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POPSThe Girls 'Sexualised' At Age Of Five Researcher Dr Eileen Zurbriggen said that girls as young at four are at risk. "The consequences of the sexualisation of girls in media today are very real and are likely to be a negative influence on girls' healthy development," she said. "As a society, we need to replace all these sexualised images with ones showing girls in positive settings. "The goal should be to deliver messages to all adolescents - boy and girls - that lead to healthy sexual development." Michele Elliot, of child protection charity Kidscape, said: "Bratz dolls are little sexualised creatures which give the wrong message to kids. "Let them be kids. We have got children of 12, 13 and 14 who are ashamed that they haven't had sex yet. They think sex is the be all and end all." A spokesman for Bratz said that children see the dolls as being pretty rather than sexy.
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POPSNew France Law: Thin Models Illegal!
The bill reflects concerns about pro-anorexic (so-called pro-ana) websites, said to encourage extreme weight loss. But Boyer said the legislation's impact would be wide-ranging. The bill is the latest in a series of measures to be proposed following the 2006 anorexia-linked death of a Brazilian model prompted efforts to tackle eating disorders within the fashion industry. Didier Grumbach, president of the influential French Federation of Couture, said: "Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny. That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France." Marleen S Williams, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, who researches the media's effect on anorexic women, said it was almost impossible to prove that the media causes eating disorders. She said studies showed fewer eating disorders in "cultures that value full-bodied women". But she added that she fears the new French law,
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POPSAbercrombie"Banishes girl with Prosthetic Arm to Storeroom - she Doesn't Fit The "Look Policy"
The cardigan, however, wasn't enough to satisfy the Abercrombie team. As Riam recalls: "A worker from what they call the "visual team", people who are employed to go round making sure the shop and its staff look up to scratch, came up to me and demanded I take the cardigan off. I told her, yet again, that I had been given special permission to wear it. A few minutes later my manager came over to me and said: "I can't have you on the shop floor as you are breaking the Look Policy. Go to the stockroom immediately and I'll get someone to replace you. I pride myself on being quite a confident girl but I had never experienced prejudice like that before and it made me feel utterly worthless. Afterwards I telephoned the company's head office where a member of staff asked whether I was willing to work in the stockroom until the winter uniform arrived. That was the final straw. I just couldn't go back." She is now suing the company, which, by the way, already paid 2.2 million dollars
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POPSDetermined to die? "The methods that they chose could have killed anyone." That study of about 250 women suffering eating disorders showed the risk of death by suicide among by anorexic women to be as much as 57 times the expected rate of a healthy woman. The gruesome methods they chose as well as how they isolated themselves from rescue, Holm-Denoma says, leaves little doubt that they wished to die. Females between the ages of 15 and 24 are 12 times more likely to die from anorexia than all other causes of death, the NEDA reports. And suicide is the primary cause of death for anorexics, greater even than starvation. Holm-Denoma stresses her research highlights how seriously treatment providers must take suicide risks amongst those suffering from eating disorders. "The likelihood of whether a patient wants to lethally hurt herself must be assessed right away," Holm-Denoma says, adding, "Addressing psychiatric needs must be paramount."
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POPSAnorexia: Whose Fault Is It? What do you think? I'm kind of on both sides of the argument, that it's a combination of nurture and nature. I was raised by a mother who was obsessed with her weight and who would regularly tell me I was fat and that was when I was pushing 120! I had boyfriends who considered me fat at 130. I toyed with binging and purging, but being a Type A personality, it made me feel out of control. I decided that I would have to find other ways to keep my weight down that didn't include doing anything gross to myself or causing myself pain (I had severe gall stones, but didn't know until years later). Now I am a healthy but plump 170 (I have three kids after all), and I actually get a lot of compliments on how I look. I find ways to enhance my assets and hide my flaws and complement those things I do like about myself. I do worry about my weight getting worse, so I maintain habits that control/lower my weight, but I don't starve myself.
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