Separating
Stars from
PeopleGossip magazines that seek to “out” celebrity eating disorders claim concern for the star, and allegedly educate their readerships about the disorder. However, this sort of journalism has multiple negative effects undermining its façade of benevolent concern. Celebrity magazines’ goal of sparking awareness of a star’s condition effectively isolates readers from the real experience of disordered eating; it becomes a problem caused by abnormal pressure, namely that of being in the public eye. Furthermore, while articles sometimes offer surprisingly clear indictments of our obsession with thinness, they avoid making the next logical connection. Writers never acknowledge the pathological nature of eating disorders in a late capitalist society simultaneously demanding greater consumption and thinner bodies. Often, in fact, an article refuses to name an eating disorder, resorting instead to euphemisms like “extreme dieting.” The goal, it would seem, is to talk about eating disorders without acknowledging their most widely-held determinants. A reading of these articles informed by the writings of Susan Bordo, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, and poststructuralist Roland Barthes will help flesh out – as it were – the counter-intuitive articles in celebrity beauty magazines devoted to eating disorders.
A comment made during our class discussion of Brumberg’s work – paraphrased here – eventually led me to choose this subject: we don’t find anorexic bodies beautiful. My immediate thought was that this is false. Anorexic bodies are considered beautiful so long as their anorexia is not pronounced. In contemporary North America, the ideal female body type – a mediated fiction to be sure – can only be maintained through disordered eating. We read in magazines like Star and People – arbiters of beauty and appropriate style – that our body ideals are destroying the actors and singers we look to for examples of beauty. Yet alongside these articles we see other celebrities similarly emaciated. Because today’s cultural standard of female beauty in the West is only attainable through disordered eating, the bodies we consider beautiful are most likely also anorexic.
Interestingly, celebrity magazines’ articles on the subject are so surrounded by images of similarly slimmed bodies that an astute reader, reading “against the grain,” can easily infer the connection writers don’t make. Never occupying too large a percentage of a celebrity gossip magazine, eating disorders are made exceptional, and the insights printed in their regard are never explicitly developed. However, the fundamentally indistinguishable emaciated silhouettes of the celebrities marked as “extreme dieters” and those assumed to be healthy betray their correspondence. Images of celebrities with eating disorders are largely identical to those of celebrities in surrounding articles, and the advertising images filling out the glossy pages of the magazines. The message available to readers who look for it is that our cultural ideal of (specifically female) beauty is physically unsustainable. Whether they are “outed” as victims of eating disorders or merely selling a new fragrance, the slenderness of so many stars can only be achieved through unhealthy control of hunger and the body.
This insight is at the root of my decision to address this type of celebrity journalism in this essay. I chose to look at this genre of celebrity article because it comes so close to revealing the inherent contradictions of contemporary consumer culture. As Susan Bordo wrote, pathological behaviors like eating disorders reveal our society’s synchronous yet contradictory urges to always consume more while becoming thinner: "Bulimia embodies the unstable double bind of consumer capitalism, while anorexia and obesity embody an attempted resolution of that double bind" (Bordo 201). Indeed, many articles on celebrity eating disorders reveal this same incongruity between our standards of beauty and our compulsion to consume, but always do so on an individual scale. In an article on Nicole Ritchie’s postpartum weight loss, an inside source for Star tellingly observes: “It’s a constant battle between what she knows is right and what she sees in the mirror.” This biting point is the last sentence in the article. The words “eating disorder” are never used though they clearly apply. This lucid observation that our relationships to food and to our bodies are fundamentally at odds is blunted by its presentation. While adroitly addressing individual cases of disordered eating brought on by physical and emotional stress, celebrity magazines like Star fail to make the connection between individual cases and our culture-wide standards of beauty.
In Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls, she proposes a useful model for studying the effects of these notions of female beauty. She proposes three different lenses through which anorexia has been interpreted and treated. The first is the biomedical, whereby individuals with eating disorders are evaluated in purely physical terms (Brumberg 27). The second mode of eating disorder analysis she proposes is psychological, which holds that anorexia, bulimia and obesity are physical manifestations of a more deep-seated psychological disturbance in the individual, which must be treated according to various therapeutic models (29-33). The facet of eating disorders Brumberg is most concerned with, however, is its cultural determination. In essence, she suggests that a late capitalist culture predicated on ever-increasing consumption that also demands an ultra-thin body, forces consumers into an irreconcilable bind (35). Thus, to fully understand the factors behind the rising rates of eating disorders, Brumberg insists we must adopt all three perspectives.
Celebrity magazines though, generally limit themselves to the biomedical and psychological determinants of eating disorders. In a recent issue of People, for instance, an article on Marie Osmond in a section titled “Body Watch” sports the headline: “Lost 40 Lbs. in 5 Months!” The article attributes Osmond’s drastic weight loss to the recent death of both her parents and her divorce, and the dangerous eating habits she developed as a child star. The article explains that “Osmond was onstage by age 3–and following extreme diets by age 12.” This narrow focus on the psychological factors causing eating disorders, as is standard practice in literature on the subject, overlooks the fundamental cultural conundrum playing such an important role in the disorders’ spread. Interestingly, a quotation from Osmond provides greater insight than the article’s writers seem capable of: “‘I know the head trip of focusing on the outside,’ she notes, ‘when, really, we have to focus on the inside.’” This statement, typically, is the last sentence of the article. Though Osmond comes close to formulating our society’s unhealthy obsession with body image, the article remains focused on fame as the source of these pressures. Celebrity magazines’ preoccupation with isolating specific celebrities as victims of eating disorders, then, has the effect of overlooking anorexia’s far-reaching contemporary cultural roots.
Our unsustainable standards of beauty, rarely stated explicitly by celebrity gossip magazines, are available to the informed readers of magazines like Star and People. On the back page of a recent issue of Star, Julianne Moore is quoted as saying: “I hate dieting. I hate having to do it to be the ‘right’ size. I’m hungry all the time… All actresses are hungry all the time.” This protest against Hollywood standards of beauty is presented without commentary, but betrays the cultural compulsion forcing Moore – one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood today – to diet. In statements like these celebrity magazines reveal what Brumberg found missing from literature on anorexia: as much as individual psychological and biomedical factors contribute to disordered eating habits, they are also culturally determined. By articulating the oppressive standards of beauty actresses must embody, Moore presents a fleeting protest against the aesthetic ideal she is often believed to exemplify.
For all the revelatory power of Moore’s statement, however, it commits another prevalent shortcoming of celebrity eating disorder literature. This quotation questions the self-denial and bodily micro-management actresses endure, but it confines these problems to the ranks of the rich and famous. Celebrity magazines, though sometimes revelatory in their coverage of celebrity eating disorders, perpetually distance these experiences from those of their readership. In the pages of Star and the like, eating disorders become the exclusive purview of celebrities, engendered by the pressures and difficulties of being in the public eye. This sort of celebrity journalism falls outside the multipronged strategy Brumberg proposes will effectively counter-act increasing rates of eating disorders. One approach, she suggests, is to reduce our preoccupation – in global media and on an interpersonal basis – with a thin body ideal, and body imaging generally (Brumberg 272). Celebrity journalism’s fascination with eating disorders, however, concerns those stars’ struggle to maintain that body ideal. These images of disordered bodies are merely an extension of our obsession with thin bodies.
This kind of article seems to conform to another important change Brumberg proposes, to spread awareness and understanding of eating disorders (273-4). However, this genre of journalism falls short on this account as well. Such articles oversimplify the symptoms and catalysts of disordered eating under the pretense of informing readers. In her book, Brumberg veers away from this idea that eating disorders have a stable and identifiable set of manifest traits. Indeed, she chronicles the very adaptive nature of disordered eating since Medieval Europe. The brand of celebrity literature in question here, however, claims to provide highly visible examples of eating disorders. By projecting what are touted as symptoms onto recognizable bodies, this literature effectively defines eating disorders and neutralizes their threat. “This famous person is anorexic,” it implies, “these pictures prove it.” Part of the suggestion is that eating disorders are an expression of psychological and physical pressures, but are largely the province of stars. Furthermore, rather than a changing set of characteristics that could be found in most celebrities and many readers, these articles narrowly define the experience of eating disorders.
The ideological operation at work here is an example of the signification systems outlined by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Whereas Brumberg documents a history of anorexia over hundreds of years of European history, celebrity journalism’s treatment of eating disorders naturalizes a very specific iteration of this phenomenon. Coverage published by magazines like Star and People presents eating disorders as a text without history. This kind of article, then, “transforms history into nature” (Barthes 129). By presenting eating disorders as a problem engendered by the psychological and biomedical pressures of fame, these articles naturalize disordered eating as a celebrity problem. This confinement of eating disorders to stars’ experience is deliberate, but celebrity magazines present it as natural. Put another way: “any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts” (131). As a result, eating disorders are dissociated from the contradictory cultural imperatives of greater consumption and thinner bodies to which we are all subjected. These articles effectively distance ‘ordinary’ – that is, non-famous – readers from the problems of eating disorders. Certainly celebrities’ hyper-visible bodies mean they are subject to greater scrutiny, compounding the compulsion to adhere to our extreme standards of beauty. However, celebrity magazines seem to deny that every person living in the modernized West is evaluated according to these very same body ideals. The pressure to control one’s body is naturalized as a celebrity problem, rather than a culture-wide issue.
This form of celebrity journalism performs another of the ideological maneuvers defined by Barthes’ semiotics, what he terms inoculation. By this process, the problems of a given value or system are admitted, and then dismissed as a small drawback in comparison to the far greater benefits offered. Barthes describes the rhetorical device operating as follows: "Take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the very curse of its blemishes" (41, original emphasis). Celebrity magazines’ coverage of eating disorders provides a striking example of inoculation. Stars designated as having eating disorders – however coded that language might be – are presented as a minority within a large community of healthy and beautiful stars. This implies that while a few will fall into excess in their efforts to control their bodies, most will succeed – we’re not sure how – in embodying our ideals of beauty. The benefits of thinness – fame and power, as we are told – are presented as well worth the risk of developing an eating disorder. Through this inoculation, then, celebrity magazines can address stars’ eating disorders, all the while upholding the standards of beauty that are their cause.
Though contradictory, celebrity magazines’ coverage of eating disorders mirrors the fundamental opposition structuring consumer society in its current late capitalist incarnation. Bordo explained that the contemporary increase in eating disorders is a result of two opposed cultural imperatives: “the hunger for unrestrained consumption… existing in unstable tension alongside the requirement that we sober up” (Bordo 201). Celebrity magazines indulge in a similar opposition. On the one hand articles about eating disorders warn readers of the dangers involved in pursuing the ultra-thin body ideal. Meanwhile, the surrounding articles and advertisements espousing beautiful slim bodies reinforce that ideal. We should see these opposite imperatives as a deliberate strategy to foster insecurities to which products can be marketed. After all, it would be difficult to sustain a highly-developed capitalist economy whose consumers were secure. These magazines, as a microcosm of the larger culture, exploit contemporary insecurities regarding body image for advertising revenue. Perhaps the most valuable thing to be taken from celebrity eating disorder articles – aside from the telling statements of fed-up stars – is the seamless continuity between their unhealthy bodies, those of otherwise healthy stars, and advertising imagery. The fundamentally indistinguishable bodies in the pages of these magazines betray that they can only be achieved through disordered eating. Until the kind of pictures in these magazines change – “images that allow for aging and ethnic variability, and images that portray women as having qualities other than just ‘sexiness’” (Brumberg 272) – we can seize upon the inherent contradictions they betray.
Note: This essay was written for Deirdre Boyle's class "Mediating Consumption, Controlling the Body" at the New School in the Spring of 2008.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. 1993. Revised Ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003.
Brennan, Casey, Ilyssa Panitz, Heidi Parker and Tim Plant. “Nicole’s Extreme Diet.” In Star (February 18 2008), pp. 52-3.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. 1989. Revised Ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Clehane, Diane and Charlotte Triggs. “Body Watch: Marie Osmond.” In People (February 18 2008), pp. 143.
Moore, Julianne. “Overheard.” In Star (February 18 2008), pp. 96.
