Eating disorders are maladies caused by psychogenic syndromes associated with a disordered ingestion. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder are the most prevailing diseases in this area. Some people often characterize eating disorders as “women’s problems.” The typical image of a person suffering from anorexia nervosa is a rich, white, adolescent girl. These illnesses appear in adolescence and often coexist with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
In our society women are perceived to be more fixated regarding the beauty while men are considered to be more serious and busy with more deliberate problems. Women have been shown to be more likely than men to report body checking behaviors, such as ritualistic weighing or trying on special clothing to check for ?t or to engage in body avoidance behaviors, such as not wearing form ?tting clothes that would make the wearer more aware of her body shape. An incredible amount of social stereotypes fosters this issue clearly dividing social roles between men and women. Furthermore, responsibilities and rights of each of them are evidently fixed. Raising a young child, the parents try to impose these stereotypes since his or her birth. For example, when parents take a newborn girl from the maternity hospital, she is swaddled in a pink diaper. Therefore, in the very first moments of her life, she faces certain social stereotypes.
The most people characterize the femininity with such features like gentleness, helpfulness, affectivity, vulnerability, tenderness, attentiveness, etc. Thus, one can consider women to be inclined to internalize mass media messages concepts due to the ideal portrait of beauty. For instance, women permanently compare themselves to other women and standards accepted in the society. So, they just internalize cultural ideals of beauty and appearance. Moreover, people who are more conformal and dependent on the view of society are more vulnerable to eating disorders. They merely endeavor to approximate their body shape to the propagandized ideal. Additionally, there is an idea that increased perfectionism as a personality feature can be a reason for disordered ingestion. A person who busily wants to control everything and to be the best in all spheres of life is more vulnerable to eating disorders.
Thereby, the main reason for the high propensity of women for eating disorders is deeply psychological. It also associates with significantly higher levels of stress, based on the fact that women have to perform many different social roles at the same time and to do it efficiently. Therefore, women try to follow a social stereotype of slimness as a successful, healthy, and attractive one.
Numerous studies prove the known fact that women tend to “chew” their stress. In comparison to men, they more often cannot control the amount of food they eat. Conversely, men intent to use alcohol for this reason. It creates a coterie when women fill psychological emptiness for food and simultaneously try to follow the common model of beauty promoting thinness. Women are more likely to evaluate each other by criteria of physical appearance. They think that men are attracted to thin and well-shaped women. Thus, they do their best to match the ideal.
Munn-Chernoff discovered that there is a common genetic basis for alcohol addiction and bulimia nervosa among women. It has been found that common genetic factors that contribute to both the development of alcohol dependence and bulimia as well as a compensatory behavior reach from 38 to 53%. This is one more explanation of female eating disorders.
In conclusion, there are many factors causing eating disorders among women. Largely, these are various psychological phenomena. Features of femininity, a high level of perfectionism, wishes to follow all social norms and stereotypes, a conviction about women’s beauty are attributes of likelihood to develop eating disorders. Besides, there are genetic factors which also can impact on the possibility of disordered ingestion. Eating disorders are very common for women nowadays who have to remember that no beauty is worth health problems.
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