THE most disappointing news of recent times was that Omega watches had backed down from their advertising boycott of Vogue magazine which it had introduced in protest at the magazine's fetishistic and demented obsession with skinny models. One rather clever spokesman was quoted as saying Omega watches were for wrists, not waists, and for a brief while the world became a better and nobler place.
But not for long because Omega then renounced the ban.
Vogue, with its wretched famished elfins, was back in business, and still undenounced, uncondemned, undamned by the feminist lobby. Why is this? Is it because the feminist journalists who might be expected to savage any enemy of female normality yearn to be invited to write for the high paying Vogue? Is it because, contrary to traditional feminist expectations, the villains here are all women?
It is true that most of the designers who are so obsessed with gaunt fleshless frames filling their creations are male; but these males are the very men - whom feminists tend to regard as sympathetic fellow victims of the heterosexual exploitative male patriarchy - they are, for the most part, homosexual. They clearly detest women as they actually are, and are determined to create distortions of the female form, like a new kind of farm animal with malnourished barely functional legs, and a torso which is skin covered spine and ribcage and wasting breast.
Desexualised Female Form
The critique of this distortion and desexualising objectification of the female form should really come from the magazines which report on the fashion industry, in which Vogue is the most incredibly prosperous and most successful. But it does not.
Vogue celebrates the pornographic reduction of the female form into cyphers for the diseased, female hating fantasies of the fashion designing world. Of the two score or so members of staff listed in the front of Vogue, only one, and very much a lesser beast, was male.
So many feminists talk about empowerment and complain about the glass ceiling which enables them to see the high reaches of success but prevents them moving up into it; Vogue is the empowerment of women personified, and the glass ceiling is in bits on the floor. Nobody to blame here but women. And in the absence of men to blame, there is silence.
(Incidentally, I did ring Vogue to ask for a quote about their policy towards anorexic models and was told I would be rung back. The sound I hear is not the phone ringing from Vogue: it is the lowing of cattle slouching homeward).
Maybe we should see Vogue and its fellow fashion rags as one of the many mental disorders of this age, surely the maddest that there has been. ,Many of these disorders are simply psychiatric - the belief that Brent Spar was going to pollute the North Sea was an example of our energetic credulousness. In Britain, we have seen the bizarre sight of people picketing docks from which calves are being exported and their leaders comparing the cattle trade to the Holocaust. That is such a vile and disgusting analogy that it defies belief but virtually everything about these hysterias defies belief.
Everywhere we see young women, especially, abandoning meat consumption on moral grounds, as animals we eat are thinking, caring sentient creatures who lead an existence independent of our own. One nutritionist has become so concerned about this trend that he thinks any declaration of vegetarianism by a teenage female may be assumed to be an eating disorder.
Health Food Faddism
It is hardly surprising when we hear from Jackie Story, a nutritionist from the University of Surrey recently brought over by the National Dairy Council, of how health food faddism is beginning to affect the health of children. Children in Britain - and no doubt Ireland - are being fed low fat foods and low fat milks because their mothers believe that fat is bad for them. Nearly 90 per cent of British mothers surveyed reported that they thought a low fat intake was good for children and more than 80 per cent thought a high fibre diet was good for them.
This simply seems a question of transference of their own morbid fears about their own bodies to the still growing bodies of their children and when one reads that six per cent of children under a year are being fed skimmed or semi skimmed milk, one begins to detect maternal delinquency. Equally, a high fibre diet in a child can mean the alimentary canal does not absorb vital minerals such as zinc, calcium and iron. Mothers once knew this from maternal lore faddery and health food nonsense have replaced grandmother's commonsense about good milk and cheese and beef and lamb for your children. No doubt we should all applaud the National Dairy Council's new booklet, How Does your Toddler Grow (free from the NDC, Grattan House, Lower Mount Street, Dublin 2). We should also be asking how on earth did we go so wrong that we must now be reteaching future grandmothers how to suck eggs?
Growing Girths
It is true that faddism seems to coexist with fattism our enthusiasm for American fast foods is clearly reflected in the growing girths which we see about the place. But for the most part, being a foodie is about having pleasure so much of the jejune food abstinence cult is rediscovery of joyless and prim puritanism. This cult has struck a bizarre alliance with the fashion industry; self hatred seems to be the creed in common.
Yet why are these magazines so popular amongst women? Why do women want to feast their eyes on figures which so often resemble concentration camp victims? Is this wide spread self starvation some attempt to atone for the Holocaust by mimicry? Is the attempt to "prevent" another "Holocaust" - this time of cattle - a comparably sub conscious attempt at purging guilt? We are prisoners of history in more ways than we know.