Ten Best Reader Comments of the Week!

10 Best Readers' Comments

This week AlterNet readers waxed prolific on a number of issues, including the affliction of anorexia, the watchful eye of the NYPD, Evo Morales, sex toys, and the religious right. All in a week's comments!

Reader kww355 agreed with Naomi Hooke's analysis of anorexia as a disease in "Understanding Anorexia: A Thin Excuse," and shared a personal story:

I had a dear friend who struggled with anorexia for over 20 years and finally committed suicide. The author of this piece is completely correct when she says the fashion industry has very little to do with it.

There may be some girls who slide into eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia both) from dieting to emulate Kate Moss or one of the other stick figures currently popular. However, the main thrust of anorexia is control, both self-control and being controlled by others.

My friend grew up in a home where nothing she did was ever good enough for her parents and she was constantly teased and belittled. Add low self-esteem to her horror of her rapidly developing body and the unwanted attention she got from men, and the conditions were ripe for anorexia.

She'd panic anytime her weight approached 90 pounds and would constantly ask me if I thought she looked fat. I got to the point where I was telling her she looked like a concentration camp victim, but she couldn't see it. She got into the trap of denying herself food (AND water!) thinking the more self-control she had, the better a person she was…

Readers hotly debated 'consumer feminism' in response to "Has Artificial Beauty Become the New Feminism?." Hagwind wrote,

How to get this across? Alex Kuczynski and a few thousand mainstream writers to the contrary, feminism is not primarily about helping individual women get whatever they want. It's about identifying and dismantling the barriers that confront women as a class. The barriers can be laws, traditions, or attitudes, and they vary from place to place and across time. Some of the attitudes are gasp! in our own heads. As those barriers are identified and dismantled, more and more women will have more and more options -- but that doesn't mean that every choice we make is a feminist choice, even if feminism helped make the choosing possible.

Jennifer Cognard-Black writes: "Yet the cosmetic-surgery industry is doing exactly what the beauty industry has done for years: It's co-opting, repackaging and reselling the feminist call to empower women into what may be dubbed 'consumer feminism.'"

Exactly right (though I'd just as soon leave the F-word out of it). This is what our sell-sell-sell culture does to everything: repackage and sell it back to us. The advertising industry really is amazing. It can take "the best things in life" (i.e., the ones that are free) and sell 'em back to us for big bucks. Love, sex, fun, health, revolution, feminism -- even spirituality, which by definition isn't about Stuff, gets turned into products and services that you can buy in the marketplace. (The "free" market abhors the thought that anything could possibly be free.)

Liberation isn't something you can buy over the counter or off the rack. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something…

Speaking of liberation, there most obviously isn't any justice for women who are trafficked across the U.S.-Mexico border for sex work. Expanding on "No Fair Trade for Trafficked Women," logansafi tied prostitution to a larger system of trafficking humans:

Law and Order Now! Is alternet's current push? There is not a run away epidemic of trafficking in underage girls in the US, though it does exist in many other parts of the world to a greater or lesser degree. We are not awash in a tide of slavery of young women here.

The idea that this issue is BIG is being used to promote a regressive agenda. If you want to stop prostitution then stop all the wars that US society promotes worldwide. Out of war comes lawlessness and prostitution. Many of the American male population that travel worldwide to engage in paying for sex with younger women picked up the habit through the military.