Meretricious standards

The beautiful life is being elevated into a new morality, namely into a standard which condemns those who fail to meet it into the rank of total failure. The problem is part of the ghastly superficiality that is bred by television commercials, glossy magazines and tabloid newspapers and typified by the expression "top model". It is the hope of looking like such people that impressionable girls refuse to eat and when the cure fails, despair and bulimia sets in.