Media Pressures, Eating Disorders and Something that Made Me Think

Kristin Hersh is someone who has always made me think. Her music has always been unlike anything else I’ve heard - and I mean that in the best possible way. Interestingly enough, a lot of the posts that she’s made and a lot of the choices that she’s made in the past few years have struck me in a similar way.

Often though, I find myself seeing that there’s a wisdom underlying her words that gets me thinking. Her most recent post is no exception:

(source)These rules are not mysterious, nor are they difficult to follow. In fact, there’s only one real rule: be attractive. If you work in the recording industry, you must play attractive music, you must be an attractive human. If you work in the film industry, you must make attractive movies, you must be an attractive human, etc.

The definition of attractive is where we all fall down. Healthy people view it as a melange of sensory, intellectual and emotional input. Healthy people are attracted to music and film — and humans — that move us.

The wildly unhealthy entertainment industry views attraction as: easy. That’s it. Just like high school! This is how bimbos happen and I don’t just mean the Barbie doll kind. Male bimbos, female bimbos, musical and filmic bimbos…a bimbo is anything one-dimensional enough to be taken at face value with no potential for insight or growth on the part of the consumer (oooh…scary…insight!)

Every time Nothing is wrapped in Fashion and sold to the Public, a bimbo is born. Bimbos always make someone money. They’re e-e-e-e-easy.

I’ve watched musicians I loved buy into this insidious phenomenon. The idea that to bring their music to more people they’d need to dumb it down. Whether they believed in their own success or their own failure didn’t matter, the end result was the same: something imaginary killed their art.

Attraction isn’t something that can be clearly or narrowly defined; but in its very essence it’s far from easy.

All I’ve got to say is this: there’s a lot of talk about the effect of media on the way young women (along with everyone else) make choices. There’s talk about the way that girls see these super idealized bodies, women who still look like girls and that’s only a little tiny piece of the big picture.

The challenging part of the media equation is the side that most people don’t see: it’s the side that shapes celebrities, that puts the pressures on them. The tragedy isn’t the way that young women feel pressured to be like the celebrities that they see in the glossy magazines; the real tragedy as I see it is the number of young models/actresses/singers who are willing to compromise their health and well being because they believe it is the only way that they will be able to fit the mold. The real tragedy is that so many people believe they have to compromise everything because otherwise they won’t be able to go after their dreams.