December: time to say goodbye to sunglasses and beautiful skirts. If we have to start covering up again, then so do the skin-and-bone celebrities whose disappearing bodies seem to have been the obsession of the media all summer long.

12月，到了和太阳镜还有漂亮裙子说拜拜的时候了。既然我们得再次裹上厚厚的冬衣，那么那些骨瘦如柴的名流们也得这么做。整个夏天，她们日渐瘦小的身体似乎一直都是媒体穷追不舍的对象。

It's not just the popular press that keeps us informed about the too-thin figures of Nicole Richie, Victoria Beckham, Renée Zellweger and Keira Knightley. The quality papers have also found ways to report on uberskinny stars. They handle the subject differrently, of course. Usually they attack the popular press for its obsession with women's bodies, and then give us an intellectual analysis of the paradox of thinness in an increasingly fat world.

不仅通俗报刊经常提醒我们妮可·里奇、维多利亚·贝克汉姆、芮妮·齐薇格和凯拉·奈特利等人身材过瘦，就连一些严肃报刊也在想方设法地报道那些骨瘦如柴的明星。当然，后者的选题角度不同。通常，严肃报刊会先批判通俗报刊过分关注女性身材，然后针对胖人日益增多的世界中出现以瘦为美这一悖论做出睿智的分析。

What all the stories have in common is that they claim to be worried about the health of the woman in question.（Notice how it's always a woman.）And it encourages other women who have fewer reasons to be cheerful than these overprivileged, underfed celebrities.

所有这些故事的共同点就是它们都声称自己是在关注女性的健康问题。请注意，为什么总是女性？而且，这会导致其他女性争相效仿，比起那些营养不良但又处处享受特殊待遇的明星，她们更缺少开心的理由。

Each year, anorexia kills an estimated 150,000 American women. In Britain, the charity ChildLine reports a 50 per cent rise in the number of children, some as young as 10, who are seeking help. Of all that is known about anorexia, the most significant is that it's most common among young Western women.

据估计，每年有15万美国女性死于厌食症。在英国，来自慈善团体儿童热线的报告显示，患厌食症的儿童增加了50%,其中一些患病的儿童才10岁大。在对厌食症的了解中，最重要的一个事实是，它在西方年轻女性中最为普遍。

Each era sets its ideal for feminine beauty: Rubenesque curves; tiny waist; large breasts; rounded hips; slender hips. But never has a set of conditions been as dangerous as 24-hour global media, airbrushing and the fashion for a figure that owes more to the unthreatening shape of a young girl that that of a fully grown, intelligent woman.

对于女性之美，每个时代都有不同的标准：或具有鲁本斯笔下妇女般的曲线、或细腰、或丰乳、或臀部浑圆、抑或臀部窄小。但从来没有哪个时代的条件像现在这样危险：24小时运转的全球媒体、精心修饰过的明星海报、体形的时尚标准更推崇小女孩没有发育的瘦小身材，而不是发育成熟、聪明睿智的女性的体形。

This impossible-to-achieve illusion leads 12-year-old girls to miss meals, go for leg waxes and, worst of all, judge each other's worth entirely on the basis of their physical appearance.

这种不可能实现的幻想导致一些12岁的女孩不吃饭，往腿上打蜡脱毛，最糟糕的是，完全以体态外貌来评判彼此的价值。

This is not a mental illness, it's an unpleasant woman-against-woman competition. Maybe it's better for women to return to the battle of the sexes. Feminism was never so successful in eating away at femininity as the present culture that makes women fear food and so show a lack of faith in their talents and pride in their natural form.

这不是一种精神疾病，而是一场令人不愉快的女性之间的竞争。也许回到为男女平等而斗争的时代对女性而言更好些。那时的女权运动都没能像如今的文化这样"成功"地磨灭掉女性的气质。现在的文化让女性对食物感到恐惧，使女性表现出缺乏对个人才华的自信和对自然形体的自豪。