Shriveling Starlets Thinspire Fanorexia
Kate Bosworth and Keira Knightley both became stars playing the leads in films about healthy, headstrong female athletes, which only heightens the irony of what they've become: flesh-covered sticks swimming in size zero designerwear, with barely enough energy to raise their now giant-seeming heads to answer the endless barrage of press junket questions launched at them. As they currently star in the two biggest youth-oriented event movies of the summer, parents of America's impressionable young ladies have taken concerned notice of the trend, fearing that their (mostly obese) children may soon want to start mimicking their skeletal heroines. And as with any media-concocted social panic story, we even get a catchy, new* word by which to identify the phenomenon: "Thinspiration."
Research shows 80 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat, and many of them are getting "thinspiration" from the growing list of young Hollywood celebrities who seem to be shrinking before our eyes.
"More and more celebrities are losing weight very quickly," said Us Weekly editor Caroline Schaefer. "Kate Bosworth, Ellen Pompeo, Keira Knightley. The list goes on. Stars are just getting smaller and smaller."
It could be argued that the "anoriffic" actresses aren't alone to blame for "thinspiring" these girls: the studios and fashion industry also owe us a "bulimia culpa" for glorifying the malnourished look in the first place. Hopefully, we'll see a reversal in the trend soon, before today's impressionable youth become tomorrow's body dysmorphic teens. It's a matter of great "purgency."
*CORRECTION: Our eating disorder consultant alerted us to the fact that "thinspiration" is not a new term after all, and has been in use by anorexics for some time. So instead, based on a suggestion of commenter The Gen X Eurotrash Jetsetter Club, we now endorse "fanorexia" (and all derivisions thereof) as our catchy celeb-inspired-eating-disorder term of choice.