Digital Scrapbook #5

“Underneath pop Star Scandals is a Serious Message about Young Women and Addiction” by Courtney E. Martin

Everywhere we look we see images of young pop stars and Hollywood actresses. TV shows, gossip columns, tabloids, magazines shower us with images of these often sickly thin and addicted young women. These girls are often the only images young women see of other women their age, thus they are, by proxy, who we are suppose to emulate and admire. And this, according to Martin, has normalized addiction for many young women. I’ve heard people argue that girls and young women should know that this elite class of Hollywood women does not serve as good role models; but they are the current focus of our media culture.

In “The Patriarchal Myth and the Addictive System” Dr. Northrup tells us that we all unconsciously inherit and internalize beliefs and assumptions about our bodies from our culture. She stresses that women cannot reclaim our “inherent ability to create health without first understanding the influence of our society on how we think about and care for our bodies” (3). If our society is sending us only one message about young women, we have only that message to learn and we have already begun to see the impact of that message. According to Martin, young women are “more diseased and more addicted than any generation of young women that has come before”. And because the images of women in magazines are perfect, even though the models in the magazines don’t really look like their pictures, we face a great amount of pressure to be perfect as well—we attempt to achieve the impossible with devastating results.
More and more women today have eating disorders and the rates of binge drinking and drug use is increasing as well. And now, according to Martin, we are noticing a strong link between eating disorders and alcohol abuse. Martin cites data from The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University that says that “up to one-half of individuals with eating disorders abuse alcohol or illicit drugs, compared to nine percent of the general population, and up to 35 percent of alcohol or illicit drug abusers have eating disorders compared to three percent of the general population. In “Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness” Jean Kilbourne also points out the link between eating disorders and cigarettes, as well as just about every other product marketed to women only. In her film Still Killing Us Softly 3, Kilbourne also points out that images of women in print advertising places emphasis on women being thin, innocent, and sexy. One print ad with a picture of a very thin model reads “The more you subtract the more you add” implying that the thinner a woman is the more she has to offer.

Both Dr. Northrup and Martin agree that in order for women to begin to heal, our culture must change. But we live in a capitalist society and those at the top make more money with our culture the way it currently is. As long as women are unhappy with the way they look, they’ll keep buying more and more products with the hopes of achieving the impossible. If the media shifted their attention elsewhere and, in turn, women began to love themselves the way they are, there would be no need to advertise products to improve looks thus no need to advertise. A capitalist society can’t function without consumerism; therefore, I don’t see changing coming any time soon.