Lindsay at Majikthise raises in interesting point about a new Spanish law that requires fashion models to attain a certain Body Mass Index before being allowed to take to the catwalk. The intent is to project a healthier image for young girls who emulate the newest fashion modes and ideal bodies. Lindsay raises the question whether such a rule is justified on these grounds. Amanda at Pandagon has raised this as an occupational health problem for women. The new requirement of a BMI of 18 are in line with a World Health Organization guideline for a minimum health weight.
Amanda's position:
At the same time, there's apparently been a lot of hand-wringing over the increasing skinniness of fashion models after some countries have taken it upon themselves to pass entirely sensible worker safety regulations demanding that models have BMIs that are considered not overly underweight. People are worried to death that this is some kind of slap at free speech or what have you, but since the impetus for the laws was a supermodel who starved herself to death, the truth of the matter is this is basically a necessary protection for the workers so that their employers can't demand they sacrifice their health in order to keep their jobs. (Pandagon)
Lindsay dissents in part, concurs in part:
The Madrid Regional Government's rationale for the new law is very troubling. Their main argument is that fashion shows should be regulated because they present an unhealthy ideal of beauty to the public and therefore constitute a public health risk. I have no doubt this is true, but I don't want the government to suppress ideas just because the larger society considers those ideas to be destructive. I certainly wouldn't want the US government taking any greater liberties on the censorship front.
However, Amanda raises a compelling counterargument at Pandagon. As she notes, the industry standard in modeling is an occupational health risk. A designer's right to design clothes for emaciated models doesn't necessarily guarantee her right to hire actual people to wear these clothes under dangerous conditions.
The average fashion model has a BMI of 16, which well below what most medical experts consider a normal weight for a well-nourished adult. Only a fraction of post-pubescent women have a BMI below 18 for any reason (See Figure 3).
Even for 15-year-old girls, a BMI of 16 is at the 3rd percentile. (That is, only 3% of American 15-year-olds are at or below the average weight of a fashion model.) If you look at the chart I've linked to, you'll see that it doesn't even bother to quantify exactly how rare BMIs of 16 are in women ages 15-20. Look at the curve and you'll see what I mean--we're talking below the first percentile. (Majikthise)
The only reason I am foolhardy enough to weigh in on a topic roiling the feminist blogosphere is because Lindsay specifically asked my opinion from the occupational health point of view (OK. It's also interesting). This is just initial reaction, subject to change with counterargument.
I also see this as an occupational health issue, but only in a very general sense, the one that Amanda expressed when she said it was "basically a necessary protection for the workers so that their employers can't demand they sacrifice their health in order to keep their jobs." How necessary and where it fits in a concern about occupational health, however, is another matter. Women and men all over the world, including this country, are involuntarily sacrificing their health every shift in order to keep their jobs. Almost none of them are accorded the perquisites and pay of a supermodel. Even if we restrict ourselves to physical requirements for celebrities, we have young ballerinas who do damage to their skeletons and joints through exhausting repetition of unnatural postures and professional athletes who take performance enhancing drugs, sometimes with fatal outcome. My son was a wrestler in highschool and I remember well the things he and his teammates did to "make weight" in the 24 hours before weigh in for a match. Diuretics and vigorous exercise in wet suits to sweat out a couple of pounds were not uncommon. And, of course, there is the epidemic of repetitive strain injury. If you can't type the required number of words or enter your quota of data or keep up with the conveyor belt on the widget turning task, you are out of a job.
As Lindsay points out there are also issues involving creative expression. I take them seriously, but the people whose expression is constrained here are not exactly unable to express themselves in other ways. In a balancing act, I probably would restrict some freedom of expression if the health and safety of workers was at stake. Slippery slope arguments are often too stringent and I think this is such a case. But even then, I'm not very keen on how this was done. The burden here is placed on the worker to "make weight." If you are going to do something like this, you should place the burden on the employer, punishing them if they employ underweight models (as we do for employing underage workers). This law has the feel of a corporeal immigration reform, cracking down on the undocumented workers rather than the employers. I'll grant it is a matter of emphasis, because if the law is enforced it has the same effect, banning certain kinds of public displays as not in the public interest. It feels different to me, though, from an occupational health perspective, and legal "look and feel" establishes a perspective that is often important.
In the last analysis I find focusing on supermodels as an occupational health problem interesting but marginal because it doesn't also reveal the huge part of the iceberg below this grotesque tip, the huge number of working men and women dying for and on the job for wages a tiny fraction of what these women earn and none of the adulation. Indeed it tends to conceal it because of its glamour.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about fashion models. There is much to worry about in this world. But this isn't where I'd start unless it was a way to open other doors.
Maybe it is. Show me.
- Log in to post comments
If government regulates BMI at one end of the spectrum, will it also regulate the other end of the spectrum? Consider a law that says people in any entertainment field cannot have a BMI over 37 because it promotes obesity in children. It's a slippery slope when we regulate personal choices, such as BMI.
BTW, according to the Factbook on Global Sexual Explotation (http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/spain.htm) and other sources, prostitution is legal in Spain. Shouldn't people concerned about women's issues focus on really serious problems like the teenage girls who are taken from their third world homes and taken to Spain by protitution traffickers?
I think there's another very real public health consequence of the trend of using underweight models: Their public status as being the paramount of beauty has an effect on the physical and mental health of young women who aspire to be beautiful. Given this added impact on the public health, do you think this justifies an added reason for caution in addition to their own occupational safety?
Looking at most of them, I think they havent been introduced to the cure for tapeworms.....
Besides the better looking ones such as Brinkley, Ms. USA while thin dont look like some malnutrition experiment. They jeopardize their long term health when eating less than 1000 calories a day or eating all they want and then chucking it in the bathroom.
Great post, Revere. Thanks for navigating these treacherous waters.
I think it's important to remember that most catwalk models aren't highly paid. Modelling is like acting--a field with a tiny handful of celebrities and a lot of struggling aspirants.
For every model who works enough to quit her day job, there are probably five or six waiting tables to supplement their income.
The median salary for models in Virginia is $22,000.
Lindsay: Shows my ignorance, although you've seen what a fashion statement I am so you probably aren't surprised.
Context:
Zapatero, the socialist prime minister of Spain, was voted in right after the Madrid bombings, as the then (right wing, Franquist - Franco - remember him? ) Aznar lied right from the start about it, and the pubic noticed, big time.
Zapatero was shocked, he never thought he would win, but accepted the mission, how could he not?
Besides vital and interesting political issues, going well beyond this topic, he has done a lot in the realm of 'identity' or 'cultural' politics (some nasty wags say because he could do nothing else), for example:
- legalised gay marriage (in Spain! Yikes!)
- cracked down - hard - on violence towards women, meaning marital violence, violence in the home
This model thing is the latest in the series of that kind of measures and was implemented, it is said, under the pressure of feminist associations whose main concern was not the well being or protection (occupational etc.) of the models themselves (and indeed the regulation will not affect that at all, for reasons I can't go into here) but the image of 'beauty' or 'desirability' thereby projected to young women, and the presumed rise of anorexia. The idea is the old 'models' one: if there is violence on the TV, it promotes adolescent violence; if models are very skinny, young women desire to conform to this standard and will thus starve themselves to death. As readers here know, an unfortunate number do, in the Western World.
Sorry I didn't get a chance to write up the contributions to the BMI/Occupational health debate today.
I got assigned an 8pm deadline well after noon and the day sort of derailed. My damned occupation keeps interfering with my attempts to discuss occupational health. (The latter is way more fun.)
Self-expression is not an issue here. The designers of the apparel are not starving themselves to display their creations. They are compelling others to starve. The compulsion extends beyond the immediate wage, to include career prospects, ie being certified as emaciated and submissive. The designers are free to use robots or plaster dummies, just as other industries, eg crash-test researchers, use alternatives to humans in dangerous situations.
As Ana reports, a few comments up, this regulation is not the imposition of a foreign king. It is the democratic expression of cultural preference, similar to our suppression of certain kinds of violent or sexual activity on public display, or famously the inappropriate shouting of "fire!" or "hijack!". We hesitate to do it but, when forced to balance the absolute need for free-expression against the absolute need to protect our children, we sheepishly discover that "absolute" is not so absolute after all. Especially when the self-interested advocates of the former (and the philosopher philosophers) are not really our best friends.