Over the span of international and domestic flights covering some 11,000 miles in the past fortnight, I have spent a lot of time reading magazines. I tried to limit myself to fluff – gossip and pictures of celebrities wearing ugly clothes – because reading about wrong-headed business ideas and even more wrong-headed political ideas really is not my idea of a fun way to spend several hours in a confined space where screaming at the top of one’s lungs is frowned upon.
Alas, alas. I avoided idiocy but the idiocy sure did find me, and in Cosmopolitan magazine of all places. Okay, no surprise there: Cosmo articles telling women to wear animal prints if they want to make a guy attracted to them are hardly the height of intellect and good sense (or taste). But at least I could kick back with some mindless articles about makeup and men and not worry about being hit over the head with loopy politics.
Or so I thought.
An Israeli fashion photographer – coming from an industry that is surely the great unsung incubator of brilliant legislation – wants the Knesset to put a law on the books that would make it illegal to use women as fashion models if they are not deemed “healthy” enough by the government. The aim is to produce:
legislation insisting all models undergo an examination by a Government nutritionist. Those deemed healthy would get a licence while any who were too thin would be given nutritional advice and a two-month deadline to put on weight or be barred.
All this is based on BMI (body mass index), which is not a reliable way of determining health anyway. Even if it was, such a law would not magically make the population healthy. But junk science being accepted as gospel is hardly a shock. What did surprise me is that 53 per cent of polled Cosmo readers said that the US should introduce similar legislation of fashion photography.
In short: I would have been less enraged if I had watched a Michael Moore “documentary” festival on the plane. Thinking about it, though, I wonder how long it would be before such legislation would make any image of someone deemed unhealthy fall into the realm of the banned and illegal. The upside of that would be no more pictures of Michael Moore in our faces, but the price for such a benefit seems a bit steep.
While they are at it, they should also outlaw spherical bubble breast implants in porn photography…
Funny post, Jackie. But let’s see how far strongly you really feel about not reading the puerile and dangerous pensées of Israeli fashion photographers on planes — would you go so far as to prefer Michael Moore to actually sit next to you and talk to you? And eat his food, including the packed lunch he brought along in case they didn’t serve enough onboard?
Didn’t Tessa Jowett, or one of them, a few years ago demand a lunch with the editors of London fashion magazines to explain to them why they should use heavier models? I seem to remember the rail thin feline editors of Vogue, Cosmo, Tatler, et al pushing away their second leaf of lettuce as tooooo filling, watching her clear her hearty three courses with the calm, uninvolved interest of a cat watching its lunch trying to escape, or as scientists might examine aliens from space. They must have fallen about laughing when Tessa finally wiped her mouth and hoofed it out of there. Needless to say, heftier fashion models failed to make an appearance on the fashion pages.
Funny that you can find food fascists among Israeli fashion photographers, but such is humanity. It doesn’t matter whether or not body mass is an indicator of health – I’ll take your word for it. It’s irrelevant. What matters is the towering impertinence of some little service provider attempting to dictate to the people who buy his services on a whim, what their criteria should be. And if they don’t agree with his self-important thoughts, his ideas should be legislated. Worse, how do you account for the readers who agreed with him?
I would love it if Michael Moore got within earshot of me, or better yet, was forced to listen to me tell him what a sick piece of work I think he is for an entire flight. Sounds fun!
OT—sorry if I’m not interested in Cosmo, exploiting undernourished children, or fashion photogs of any nationality—Justice Scalia gave an interesting speech, available thru Instapundit among others, in which he analyzes how the Constitution is being used as a springboard for government expansion instead of its intended function as a boundary to circumscribe state power.
I would be very interested in the reactions of those who frequent this site.
Jackie – I hadn’t thought of that! Of course, you could be in control of the conversation! The only thing is, I’d want to be on the aisle seat. There are limits.
That critique of body mass index has a few misconceptions. It claims that BMI being the square of the height is wrong since, according to physics, volume (and hence mass) scales with the cube of the linear dimension. It then goes on to use Gulliver as an example.
Firstly, using Gulliver as an example is preposterous. Someone of Lilliputian size would be an extremely abnormal being and no comparison could rationally be drawn.
The thing is that for normal human body, one could assume the fat layer could be approximated as constant thickness layer over the surface of the body. Areas scale by the square of the linear dimension which accords with the BMI formula.
The BMI formula /is/ flawed for several reasons, including some of those stated in the article (bone density, proportion of fat to muscle etc) but the main point the linked article tries to make is flawed.
Rich
Obviously there is nothing to worry about:
Fashion models are notoriously underweight, but plainly this has no impact whatsoever on the people, who are notoriously obese.
EG
Fashions come and go. Personally, my tastes tilt towards the curvy side of the market. Never understood why it is fashionable or sexy for women to resemble X-Ray prints. I think the delicious G. Paltrow looks even lovelier after she put on a few pounds.
Bring on Salma Hayek!
Very simply, the camera adds anything between 8 and 12 pounds to the subject and, as a consequence, models are encouraged to go below at least a stone of their normal weight to counter this effect. Regarding models appearing/being anorexic well, unfortunately, this has been happening for well over 50 years now and you are going to need a lot more than some ridiculous state licence for 14 year old girls to deal with that problem.
Most modelling agencies I access for background extras would never send me someone who is anorexic anyway – they tend to show up on film as looking very ill and tired.
Is it the camera that makes the models appear fatter or the saturation lighting screwing with the shadowing and thus fooling the old bonce?
What is Jordan’s BMI ? Or even the BMI of that one legged woman that married the annoying scouser?
Models must be pretty (ha ha) near obsolete now. Some enterprising programmer will make a CGI tart renderer package that can generate the umpteen billion slightly different cover photo’s that the glossy magazine industry currently pay huge amounts for.
I dont like looking at girls that look like they just got spung from Buchenwald either, but making a law against it?
What should be illegal is starving the poor creatures like that. The way they raise veal isnt much more brutal. The real culprits are the designers; it requires much less engineering skill to design clothes for a body with no curves. But what the hell, it requires an ego the size of an aircraft carrier to make a mark in that business anyway, what do they care?
In my experience, guys who complain about skinny chicks are the ones who only get to shag fatties – and girls who complain about skinny chicks ARE fatties.
And in my experience, guys who talk about ‘fatties’ and ‘skinny chicks’ never get laid by anyone. Isn’t experience funny? 🙂
Dear Jackie D.
Thanks for writing such a great article, its very refreshing to see something libertarian written anywhere these days. Yes, Herion Chic IS better than Statist Chic, in many ways, and the fact that youre basing your complaint on a Cosmo article proves that statism and socialistic thinking is seeping into almost all aspects of daily life, even fashion!!! Sadly, many so-called “humanitarian” people fall into the statist trap, they think that if they dont like something, there should be a legislation or law passed against it, like smoking in shopping malls, driving while on the cellphone, or, the most long standing, and notorious of them all, those great and wonderful American Anti-trust Laws! (Nothing says freedom and liberty like uncle sam’s finger wagging ominously at anyone who wants to have a successful business!). In a free country, the function of laws is to protect the human rights of the individuals of that country, not to control their health or their bussiness decisions,and,
however good or bad they might be, they are not illegal unless they violate other people’s rights, and I think its in anyones full human rights to be as dangerously skinny or fat as they want to be, and to photograph or employ in any way such peoples.
Jackie: I am a little late coming to this thread but like you, I also disagree with the proposal that legislation should regulate what kind of women fashion designers can use. On the other hand, the critique of BMI that you link to is misplaced. The BMI cut-offs for different body fat level classifications vary by ethnicity and age, but the critic applied the adult scale to his pre-pubescent nieces! It is true that BMI is not a good proxy for body fat level in some individuals such as very muscular or very short people, but such individuals are outliers and the utility of BMI lies in it being a good proxy for percentage body fat at the level of the general population in epidemiological studies. When one has to deal with individuals, as in an eating disorder clinic, one can directly measure body fat levels instead of using BMI. Besides, trained medical personnel can evaluate abnormal levels of body fat via physical appearance alone.
Euan Gray: You are mistaken about skinny fashion models not having much of an impact; read this.
Julian Taylor: Requiring skinny fashion models because the camera adds a few pounds would be a plausible hypothesis to explain their actual skinniness if they looked okay on camera, but they typically look very skinny on camera, too.
Lucius Severus Pertinax: Judging by the aesthetically pleasing and sophisticated designs that top-ranked fashion designers often come up with, they undoubtedly have the engineering skills to design clothing for a feminine physique; they are not selecting skinny women to make the job easier for them.
Johnathan: The answer to your question as to why fashion models are so skinny lies in putting together some observations: fashion models are typically young, very skinny, and have masculine faces and masculinized physique proportions (see here and here); top-ranked fashion designers are mostly gay (see last link); and gays disproportionately find the physique of adolescent boys aesthetically appealing. Now, this is politically incorrect thought, but criticisms of this notion are addressed here for those who are interested.