RAGEGIST

How can you protect your girls from this?

The bikini bridge. Source: Twitter

A FACEBOOK friend recently noted the following conversation he heard on a suburban railway platform:

Schoolgirl 1: “How are you so thin?”
Schoolgirl 2: “I don’t eat breakfast.”
Schoolgirl 1: “I’d get hungry!”
Schoolgirl 2: “If you have a smoke when you leave home and at the station, you’ll get used to it.”
Another friend mentioned, with some sadness, a conversation a mother-friend had with her early primary school-aged daughter:
Mother: “Oh, there’s still food in your lunch box, you haven’t eaten it all, are you feeling ill?”
Girl: “No, I just don’t want to eat too much food.”
Mother: “Why?”
Girl: “Because eating too much food makes you fat”.
The latest trend embraced by “young fashionistas” is known as “Bambi legs”. The idea is you get so thin your legs look as fragile and bony as Disney’s baby fawn’s.
According to the magazines, Bambi legs is even more extreme a slimming trend than “thigh gap” (otherwise known as “box gap”), where you lose enough to get a space all the way up from your knees to your crotch when standing feet together. So 2013, apparently. Now your whole legs should look too frail to hold up your weight.

The elusive thigh gap. Source: Supplied

This comes hot on the heels of the other trend sweeping women’s social media in 2014, the “bikini bridge”. This involves getting so thin your pelvis bones protrude when you’re lying on your back and your bikini bottom is suspended between the bony outcrops (see above).
One way to achieve all this would be to follow the extreme diet being spruiked today by the publicity-addicted “Human Barbie”, Ukranian model Valeria Lukyanova. She hit front pages of websites around the globe for spruiking the so-called ‘breatharian’ diet.
Some breatharians have died while on this cult regimen that involves living only on air, light and water to achieve “eternal beauty”. Lukyanova tweets her weight, 46.2kg, with rear-facing — yes Bambi-ish legs - as proof of its merit.

Valeria Lukyanova. Source: Facebook

As extreme weight-loss trends like these have spewed across the net in recent years, pressure from consumers and health lobby groups has encouraged some fashion editors to throw their might behind the “healthy body” movement.
The odd “real women” or “plus-sized model” edition has made a splash, but taking in all of the above you really wonder how much any of these novelties has helped to counter the extreme-thinness ideal.
When the world’s most celebrated brand, Chanel, launched its Fall-Winter collection with an ultra-glam, supermarket-themed parade in Paris (where the main item for sale on the elaborate set appeared to be bottles of coloured water) last week, it was still not Karl Lagerfeld’s designs that grabbed the big publicity, but the “microscopic” waist of one of the stars of its advertisements, actress Keira Knightley. Its tininess was striking.
Many of the models putting pretty water in their designer “trolleys” in the parade were even tinier.
So how are parents hoping to raise healthy kids through adolescence, as they grow up in the most online-soaked generation yet, to protect their developing identities from the proliferation of starving-is-good messages in imagery, online and on the haute couture catwalks?
“More education,” is the solution suggested by the Butterfly Foundation’s national head of communications, Sarah Spence. She is encouraged by the many media and fashion influencers who have embraced healthy body-weight campaigns.
Still, more than 913,000 Australians needed hospital treatment for eating disorders in 2012, and numbers of suffers have not reduced since. In fact, bulking out the traditional eating-disorder demographic — girls — more boys and young men are now presenting for treatment with disordered-eating illnesses.

Actress Keira Knightley poses as she arrives to Chanel's ready to wear fall/winter 2014-2015 fashion collection presented in Paris, Tuesday, March 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus) Source: AP

“We are quite alarmed by extreme thinness and extreme dieting practices which are still very much upheld as the perfect body type in our society,” says Sarah Spence. “There are many groups in the media trying to dispel myths around what is seen as the perfect body type and introduce better reporting, and knowledge, which we applaud.”
She concedes that while mainstream media is increasingly promoting the ‘healthy body’ line, the job of counteracting “thinspiration” or Thinspo messages on blogs, websites and social media is vast.
Parents struggling to shield kids like my little 10 year-old, for whom weight is not an issue but whose radar weight-talk has well and truly crossed, face an intimidating battle. We can’t do it on our own.
Token gestures, or one-off campaigns from style makers aside, you can’t but get the feeling when it comes to really counteracting the toxic ideals behind the ‘Bambi legs’ and “box gaps” the industry that thrives off our desperation to be “beautiful” doesn’t walk the talk.
What do you think the solution is? Share your thoughts in the comment section below