Unttainable Beauty

Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that media iamges of female beauty are attainable for all but a very small number of women. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, fro example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition.

Still, the number of real life women and girls who seek a similarly underweight body is epidemic, and they can suffer equally devastating health consequences.