Canada’s youth are at war with a genius of a disease.
It tricks smart girls and boys into becoming dumb with desire for those seductive, skeletal, sinewy limbs.
From the day they are born, Canadian children are at war with the expectations society will impose on their physical appearance.
And last week, Quebec took the first step in the fight to end the battle.
Quebec’s fashion industry has agreed to regulate itself to promote a healthier image of women.
Christine St-Pierre, Quebec’s culture minister, used the backdrop of Montreal Fashion Week to launch a voluntary charter to help fight extreme thinness in the fashion industry.
St-Pierre said she hopes the resolutions will foster a healthier society by reducing the incidence of eating disorders in Quebec.
What are the other provinces waiting for?
The fashion industry, like any other, is a business. If clothes sell better on skinny models, designers will accommodate that. Yet with the large number of eating problems in this country, responsibility needs to be taken into account, as well as dollars and cents.
Eating disorders have always affected Canadians, but with the rise of the Internet and other technologies, Canadian youth are bombarded with images far more than they ever were even two decades ago.
In 2005, more than 500,000 Canadians suffered from some sort of eating disorder, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. That’s more than the population of Halifax.
Not only are eating disorders detracting from the quality of life but they are also leading to death, according to the CMHA. Its research has found that eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
Arguably, worst of all, is that negative body image perception seems to be starting exceptionally young, according to the CMHA. In a study of children aged 8 to 10, approximately half of girls said they were unhappy with their size and worried that they may become fat.
These alarming statistics probe a crucial question: with most fashion models being thinner than 98 per cent of Canadian women, why doesn’t the other provinces' fashion industries ban the use of models with unrealistic figures when it’s been proven repeatedly that young women measure their own bodies up to these unachievable standards?
Canadian youth will always have the international representation of women in fashion to contend with, not to mention issues with their own self-esteem that may exist with or without negative representations of women in the media.
Arguably, it could be said that it’s the role of the family to educate their child about healthy body image and build a child’s self-esteem.
But with those staggering statistics, something clearly is not working. With that in mind, the fashion industries of this country should step in and do whatever it can to address the problem. Any step in the right direction, as Quebec has demonstrated, is an improvement, and the rest of Canada should follow suit.
So babies born into this country will start with a clean slate, no longer soldiers fighting unrealistic standards for their self-esteem.