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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, @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?