07/16/2021
Will you join the 1000s of women taking action today? Click the link in our bio and send a message to Congress that we want change.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the ban on to***co advertising initiated by President Nixon, acting definitively in defense of the American people. The costs to the american healthcare system of smoking at the time was a massive $6bn*.
Today, the direct costs to the american healthcare system of disordered eating are nearly $65bn. Well over 10 times the cost of smoking when cigarette advertising was banned.
It's time for action to stop the growth in incidence of eating disorders, and associated conditions of depression and self harm, we are calling for decisive action to protect the future of women in this country.
We're asking the to help us try to introduce a health warning on digitally altered images of the female body in advertising.
The average American encounters 3,000 advertisements every day. At the center of many of these ads is an ever more unrealistic, digitally altered image of a woman.
Women and girls compare themselves to these images every day, and failure to live up to them is inevitable because they are based on a fake flawlessness that doesn’t exist. The American ideal of manipulated beauty has become so pervasive that 50% of three- to six-year-old girls worry about their weight.
The placement of warnings over digitally altered images will achieve two things - firstly it will discourage companies from presenting unrealistic bodies to women and young girls, and secondly research shows that the use of warning labels lessens some of the known negative effects of viewing media images that feature the digutally manipulated thin ideal.
Major countries are working to place warning labels on media images to inform that the images have been digitally altered, as a means of reducing the negative psychological effects of such media images. And it's time the USA shows leadership.
After all, the TOTAL costs of disordered eating in the USA are over $400bn a year (including direct AND indirect costs)**, and 1 in 3 women will experience disordered eating in their lifetime.