Israeli Government Legislates Down the Runway

The media’s image of what a beautiful individual should look like is at best unhealthy and dangerously irresponsible. Prominently featuring underweight models in television ads and magazines can have a profoundly dangerous effect on impressionable youth of both sexes, encouraging eating disorders to conform to an ideal that is not based in reality.

A bill recently approved by the Knesset seeks to curb the use of underweight models in advertisements. The bill requires that licensed models provide medical records proving their BMI (body mass index) is normal.

In the future, airbrushed pictures featured in advertisements and in magazines need to carry a disclaimer whenever photoshop or a similar program is used.

According to the bill, which was passed by the Ministerial Committee of Legislative Affairs, “the prevalence of eating disorders, including anorexia, has been on the rise in recent years…particularly among young girls. Studies show that one of the reasons for eating disorders among teenage girls is the influence of the media and the advertising industry, which feature particularly thin women as role models, thus influencing teenagers’ standards.”

“The fashion and advertising industries, in particular, have created a distorted image of an ideal woman using many underweight models. The purpose of this bill is to reduce the extent of teenage eating disorders.”

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Photo provided by Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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