire army? Because the woman is overweight means that she automatically doesn’t want to look nice? If a woman is a size 12, does that automatically mean that she loses all fashion sense?

In conclusion, I just wish that society would wake up and realize that women very rarely look so skinny. Most women happen to be larger than a size ten, and I wish society would reflect that so all the women that are size eight or six wouldn’t feel the need to starve themselves to become smaller. This truly has become a large American problem which no one seems to care about.