Last month, advocates and survivors in the eating disorder community publicly worried that the film's trailer might glamorize anorexia or include excessive triggering imagery. The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) recommends against showing "dangerous thinness" because of the way that imagery can affect people experiencing or recovering from an eating disorder.

"What was in the trailer, there’s more of it in the film," said Claire Mysko, CEO of NEDA. She's glad Netflix included a warning about those depictions. But she's also disappointed that the movie doesn't point viewers to resources for information or help, something NEDA lobbied Netflix to do when the trailer dropped last month.

Making it easy for people to access help would have been the responsible thing to do here," she said.

If you couldn't tell already, this isn't just any ordinary movie — the expectations and stakes are much higher than any casual viewer could imagine.

That's why its scenes, plot points, and imagery are being subjected to such scrutiny. It may be just one woman's experience, but it also has the unusual power to dramatically shape public opinion of what eating disorders look like. Pop culture rarely portrays them well, or at all.

Prior to the film's debut, Melissa A. Fabello, a survivor, writer, and researcher who studies body positivity and eating disorders, wrote about the need for more stories that reflect diverse experiences: "My story  —  and the collective story of those like me  —  has become the only story."

Screenwriters have increasingly drawn on the singular narrative about eating disorders since the 1980s, when they became a topic of public conversation following the anorexia-related death of musician Karen Carpenter. In the 1990s, books like Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, gave white women, in particular, a language to talk about media, pop culture, body image, and eating disorders, but that conversation wasn't overly inclusive of contrasting experiences.

Read the source article at Mashable