Wednesday 10 July 2013

Size 2, Round 2




FEEDBACK. Still no puns intended.

Thanks to everyone who have shared, promoted and otherwise shown their support for my last post, and for the campaign in general. It’s been brilliant to see people reacting so positively. It’s been equally great to see people who don’t support the petition, but have had some important points to make regarding why they don’t. I’m posting this partly out of a selfish need to defend myself, but mainly in the hope of preventing any offence being caused to anyone who disagrees with the petition. My intentions were benevolent, I promise. I only want to make women, all women, feel good about themselves.

First off, I need to fry some big fish. The eating disorders charity b-eat have refused to show support for the campaign, which I'm pretty disappointed at:


I was pretty flabbergasted by this response. I know that they're supposed to be 'experts' on this, but they're supposed to support those with eating disorders, and every single person I know with an ED has (SO FAR!) supported me. All I can say is that I hope that not too many people saw b-eat's response, as I think it does a disservice to what is normally a brilliant organisation who do very positive work. I'm going to try and get a bit more of a response through email. God knows 140 characters isn't exactly a good medium for what could be a complex position.

Moving on, then. The biggest critic, of course, was always going to be ASOS itself. (Whose page on 'Positive Body Image' can be found here. Prepare accordingly. A sarcastic guffaw may be appropriate.) I got in touch with them via Twitter and email, and they’re got back to me really quickly.Brilliantly done, and full credit to ASOS for responding so promptly to feedback, even when it’s not very positive. I’m particularly happy because the only response I’d seen before this was, if you ask me, completely inadequate (but well done to Julie Stephen for making her voice heard!). This is what they tweeted me to say: 



 
In their email reply they said:

‘We understand your concern about UK Size 2 but we don’t feel there is anything inherently ‘wrong’ in being this size, if you are healthy.  This size is perfectly healthy for some people, including some specific ethnicities including Chinese and South East Asian.  We are currently preparing to launch our Chinese website and our recent addition of some products in UK Size 2 is a response to this.’

Right. Well, you can’t argue with that, right? Well… I kind of want to. I can’t pretend to be as au fait with the typical  Chinese physique as I try to be with the British one, but I know that people of this heritage do tend to have much smaller frames and therefore smaller measurements. (The whys and wherefores are debated, although there are arguments that this is due to historical poor nutrition, and that, with increasingly greater access to high nutrition, this is changing – see this, from the President of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine).  However, it seems to be to be a big presumption that, with the spread of Western brands such as ASOS, we can work under the assumption that Chinese women are all thin naturally, and not prey to the same pressures as women in the UK. By no means all Chinese women will be able to be a size 2, either – it’s a huge country and body types vary wildly. ‘Chinese and South East Asian’ is not a homogenous social group, culturally or physically. Plus, there are worrying signs that the same trends towards a cult of thinness are affecting Chinese ideas of beauty (see a study in the journal 'Eating Disorders'). The Chinese University of Hong Kong compared measurements and BMIs of Miss Hong Kong contestants, looked into ED research studying Chinese patients, and concluded that, while ‘Chinese culture has long emphasized thinness in women’, there is a ‘problem with maintaining these standards of beauty [when they are] increasingly hard to achieve with the modern sedentary life style and nutrition. For example, Leung (1995) reported that the mean weight of 18-year-old women was 5.1kg heavier than those studied in 1960s’.

Going back to women in the UK, I think the central point is this. Surely expansion into new markets shouldn’t come to the potential detriment of the original market? (According to that email, they still make 50% of their sales courtesy of the women of Great Britain.) And surely these clothes made for all these, apparently teeny-tiny but totally healthy, women in the East shouldn’t be sold before the launch of the Chinese version of ASOS, and on a website which is still predominantly directed towards British women (see the response to our changing seasons, cultural events etc. on their homepage).

So ASOS, please don’t think that this is enough of an excuse. I for one am not comfortable with the idea of trading off a bigger market share for western retailers in the East for a potential increase in the body-image related issues back here in the UK.


Anyway, that’s the angry stuff out of the way. Onto the genuinely appreciated responses I’ve had from other people. One particular person got in touch with me to express her personal reasons for having a problem with the petition. She gave me her blessing to post my response here, and I’m doing so in hopes that it clarifies some things regarding the most frequent criticism I’ve seen. Apologies for the rash of intensifiers, but I honestly meant them…

'I’m really, really sorry if I’ve in any way hurt anybody’s feelings, or suggested that there aren’t people out there who would benefit from ASOS selling a size 2 range. I know that there are people who don’t fit into standard sizes for reasons other than eating disorders, and I don’t want to suggest that they don’t deserve to have access to fashionable clothes, either. I know it’s not the same, and I don’t want to in any way demean what other people have to deal with, but there is a point in anorexia where it becomes so chronic that everyone essentially stops talking about recovery and starts talking about ‘management’. At that point, you’re usually still really underweight but trying to get on with your life, and yet find yourself without the wardrobe that makes you feel a part of the ‘normal’ community. I’m getting there myself, so I do understand what it's like, and would support ways to make the situation better. I just don't think ASOS's is the way to do it.

Basically – ASOS is a company which is there to make a profit. They wouldn’t have produced size 2 clothes unless there was a decent market to support it. There might be a small minority of people in the right demographic who have health conditions that make that size suitable, but I would argue that there’s not enough of those type of people for ASOS to base their expansion on. They’re clearly not just targeting people who are in a situation where their physical health condition makes it hard to gain weight. I suspect that the target market for these clothes is made up in no insubstantial part by girls who are skinny for quite another reason. And it really worries me that a mainstream, fashion-lead, aspirational brand like ASOS is putting out the message that it’s ok for those girls to see a size which most people get to only through ill health as somehow acceptable, or ‘aspirational’.

I just think it’s a bad move. I know that there are upsides to selling size 2, but very few things are solely bad or solely good. I would technically benefit myself from wearing size 2 trousers, shorts etc., but I just don’t think it would be OK to buy into it, with all the unforeseen consequences hovering in the background’.




Thanks again guys. Hope I’ve allayed some fears and/or cleared up my position somewhat. I appreciate some people will still think I’m misguided/overacting/a nasty woman-hating body fascist, but I can deal with that. I just hope some of you don’t, and will consider supporting the effort.

Louisa x

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