Writing

1. Summarize the contents of the artic`1le in the form of a précis.

2. Write an essay on one of the following topics:

a) “There is no friend so faithful as a good book”.

b) “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested” (F. Bacon).

Text 6

Thin end of the wedge

L. Rogers

They look as though they’re wasting away. Thanks to Kate Moss and Co, modelling is once again a to-diet-for career.

London supermodel Kate Moss leads the latest fashion which favours a thin, undernourished look with large soulful eyes, plucked eyebrows and spaghetti legs and arms. While this may be fine for fashion it puts pressure on young teenage girls to follow unhealthy diets in the hope of ending up “thin” like their idols.

1. In the 1960s it was every woman’s dream to look like Twiggy. As the wire-thin icon of her time, she, along with such fellow ingenues as Jean Shrimpton, represented the ideal shape. A flat chest and ironing-board stomach were essential, no matter what starving and self-denial that might entail.

2. “Before a show we used to think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to lose a few pounds’,” recalls Natalie Lawson, a successful catwalk model of the 1960s. “At that point we would all go on a crash diet of black coffee, grapefruit and water for a week, and lose half a stone. Occasionally we would indulge in a few lettuce leaves without dressing.”

3. Those famine-stricken limbs are now back in fashion, as the wheel turns full circle. And so, according to those within the fashion industry, is the drastic dieting.

4. For a while, in the 1980s, it looked as though models could be successful, rich and adored, and still eat at least one square meal a day, but the cleavages and curves of Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and their ilk have once again become outmoded. The backlash against the opulent Supermodel has come in the guise of the Superwaif  only this time round she is even paler, younger and waifier than her sisters of the 1960s. Twiggy herself, who was blessed with the ability to eat heartily and stay thin, is incensed at the renewed demand for the anorexic-looking pre-pubescent role model. “I find it appalling that people should make themselves ill to achieve any look,” she says.

5. When Kate Moss arrived on the scene last year, with her flat chest, bandy legs, pale face and large sunken eyes, the size 8 coathanger was back in business. Like Twiggy, Kate is apparently able to maintain her skinny shape on a diet of burgers and chips. But suddenly, Cindy Crawford, slim by anyone’s standards, was pronounced fat, while Rachel Hunter, a small size 12, was used to model outsize clothes. Women everywhere were in a mad panic, and models themselves realised that to stay in business they had to lose pounds fast.

6. Models’ livelihoods depend on keeping off the inches, so it’s not surprising that their world is ripe with eating disorders. The former models Margaux Hemingway and Lysette Anthony have in their time fallen victim to bulimia, the slimmer’s starve-and-binge disease. According to Caroline Green of the London Centre for Eating Disorders, the pressures on models and other young women to be thin have never been as strong as they are now. “Models are getting younger, and the norm is to be an almost prepubescent shape, which even girls of 20 find hard to emulate,” she says. “Some models we see are tremendously malnourished. They starve themselves or find ways to get rid of their food, such as laxative abuse.”

7. This same pattern, disturbingly, is being repeated by the young girls who take these skeletal women, heroines of the glossy magazines, for their role models. Cases of anorexia and bulimia have increased and victims are getting younger. “Even five-year-olds look at each other and say: you’ve got fat thighs, or a big tummy,” says Green.

8. Dr. Len Mervyn, the technical director of Healthcrafts, the food supplement manufacturer, recognizes that, like ballet dancers, models are “ultra slimmers.” “I suspect a large proportion are anorexic, and yet children, who at puberty, need all the calories they can get, are emulating them.”

9. “The department of health is very concerned because for the first time eating disorders in schools are reaching epidemic levels.”

10. Hannah Erlichman is a 14-year-old pupil at St. Margaret’s Girls’ School in London, and while she is unfazed by impossible physical standards set by models, she sees a great deal of weight consciousness among her peers. “Really skinny girls look at pictures of Kate Moss or models like her and then complain they’re fat, or that they’ve eaten too much.”

11. Most of these models are not naturally thin. A large boned, 5ft 11 in frame is not ordinarily fitted with a 24 in waist and 34 in hips, and models do work at maintaining their gamine shapes. Yasmin Le Bon, who used to live on a cup of soup and chocolate bar a day, has been known to faint with hunger at photo shoots. Elle McPherson, better known as The Body, used to smoke 60 cigarettes a day, another ploy by models to keep down weight. Others resort to drugs such as speed, and in New York and Milan, cocaine use is reported as widespread among models to promote weight loss.

12. “It’s not uncommon for some models to live on little more than coffee, Diet Coke, nicotine and occasionally amphetamines,” says Linda Hartley, a model in the 1980s with Booking agency in London. “I remember being on a job in Tokyo with some other models. We went out for a meal and every single girl went to the bathroom afterwards and threw up. That’s common.”

13. Another international model, Claire Spyer, believes that most of the pressure, to be skinny comes from model agents themselves. “You hear agents saying to new girls, ‘Now don’t eat too much chocolate,’ or ‘Honey, you’re way too fat.’ That just screws up a girl who hasn’t been in the business long enough to say, ‘Forget it. This is as thin as I can get without being unhealthy’.”

14. Natalie Lawson believes that the Twiggy shape is far more impractical now than it was 30 years ago. “Models in the 1960s were war babies. These days a woman who was brought up on Coca Cola and junk food is expected to have the figure of someone who grew up when food was rationed.”

Twiggy – a British top-model, very popular in the 1960s; noted for her very thin, teenager-like figure.

ingenues  innocent, young people.

superwaif  a very thin model who looks like an orphan without food.

anorexia  a disease having to do with eating disorders, lack of appetite.

bulimia an abnormal and constant craving for food.

Thin End of the Wedge (a saying)  an action, event, change, etc., which may lead to further actions, changes, etc., and which is more important than it seems to be at first.

E x e r c i s e s