A New Model

The varied lovelies of the plus-size agency IPM, which "believes beauty has no size, age, and race."

I suppose after living through the economic debacle of the past two years I shouldn’t be surprised by the ability of an economist (or worse, two economists) to become totally divorced from reality. But a recent report out of the London School of Economics on the effect of plus-size models on public health and obesity rates (yes, economists writing about body weight; what’s next, Donald Trump writing about Obama’s citizenship?) sets a new bar for wonkiness—and pure wrong-headedness.

The study authors’ basic premise is this: presenting a more realistic “body ideal”—for instance, by using so-called plus-size models in some fashion spreads and insisting on a minimum healthy weight for runway models (as some European countries are now doing)—is likely to backfire and “foster the obesity epidemic.” They appear to think that they have proven this hypothesis through a string of unintelligible economic “models,” complete with abstruse equations that reminded me unpleasantly of the calculus I failed in high school (where F stands for food and c to the first power is food consumption…).  Excuse me: No. That is not how eating and body weight works. That is not
research. That is so fatuous that I half-wondered if the whole thing were a hoax, like that mumbo-jumbo faux-scholarly article Alan Sokal submitted to the journal Social Text back in the 1990s, to expose academia’s absurd infatuation with “postmodernism” (they published his piece, which Sokal later described as "a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”). This economic analysis rises dangerously close to the Sokal threshold.


I will give the authors one, only one, point: that it is useful to consider how far self-acceptance can go before it becomes downright unhealthy. Should a morbidly obese, 500-pound man feel perfectly contented with his form, or should he become concerned at the ramifications of his weight and make efforts to change it? But that is a far different question than whether, say, young women who feel they have an extra ten or twenty pounds they’d like to shed should beat up on themselves—or whether many of us, as a population, should feel physically inadequate because we have hips, or a belly, or are shaped in some (perfectly normal) way vastly differently from those bizarre hipless and belly-less fashion models.

The Lauren shot heard round the world: Would you diet because of this woman?

                                                                              
Here’s the other problem: their logic, despite the long strings of equations, is utterly faulty. Let’s just look at how this has worked in the past: Has viewing ultra-thin models made our population thinner? No; we are getting fatter, except for the unfortunate few who take the model-look too seriously and become anorexic. So, is there any reason to think that looking at fatter models will make us fatter? (And by the way, many “plus-size” models are what most people would call “curvy”; certainly almost none of them would qualify as “obese.”) Of course not. Such viewing may, however, make many of us happier.