1980s Culture Analysis

While the institutional changes took place as responses to the public’s fueled curiosity and fear towards anorexia, the cultural leaders in the 1980s began to ponder on the social effects of anorexia and their personal experiences related to the disease. They brought the experience and pain of anorexia to a larger audience through personal testimonials. After Carpenter’s death, the 1980s saw an increasing number of movies, autobiographies and novels about personal anorexic experiences. These cultural works on anorexia involved efforts from celebrities, writers, and cultural leaders whose target audience included adolescents and anorexic suffers. Both novels and autobiographies were intended to provide teenage girls with warnings against the
disease and to emphasize the importance of professional intervention. Usually, psychiatrists and therapists were portrayed as compassionate people who asked lots of questions, while anorexics were portrayed as victims who used tricks to deceive doctors that they had normal weight. The stereotype was that the patients were tall, attractive high school girls from a middle or upper class family. The Best Little Girl in the World-- a television film produced in 1981 and regained more attention after Karen Carpenter’s death, exemplified the “Drama of Anorexia” during the 1980s. The main character, Casey Powell, is a good girl whose dream is to be a professional ballet dancer. Her parents give all their attention to her sister Gail despite the fact that Casey is pretty, smart, and dedicated. Being ignored by parents and told by her ballet teacher that she could be a very good dancer if losing a few pounds, Casey becomes anorexic and bulimic. After lots of of cheating and resistance, Casey eventually recovers under a therapist who is compassionate and patient, giving her not only physical treatment but also mental guidance. Although the play was a realistic reflection on anorexic families and raised awareness among parents and adolescents, it did not go into details about the struggling recovery process of the patients to protect youthful readers from brutal realities. The show also downplayed the fact that the disease could have destructive effect on family including tearing the family apart and leading to intense depression of everyone in the family.