okay...so i was watching oprah today...yes, oprah. gimme a break already. anyway, i was watching oprah, and she was doing the show on anoerexia and all the new net communities for it. let me tell you, it was a rather disturbing sixty minutes.
some of you might have seen the "pro-ana" sites out there somewhere. i, as of this posting, have not. oprah(and, yes, by god, i was watching oprah. shut the fuck up already), however, had select images from these sites on the show. and omg...have you ever seen that woman on the weekly world news? the one they call the "human toothpick" or something? yeah, well, the girls on those sites could give her a run for her money.
but wait, that was not by far the scariest thing. it was not hearing the twenty percent mortality rate or the two-thirds recurrence rate. no. it was the two girls...AGE 5 that were already headed that way. FIVE YEARS OLD! one was not yet dieting. she simply refused to wear clothes that made her "look fat" and exercises excessively. the other girl, now age seven, would eat paper and q-tips to feel full so that she would not have to eat. in both cases, the mothers are like, "i don't understand where this is coming from." the five-year-old's mother drinks slim-fast all the time, and the other little girl said that she got the idea from her mother talking about dieting. the ironic little twist of fate that topped it all was a commercial for the local news here. the montgomery news station, waka, ran its usual preview of the 5 o'clock news commercial. one of the topics for this evening? "overweight children" and how to slim them down.
all right, and one more note here before i go on...i was sitting there watching this, thinking how great it was that oprah had this on. a lot of people, amazing as it may seem, have no idea about this. i thought, it's about time someone explained it all again to the masses. BUT then i remembered the diet article in O, the Oprah Magazine not more than a couple of months ago.
and the mothers wonder where in the world these kids get it. between them scarfing slim-fast and bitching about their own asses to the freekin' evening news, these girls are being told that they are not good enough. yes, i know i have bitched about this before, but i mean, come on, a FIVE YEAR OLD? my god, if these kids are starting this early, imagine the possibilities. by eight, they'll have been in counselling. by twelve, they'll be doing it again, and by 16, they'll be dead from malnutrition, heart failure, or some other related thing.
what's to be done about it, you ask? i'll tell you what. someone needs to tell the little girls of the world that they are good enough. that they are special and beautiful just as they are. don't drink slim-fast or complain about your cellulite in front of the kids. counter the images on tv with actual pictures of real women and what they look like. tell your daughters that thin is not perfect. beautiful is not successful. beauty is ingrained in your soul not in your bathroom scale.
...thus spake the munkies and it was good.