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CBC Canada has a report on a law under consideration in France's lower house that would require models to meet a minimum body mass index standard.
The link between high fashion, body image and eating disorders on French catwalks may lead to a ban on super-skinny models.
Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel, which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.
Under the proposed legislation, any model who wants to work has to have a body mass index (a type of height to weight ratio) of at least 18 and would be subject to regular weight checks.
The law would enforce fines of up to $79,000 [US] for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for any staff involved, French Socialist Party legislator Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told newspaper Le Parisien.
The bill's amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles and forums that encourage eating disorders.
Body Mass Index (BMI) is is a measure of relative size based on the mass and height of an individual.
c0lo's random thoughts:
- On one side: governments regulating the BMI... (large soda ban)... hmm?
- On the other side: how is this different from laws against public indecency, laws which are well-knitted into the fabric of westernized societies?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:44AM
This disproportionate representation of the naturally super-skinny as the ideal standard for beauty is leading impressionable teenagers to try and replicate that body image through starvation dieting. The online "Pro-anorexia" movement is promoting a lifestyle based around a mental illness and it's killing people through malnourishment and suicide.
(Score: 1, Troll) by FatPhil on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:35AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:21AM
What if it doesn't?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Troll) by FatPhil on Thursday April 09 2015, @12:35PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday April 09 2015, @01:27PM
By your logic we should ban all depictions of fat people being happy in media... because this encourages people that they can be happy no matter what size they are.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Touché) by wantkitteh on Thursday April 09 2015, @04:00PM
S'not my logic, I didn't come up with the retarded idea of banning images of hawt gurls. ;)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday April 09 2015, @02:40PM
It's not killing anyone; they're choosing to kill themselves, if anything. But of course, blaming things other than the one who chose to take a certain course of action is popular; violent media, comic books, and other things like rock-and-roll music have all been blamed for the actions of certain people.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday April 09 2015, @03:57PM
Please read what I actually wrote - I understand the jump to conclusions here, this does on the surface appear to be a Columbine-style "Blame Marilyn bleargh!" moral panic, but this is a very different situation. The pro-ana movement seem to rather enjoy sharing and collecting pics of extremely skinny women, they call it "thinspiration". No amount of banning the future publication of skinny girl pics in another country will make the slightest difference to this activity and I never said it would.
And we're both right - the Pro-ana movement is killing people, it's own members are killing themselves. It's not a simple case of ignoring medical advice, shunning proper diet control and ignoring the very concept of exercise planning. When there's a community of young, impressionable people online advocating the above and recruiting among their peers, that's when you can start considering this a contagious variant of anorexia, itself a mental disorder.
While I agree that something needs to be done... this ain't it. I thought that was pretty obvious ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @02:42PM
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday April 09 2015, @03:27PM
*Nods* Sounds perfectly legit to me. Then again, the French have been distinctly crap when it comes to freedom of expression recently. It was perfectly legal for Charlie Hebdo to publish cartoons considered offensive by many (not all) Muslims, but then Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala gets slapped with $32k worth of fines [vice.com] for an offensive play on words on Je Suis Charlie... hmm.
I'm not making judgement on the validity of either the expression by Charlie Hebdo or Dieudonné, that's not really relevant here, but the French seem to have swung from "say what you like, offend whoever you like" to "you can only say what we say you can say" in the space of a single response to a terrorist incident. Terrorists win! Crap! :(
(Score: 1) by cwadge on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:35PM
Yeah, those pro-anorexia folks can be a real bitch. They came to my door this morning handing out leaflets and wouldn't take no for an answer. Until now I'd simply eaten until I was satisfied, but now I've got to subsist on nothing but a single peeled carrot and two Tic Tacs per day. If only the SJW's would save me from these monsters!
Sarcasm aside, I haven't seen any evidence of a "pro-anerexia movement" of any substance (though if we were talking about bulimia, there'd be a decent pun in there somewhere). Not any more substantial than the Flat Earth Society, anyway. Non-issue IMO. I have however experienced countless self-appointed SJW's who want to tell me how to think, how to live, who's important, who's not, and why. It's a weird hobby with too much dogma and not enough actual progress for my taste. Wanna help somebody? Buy a homeless guy a sandwich and a beer. Bored and self-righteous? Start a Twitter campaign about patriarchy.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:18PM
lol, I can almost imagine that... "Excuse me, sorry to bother you, we're here to talk to you about maybe donating to your local food bank? We were thinking, like, every scrap of food in the house except that lettuce? Would you like a free copy of French Vogue?" Saying pro-ana doesn't exist is just silly, 2 seconds of web searching will find references to it going back to 2001 - even Oprah covered it back then. And don't worry, I'm not SJWing or anything, people way smarter than me have been trying to figure out how to solve the problem for years without success.
Not that I hung out with her or anything, but a girl I went to school with got caught up in it, died of organ failure weighing 5 stone at age 23, that was like 10 years ago. Her parents blamed "some website" for the whole thing, didn't think anything of it for years until I heard the term pro-ana pop up again recently. It's kinda spooky, I remember we both started school on the same day in the same class, I can even remember what she was wearing... weird, I couldn't tell you a damn thing about anyone else from that day, but she stuck in my memory the whole time. Whatever, pro-ana as a community seems to be better than most at flying under the radar online if they've been doing it since the dial-up days, that's actually impressive.
(Score: 1) by cwadge on Friday April 10 2015, @08:21PM
As for anorexia in particular, I've known a couple of girls in my distant path with the same issue. Thankfully they were a tiny minority in the grand scheme of things, and if I had to analyze them in hindsight I'd have to surmise that peer pressure actually had very little to do with their body image issues. That is, their peers were telling them the opposite ("you need to eat more, you look like hell!). Sadly both girls I'm thinking of had suffered some childhood traumas which left them with a range of emotional problems, anorexia being only one of those. Now bulimia, on the other hand... having grown up in the inland empire of southern California, I saw a lot of that. They called it, "The Hollywood Diet". Need to lose some weight before a shoot? Laxatives. This is also the same region where plastic surgery is almost the norm for a particular crowd though, so there are some special circumstances. *sigh* Why can't people just be happy to be themselves? We as humans just love to fixate on meaningless tripe, don't we?