Day 132 - Carry That Weight

As she does most weeks, K___ bought Heat magazine this morning. On the cover was Victoria Beckham, the grotesque former-Spice Girl harpy. Posh is apparently desperate for a little girl to go with her three boys with the former England captain Narcissus and has agreed to put on some weight in order to try and get her body to start working properly in order to achieve this.

Now, eating disorders are just not funny. However, the way that a lot of our culture deals with them is - just not in an amusing way. As we waited for the train to arrive, K___ and I talked about it.

One recent thing has been to show how Posh's extreme thinness (she apparently has the waist measurement of a seven year old) is an 'thinspiration' to anoxerics. If anyone's wondering, I routinely read the women's mags K___ brings home, so I'm pretty much down wid whidda ladiez are reading about. Since this first came out, there's been a bit of a trend for showing pictures of girls in the advanced stages of anorexia. Not surprisingly, pictures of women who have systematically starved themselves to the point of death are quite distressing.

We could look at that and think, well, hopefully those pictures may cause some girls to wake up and think about what they're doing to themselves. Maybe they will; I don't know.

On the other hand, the rest of the time the mags are castigating women for daring to allow themselves to get over nine stones. There's this constant yoyo between 'this is too fat' and 'this is too thin' and I can't even begin to imagine the pressure it must put on young girls. To a large extent this and the allowed variation is tiny. This has never affected me before. The magazines I buy (film and music related) are unlikely to be too obsessive about people's weight.

However, I may very shortly learn that I have a baby daughter on the way and it's quite worrying to think that there is going to be no way that we could stop her being exposed to this stuff. Sure, K___ could stop buying her magazines, but that won't stop it. These pressures are everywhere. Just one more new thing that has occured to me to think about. I may soon learn I have a son on the way, and then it's all rather academic, though I dare say young men have more pressure on them that we did. Obviously I realise a baby isn't going give a toss - I'm only mentioning it at all because the Heat story had a pregnancy angle to it - but it is worrying.

We hope that when it comes to it we can show that it's okay to be a weight within a much larger margin than is being promoted by some of the magazines.