Is anyone else cross that the Next model looks on the verge of anorexia?

[WilfSell]

I think the catalogue one of the most widely recognised retailers in the UK, pored over by countless young girls no doubt, should NOT feature a model who is so thin she looks ill.

Her upper thighs and arms are just about the same or perhaps thinner than the lower and her face is getting that 'stretched' look where you can see odd muscles.

I really don't think it is on.

I understand all the arguments. I know I am in a minority. I still think it is short sighted and wrong to assume that models, or normal people are mentally ill, unhappy or disturbed if they want to be thin.

I don't assume that if someone is overweight (even very overweight) that they are depressed, a feedee, or at crisis point.

Pre-media, there were always people who enjoyed being thin. There were always people who were larger.

It has become a modern cliche that we all have to buy into; very thin people of over disciplined miseries who are shallow and troubled. Very larger people are 'real women' with curves and vitality and bubbly personalities. And the 12-16's in between are Mrs Average who have got it about right and have the freedom to go to Weightwaters, yo yo a bit, get into a bikini in the summer and then overdo it in the winter but in the meantime pat themselves on the back for being 'normal' and 'feel sorry' and 'worry' about anyone else who isn't them.

Sorry I just don't buy it anymore.

I spent a few weeks in an acting class with a minor tv actress/Heat sleb. She was size zero or less. She ate tiny amounts and spent about half an hour in the bathroom after each snack/meal break. She really didn't come across as a happy person, hiding away in the bathroom while everyone else got on with their workshops and classes.

Having worked in and around this environment, I think it is tragic that women feel this is what they need to achieve to be successful.

The crap about, "Well I'm naturally thin and blah blah" is missing the point spectacularly. For the majority of the population, being that thin is not easily achievable or natural, yet there is pressure on them to copy it.

And all this, "Well, it takes work to be thin, our mothers' generation put some effort into it" - well, that's the pressure right there. The implication that if you don't work hard at being thin, you're slovenly, less womanly etc. etc.

Why the flaming buggery SHOULD we put some effort into being thin and 'working' at it? There's more important things to be getting on with! And quite honestly, I find doing those important things much more difficult when I'm hungry.

But why despise her if she wants to?

Why pity her?

She doesn't pity you or think you are unhappy.

Why is it so tragic? It is just a choice, just a vagary of the human condition. People are all different thank God and as many people as you can cite who are like her, I can point out a million women, young women particular, who are big and confident and feel great and wear clothes that I would never have dared wear at any age, or any size.

There has never been a better time to be any shape you please.

I admit I have absolutely NO emotion about weight or size. I don't look at thin women and pity them, or fat women and think 'GO GIRL!' or Mrs Average and think 'bet you shop at Next'.

Couldn't care less. I do think it is totally disingenous to pretend that you feel sorry for, or worry about the nutrional needs of celebs/models/strangers. Surely the whole weight issue is just another opportunity for women to slag of other women, gossip, and whinge about how much 'pressure' we are all under.

Tip for happiness; don't worry about other people's sizes, habits, choices, lifestyles so much and stop looking for 'pressure' where there isn't any.

And this from a very average women who feels little but tolerance for her average body. My face is ok though and my heart is good.

Have to be a tad circumspect here, but a friend work in the music industry and knows that certain female singers who appear weekly in magazines and newspapers are either bulimic, anorexic or do/take things to suppress their appetite (hardly a great surprise to anyone) but it's endemic in her industry. She's always amused when they claim in interview they're an egg and chips girl.

Using underweight models is rather old-hat though, rather like Next itself.

Did I say I despised her? She was lovely. But she seemed very sad. She closed herself off from other people and missed out on a lot of fun. I don't pretend to feel sorry for her, I actually DID feel sorry for her.

A choice is a choice if freely made. Do alcoholics choose to be alcoholic? Do people choose to have depression?

There is a lot of pressure and sadly it hits those who are vulnerable - usually adolescent girls who have enough to deal with.

You sound very smug, greatgoing. Have you really never been affected by peer pressure or insecurity? If so, you're very lucky.

I don't know what to say. I am not going to list all the sad horrible things that have happened to me to prove I am not smug.

With genuine tears in my eyes, I am going to bow out here. Mean girls. They crop up everywhere.

You have 'no emotion' about weight but now have genuine tears because someone on an internet forum said that sounded smug.

Aside from anything political, when I buy clothes online I'd like to see what they would look like on a more averagely shaped woman.

These pictures are very poor advertising - I simply wouldn't buy them because they appear to be styled for the unrealistically ultra-slim. That, and they're largely awful.

Sorry to see you go greatgoing, you provided an interesting discussion. I do understand that if someone wants to be thin then it is their lifestyle choice and I don't think anyone here is denying that, I like being thin hence I exercise regularly, but there is a difference between thin and mentally stable and aneroxic and mentally ill and then for Next to pretend that look is somehow accessible for average people. These girls look like they have eating disorders not girls that enjoy being thin. Eating disorders kill people and destroy families. This is where most posters have to draw the line. I have only ever seen one other person in real life who is as thin as that and she was aneroxic, I did not know her but she used to come to the gym. She was very weak and did not seem to have the full range of movements. Maybe she is happy the way she is like you say but I'm sure that there will be long term impact to her health.

greatgoing, are you flouncing totally from MN

or just from this thread ?

would be sad to see you leave MN, you have a valid viewpoint, well-articulated

You're right greatgoing, I'm not particularly concerned for the nutritional needs of obviously starved models or actresses. I am though concerned about the message it puts across to very impressionable young girls. These models and actresses [and trust me, I've seen it at close range] perpetuate the myth that they are the ideal and they are naturally skeletal and eat pasta every night, and that puts enormous pressure on young women who are often laden with oestrogen at the time and naturally have layers of flesh, who feel they are inferior because they cannot compete with that. It is just the way the world is. I'm sorry you feel victimized because people have said mean things to you and you are naturally thin. But there is a systematic starvation going on amongst many young women, and when successful women perpetuate the myth that underweight - beauty, it just keeps the vicious cycle going. And that I am much more sorry about.

sorry, that underweight = beauty.

And overweight people very often have eating disorders, or at least, problematic relationships with food, too. I don't want overweight people being presented as the ideal body image either [not that it would ever happen.]

Greatgoing, you sound just like some of the shite on pro-ana websites. Were you aware of that?

Wilfself - I thought exactly the same thing.

I flounced because as always debates on this site descend into personal insults and fifth form bitchiness; why can't women argue without resisting nasty digs? But that is another discussion.

It is really interesting that it has been assumed that I am 'naturally thin'. I am not at all. I prefer to be a 10 or 12 but have been all sizes and at the moment am heavily pregnant so I am pregnant size.

I am not so polly-annaish as to deny that there are all sorts of pressures on women. It troubles me deeply that our own daughters are living in a world where sexual pressure is horrific; porn is everywhere, bodies are sexually enhanced and the currency of success seems to be based on sex, sex ,sex. This is a real constant pressure that is growing.

Equally, I just don't believe this 'pressure to be thin' exists anymore much outside women and their own minds and circles. And if it does, it certainly doens't work! We are a nation queuing up at weight loss classes and crying into our muffins (me included); not because there are billboards of 'skinny minnies' on every street corner, or heards of anorexics swarming through the streets, but because we just can't stop eating (again, ME included).

And if your references are Heat, or other such mags, then sure, the lowest, basest bits of society become your flash point. But it is like saying you can't find decent news commentary in The Sun. There are lots of magazines out there that really don't focus on how thin the soap stars are.

There is something pretty distasteful about well off, haelthy Western women with more choices that probably any other women in the world, with more food, drink, gyms, psychiatric help, medical help, and even more grub to ease all our pain, to bemoan and hand wring the 'pressure' put on us by a frankly ridiculous looking model in a catalogue.

I am appalled that I have been percieved as pro-ana. I am not, and I am not going to bore you with why I am so obviously not. In summary, of course I think that it is inadvisable of Next to use such extremes, but the abusive response that body shapes get is equally a cause and effect of the pressure women put on each other, which is more insidious, more powerful and more nasty than any of the 'pressure' put on us by 'the media'.

So Greatgoing is now going to namechange for the fourth time in as many years.....hmmmm.....

Your argument doesn't really make much sense, sorry greatgoing. No one is making abusive comments about the models. They are stating a fact - that they look starved and underweight. Everyone has acknowledged that some women are naturally thin. I myself am pretty naturally slim. No one is being abusive to them either. All they are saying is the huge amount of images presenting underweight women as the perfect ideal is damaging to young women. If you want to go on and on saying it isn't and women being bitchy to each other is the real reason [when there has been no bitchiness at all on this thread - one criticism made of you which often happens when people debate I'm afraid] then that is up to you but the argument makes little sense.

Do they look starved though? Genuine question. Other than the one with the thigh stubble i haven;t yet seen one that has made me shocked. She doesn't look ill either - to me.

And for whoever it was said to boycott Next - I already do! Their clothes are shite and fall apart v quickly

Greatgoing isn't pro ana - she is pro "your shape" from what i have read on this thread.

Not to devolve into who started it, but you said it was disingenuous to 'pretend' to feel sorry for someone. I think that's really rude and really quite nasty when I quite liked the girl and felt bad for her. But, I'm sorry you choose to be so offended by my suggestion that being emotionless about weight sounds smug. I'm not a 'mean girl' though, however you'd like to paint me.

Anyway, putting such fifth form matters aside and moving on...

I'm interested in these magazines which don't have stick thin models on every page. I think I've seen a pretty wide range from computer mags to broadsheet magazines and they ALL have jutting collarbones etc. etc. I've not seen many average or 'plus' sized women represented.

If all body shapes are acceptable, then why is this happening?

Women are certainly not ignoring these images. I will happily admit some of them make me feel quite insecure about myself and I'm not massively body conscious. I'm sure the effect on many younger women is even more profound. You can't possibly say that it's all in their own mind and these images don't deepen those insecurities.

I think her argument that 'choosing' to be unhealthily underweight is a valid choice is what reflects the rhetoric on pro-ana sites. That anorexia is a lifestyle choice, not an illness.

"ana" is the lifestyle. Anorexia is the illness as a result of living with Ana.

I'm one of those lucky sort of people who eats normally and remains fairly slim. I have a jelly belly from having had babies and some cellulite but I'm still a size 8.

I am not very body concious and feel pretty secure about the way I look.

And yet I still as a confident, 36 year old women can flick through a magazine and feel a bit like a porker after looking at image after image of air brushed thin people.

It seems obvious that if I, as a secure adult, can feel like that, then teenage girls are going to be affected.

It is just boring and wrong for the media to portray beauty in this way (and bizarrely generally not that beautiful). The women in the Dove advertising campaign are a lot more attractive than these women in horrid Next clothes.

No one had any size issue with the women with thigh stubble mumofmonsters. She was linked to show a healthy looking body. It was the first images linked to, of a very skeletal figure, that raised concern.

one only has to think of how they airbrushed Kate Winslet, who has a fantastic figure but who is not skinny, for a lad's magazine to make her legs longer and much skinnier, to see how unfair it is for young women.

It wasn't her size that made me it was the fact that they didn't airbrush her stubble away

I didn't find any of them skeletal actually. These are disgusting ..

WARNING VERY thin/skeletal women and possibly nudity

stella McCartney?
photos-c.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v161/228/95/555301258/n555301258_687258_9142.jpg
probably the worst i have seen

THEY are skeletal.

Thin (or skinny) is subjective.