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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: 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 ;)