Current Anti-feminist Trends in Eating Disorder Treatment

Culturally eating disorders aren’t only mental illnesses. They represent the newest expression of suffering and oppression women experience in our society.

These illnesses are borne out of the relentless pressure for women to be thin in order to be attractive, to be employed and to be heard. Eating disorders can be seen as an expression of protest against this oppression but then become a prison of their own accord.

Over time the direction of eating disorder treatment and the cultural response to the imperative to be thin leaned into feminism and freedom.

The second generation of eating disorder treatment programs were founded and created by powerful women in recovery who themselves became the focal point of change and hope. They created worlds aimed at feeling one’s own autonomy and agency. They structured recovery around a community of women valuing friendship, connection and love, not a show of eating to prove to men how they can follow the rules.

In the decade after, the body positivity movement encouraged women to appreciate and respect their own shapes and sizes. The power of this new message stretched even to celebrities and clothing’s stores.

However, both of these steps to empower and liberate came crashing down.

Private equity bought most of the treatment programs and transformed them into money making ventures run primarily by less experienced clinicians cynically aimed at exploiting young women and insurance benefits.

Ozempic and the other GLP-1 agonists, in addition to the newer, stronger medication on the way next year, drew in women by promising a magical way to be thin. The body positivity voices have been drowned out by the lure of the weekly injection and by the unsubstantiated claims of doctors that losing weight is the key to good health.

It’s hard to watch these capitalist changes in recent years and not conclude that market forces benefit from keeping women enslaved to the goal of thinness. An empowered society of women immune to external pressures about appearance doesn’t benefit the financial goals of a male-oriented business culture.

This depressing fact does prove that the epidemic of eating disorders won’t improve without a strong feminist base to recovery. Women need to collectively remember that the pressure for thinness and the scourge of eating disorders are never in their best interest. Recovery, for the individual and the collective, begins with education, autonomy and inevitably the power to stand tall.