fed well and delicately. Women also covered most of their bodies with skirts lower than the ankle. This changed in the early 1900's when fashion styles changed and skirts instead became a little bit higher. Legs were being shown off, and the stress on thinness became more and more common. As time developed women were forced to become thinner and thinner, and skirts got higher and higher. Thinness was key to success until the time of Marilyn Monroe, who possessed a somewhat voluptuous figure. This gave young and older women alike a breath of fresh air. They no longer had to be that thin. This dramatically changed as the years rolled by, and finally the famous model "Twiggy" came onto the fashion scene. Her impossibly small waistline and incredibly thin body shocked the country. Everywhere girls across the country tried to immitate this model and things like purging and self-starvation started to run rampant. The 1980's saw the social epidemic of anorexia, and since then it has multiplied to the point in 1999 when we have over eight million people with eating disorders, 5% of whom are men. That is close to 2% of the population, eradication of that much of the population seems like a huge problem and in fact, that is what is happening. There are more people with anorexia then there are with AIDS. Even in China, a county of catastrophic famines, "where a little extra padding was considered as a sign of good health," we now see startlingly high numbers of anorexics and bulimics, and the numbers are going straight up. The causes of anorexia are can go many different ways, "Multifaceted physical and mental health problems and their development usually have a number of different contributing and perpetuating factors," as stated by organizations around the world dedicated to eating disorders. These factors could be any, or a combination of physical, emotional or sexual trauma, cultural emphasis or preoccupation with body image i...
