Xtra large and Xtra small

Bigorexia

Boys are big, girls are small. That is just the way it is. According to a Blue Cross-Blue Shield 2001 survey of ten-to seventeen year old boys, half were aware of sports supplements and drugs, and one in five takes them. Forty-two percent did it to build muscle and sixteen percent just to look better. That is a dramatic increase from the BCBS survey in 1999 that found no sample of kids under fourteen had taken products. In the 1980’s there was a big force in the media culture—giant billboards for Calvin Klein underwear and fierce male torsos in designer perfume ads helped to change the shape of male bodies, literally.

“When you hear girls gawking at Abercrombie and Fitch about how hot the guy is on the bag- that makes an impression,” one teen bodybuilder told New York Times magazine in 1999. One of Abercrombie’s countless bare-chested and buff youths had clearly been seared on that teens mind. This drive for huge pecks and out of control muscle gain has been deemed by media wags as “Bigorexia.”

Teen, male fitness is something that requires hours of painful effort not only for lifting but also when it comes to diet. I thought girls were bad, but what about all the teen boys who have a meticulous diet regimen involving egg whites, protein powder, whey, whole bread and turkey. According to Alyssa Quart, “Once there was a hope among feminists that girls could be taught to escape their oppression body project. This has not occurred. Now boys partake in it as well. Weightlifting, enthusiasts say, is a form of self construction.

Pro-Ana.

The following is an excerpt from Quarts book,

My name is Cheallaigh (pronounced Kelly),” reads the home page. “I have had anorexia for six years, of the bulimic subtype. I weigh 120 and I am 5’6”. I am 17 and attending community college. This page is my personal diary of my love affair with anorexia.”

Cheallaigh is not using the word, “love affair” lightly or ironically. She is truly besotten with anorexia and she is not alone. She is one of a new movement of girls, many of them teenagers, who dub themselves, pro-anorexics. They dwell clandestinely on the Internet and chat about their starvation methods, their feelings and, of course, their hatred of fatness. Those who produce their own pro anorexic sites proffer “thinspiration” photographs of tiny actresses and often digitally alter them to look even thinner….

The most plaintive response from the pro-annas was one I recognized personally, “It is disheartening to be faced with these extremely tall, thin, beautiful girls wherever you go, beauty can all be explained away by, ‘it’s all makeup,’ height ignored there is nothing anyone can do about their height, but thinness is always seen as something you can have control over. And if you can just be as thin as these women, then maybe you’d be as happy as they appear and just maybe instead of your guy looking at the billboard with lust they’ll look at you that way.”

It seems as if the plastic-surgery girls and the weight-lifting boys and the pro-annas are symptomatic of a new sort of adolescence in which kids ratify their family social status through looking the part. Marketers have convinced these kids that they need a specific set of physical attributes, and that their own qualities must be obviated. For the large subculture of teens who self-brand into look-alikes with tiny waistlines, bulging biceps, deracinated noses and copious breasts, the supposed freedom of self creation is not freedom at all. What they have is the consumer choice, no substitute for free will.