Do thin models cause anorexia?

Does glamorizing “Paris-thin” models cause anorexia? Some lawmakers in France think so. In a national effort to combat the prevalence of anorexia among its girls and women, the French Parliament is considering new legislation that will set minimum weight standards for female models.

Part of a comprehensive health law, the proposed legislation would fine violators 75,000 euros (about $80,000) and sentence them to up to six months in jail. An amendment in the bill mandates that models provide a medical certificate proving that their body mass index (BMI) is at least 18 (for a woman 5 feet 7 inches tall, that’s at least 121 pounds). A second amendment imposes penalties on “pro-ana” or “thinspiration” websites that provide how-to-be-anorexic tips and glorify gossamer bodies.

France isn’t the first country to propose such a law; Israel already forbids hiring underweight and underage models, while Italy and Spain have also implemented similar legislation. With an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 French females reportedly suffering from anorexia nervosa, France is taking this issue very seriously—and visibly. Parliament’s decision will be significant, because as the epicenter of fashion, France influences the culture of the industry and can push it to consider more gravely the consequences of promoting too-skinny models.

But that’s the problem: It’s a too-simplistic solution to a too-simplistic blame on catwalks and magazines for today’s alarming phenomenon of eating disorders. What’s more, BMI is unreliable in judging a person’s healthy weight, especially when factoring in ethnicity and bone structure. Many models are naturally thin, or simply underdeveloped because of their young age. In fact, not all who struggle with anorexia are stick-skinny. A chubby girl can have anorexia, and so can males.

The debate surrounding the links between eating disorders, body image, and the fashion industry is not a new one, but it gained momentum after French model and actress Isabelle Caro posed nude for a controversial anti-anorexia campaign in 2007. The startling, discomforting blown-up posters of her body in the throes of anorexia—protruding ribs and collar bones, jutting tailbone, blank stare, and deflated, wrinkled breasts—pasted a human face and body onto an incomprehensible, misunderstood mental disorder. Caro died in 2010 at age 28 due to complications from anorexia, but not before jolting the public into recognizing that anorexia is a real, hideous, deadly disease.

That’s why good, effective public conversation on the realities of eating disorders should be encouraged and applauded. This legislation just isn’t one of those.

Eating disorders are a complex, multi-layered enslavement of the mind and soul that reveal their rottenness through outward behaviors and appearances. Certainly, many individuals with eating disorders like to go online to lust over fashion models’ sharp contours and concave tummies—but that’s an aggravating symptom, not a cause. Substituting those figures with “healthy-looking” bodies won’t heal the disease, which goes much, much deeper and travels way back into ancient times when Satan, the father of lies and destruction, first deceived Eve through the serpent. From then on, Satan and sin have linked arms to systematically strip away any traces of God-given human dignity and purpose.

People ignorant of mankind’s spiritual condition will understandably blame genetics, poor parenting, the media, culture, the lack of “empowered women,” addiction, vanity, trauma, and other external and biological factors for creating eating disorders. But what exactly causes anorexia is still an unsettled, hotly debated study among medical professionals and researchers. Why would an otherwise rational person defy the laws of nature? (And it certainly goes against the theory of evolution.) Why would she so painfully torture her own body into slow starvation—even as she flinches at people’s disgusted stares and honestly, desperately wants to enjoy French fries and a strawberry milkshake without panicking?

Indeed, anorexia makes absolutely no sense, not until the realization that all mankind live in flagrant defiance of the natural creation of God. Anorexia just happens to ostensibly and dramatically exhibit our broken, deceived, bondaged state without God—which can actually lead to enormous blessings when it awakens a daily, desperate hunger for the gospel. But if someone were to recover from anorexia (and many do to some degree) without having identified and treated the root of it, the symptoms of destruction will persist—this “recovered” person will still be seeking love, worth, and freedom in all the wrong places.

France, fashion, and many other entities and nations including the United States rightly need to do some soul-searching into why so many people are suffering from eating disorders. Eating disorders fester and grow in secrecy and deceit, but making a villain out of the fashion world only distracts people from the real villain of eating disorders. What we need is a clear exposure of what they truly are, not a scapegoat.