Modelizing

OK, so I really wanted to hear your reply about how much of a babe you find Daniel Radcliffe and things, but I feel this is more important. Today I awoke to find this piece of blog action on my RSS feed and it kind of grossed me out:

She looks, and I imagine walks, speaks and acts like a child. And she's being touted as "one to watch" in the modelling world. A 13 year old child, is being touted as one to watch for her physical appearance. I find this hard to digest. I've listened and reacted to the rhetoric surrounding what is and what is not appropriate behaviour in the fashion world, but, recently, Ellen Falconer wrote a piece for me about Picture Me: A Models Diary (a movie which has just been released here) that suggests the overarching problem with the modelling industry was the age at which girls were subjected to it because:

A) By being ingratiated into an unrealistic culture at such a young age they believe it is a reality, and grow into it and its false expectations rather than growing to understand and relate to a series of realistic cultural and social standards. And, this point which I find far more important:

B) That when the industry suggests that a 13-14-15 year old girls figure is the normal and desired women's body shape it sets unrealistic standards for the rest of female society who absorb these images. I heard recently that anorexia and eating disorders were becoming overwhelmingly more common in middle-aged women, and this has got to be partly to blame. It's not just 'normal' women either. In Picture Me, international model Lisa Cant states that “a lot of the girls they are saying are anorexic are literally 14 years old. And if a girl is 14 years old and 5’9”, she will sometimes be 100 pounds and be the ideal that all of the other models have to live up to. So I think we should be keeping the younger models off runways.”

There are alternative arguments. I recently had a conversation with a very learned photographer who had grown up on philosophy and the teaching of Germaine Greer, who brought an alternate viewpoint to the table. She noted that Greer suggested that throughout history women have been sexualised at ages 12-13, usually for marriage and children, and therefore utilizing a 13 year old for the runway is nothing new or particularly controversial. 

My argument in response to that would be that our society has inherently changed. 

A) We are living longer and therefore do not need to be reproducing at age 13

B) In the last 500-or-so-years (up until I guess the beginning of the 19th Century) females roles have changed and we are not only respected for our sexual capabilities, but for our equal intelligence and place within society. 

There are so many other threads that come into this argument - the media's (blogs like the above and sensationalist glossy magazines particularly) perpetuation of such standards, the absurdity of attempting to get a 13 year old model to sell clothes to the 35 year old professional who can afford them, the fact that media's representation of society and reality are getting farther and farther removed from eachother - but I think this is a good place to start. It is such an inherent, universal standard, and the question has to be asked? When and how did we let this happen?

Or maybe it's just not that big of a deal.

We could potentially debate this more in person over red wine after seeing the movie:

And you should also read Jenna Sauers writing here, because she is an ex-New Zealander who exposed the ridiculous nature of the industry from behind-the-scenes while she was an international model and is also a very articulate journalist in her own right.

BOOM. Done.