Is Hollywood or the media responsible for the increasing number of anorexics?

In the end, someone who has an eating disorder is responsible for themselves. Blaming it on anything else only derails their recovery. They should take responsibility for their own actions.

At the end of the day it’s the anorexic’s decision to self mutilate.

If we blame Hollywood and the media for presenting an unrealistic body image to emulate then we have to also blame all our peers for reinforcing that.

I watch mainstream media and am not anorexic. As @Vunessuh said, you are responsible for yourself. It’s a sort-of-free country. Advertise whatever you want. I am going to laugh at the schemes you come up with, not buy into them. People need to be smarter. I can’t believe the stuff people believe sometimes. I don’t find rail thin people attractive. You can be thin and athletic, and that is healthy and much more attractive.

The media has an influence on how people feel about their bodies, but it is not responsible for the mental health of the public.

I do think that there is something wrong with creating and then preying on people’s insecurities, but the emphasis has to be on the people to be stronger than that. Mainstream media is not telling people to stop eating, to throw up after meals, to stuff themselves with unhealthy foods at night: that is the decision of the person alone.

I would blame glamour magazines before movies.
There are a lot of women in film who have curves (Scarlot Johannson, yum!)
Try and find ones in magazines that aren’t Oprah.

“Everywhere you look the media and in movies there are anorexic women” – How true is this statement of yours? Yes, there are a lot of slim women but slim doesn’t always equal anorexic. I’m slim and I wonder, if I was in the public eye, would I be accused of being anorexic?

I am sure that if someone already has issues and low self esteem then yes, seeing women that they consider more body beautiful than themselves probably doesn’t help their situation but I certainly don’t think we should ban slim people from the cover of magazines because it may send someone, who already has problems, over the edge. If someone has problems then there will always be something to tip them over the edge even if slim women were banned from the public eye.

Like others have said, people need to take a certain amount of responsibility for themselves. It’s too easy to blame everyone and everything else for our problems but, like I said, unless we take responsibility for ourselves, even if certain body images were no longer in public view, we will still find something to blame.

There are now studies linking adolescent girls negative self image to the way women are presented in the media. I guess I’ll look them up if anyone needs specifics. Women are shown a standard of the way they should look and unfortunately, adolescent girls seem to be the most vulnerable due to changing hormones and development of cognitive ability in the brain.
There are programs out there now to counteract this and they’ll probably grow over the next few years. They are having some success with these but the problem still does exist.
I think Gloria Steinem said it best. I can’t remember her exact quote so I paraphrase when I say “Women are judged and judge their own self worth by their ability to attract multiple males.

The roots of this particial minority{those who like to be really skiny}} Can be tie with catwalk and paris….....

I may be way off base here, but in my opinion, the problems that teens face today are directly related to the increase of mother’s in the workforce, with zero supervision provided for the children left at home. Yes, I count teens as children.