Who’s Pulling Our Strings? Women's obsession with thinness

Ladies, we’ve become puppets. Mere marionettes with strings attached to our shoulders, limbs and, yes, even our heads.

There’s no other way to explain our obsession with thinness and starving ourselves — which evidently has reached the breaking point with the latest news coming out of the fashion world.

It appears the powers that be at Ralph Lauren don’t think their anorexic models are thin enough. That’s why they took it upon themselves to digitally alter a photo of a 5-foot-10 model that weighs in at a mere 120 pounds — to make her appear about 40 to 50 pounds thinner.

And because it’s unlikely that the real model wouldn’t be able to lose those 40 to 50 pounds without falling over dead, they fired her. At least that’s the reason model Filippa Hamilton gives on why she was given the pink slip. Filippa, who had worked for the company since she was 15, said, “They fired me because they said I was overweight and I couldn’t fit in their clothes anymore.”

Bloggers at BoingBoing.net spotted the ad with the alien-thin version of Filippa in an international magazine and cried foul.

Ralph Lauren, of course, claims the image was “mistakenly released.” For anyone who knows the process of getting an ad from the drawing board to print, this seems to be a pretty far-fetched excuse.

But after all the uproar dies down about the Ralph Lauren ad where does that leave us — really?

I predict we will forget how indignant we were. We always do.

Remember our disbelief at the anorexic-looking Kate Moss? Our outrage lost steam and the downsizing of all models began.

Do you vaguely remember the campaign to get more realistic-looking models on the runways and magazine layouts? It fizzled. According to Kate White, editor in chief of Cosmo, who appeared on the Today show recently, if you’re not a size 0 or a size 2, forget about a career in modeling. By the way, Filippa wears a size 4.

The bottom line, according to White, is that nothing is going to change until women protest — and then actually do something to back it up.

As a collective whole, Kate says, we purchase magazines with skinny cover girls in far larger numbers than those featuring women who look like the average-sized woman.

We complain a lot about how damaging these anorexic images are to our girls and to us, yet we continue to idolize them and quietly obsess about our own weight, our definitions of beauty and our inability to fit into skinny jeans.

All of which begs the question: Just who is pulling our strings?

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by Shari Scales Finnell