The suicide of Marie Caro raises troubling questions about this killer
How terrible that Marie Caro has committed suicide out of 'guilt'. She was the mother of Isabelle Caro, the French anorexic model, who posed naked, bones jutting, skin stretched, eyes sunken pools of horror, for the 2007 'No Anorexia' campaign. At her worst, Isabelle weighed 3st 13lbs and ate two squares of chocolate and four or five cornflakes a day. She died last November, aged 28, after being admitted to a French hospital suffering from dehydration.
Marie is said to have taken her own life, consumed with guilt. Isabelle's stepfather says this was because it was his wife who insisted that her daughter go into the hospital. (In a case still pending, the Caro family believes the hospital failed Isabelle.) Aside from this, you wonder if, for Marie, guilt had become a way of life, the default guilt that's the lot of almost every mother, capped by the guilt of Isabelle's illness and death.
In her book, The Little Girl Who Didn't Want to Get Fat, Isabelle said her mother didn't want her to grow up. 'I wanted to have the body of a child for ever, to make my mother happy.' This belief is seemingly contradicted by her mother's subsequent battles with her over food, but who are we to know?
What we do know is that other mothers of anorexics have come forward to talk of their own crippling 'guilt'. This seems odd when anorexia has long been classified as a disease. If a mother would not blame herself for her child's cancer, then why would she take the blame for her anorexia? Because society dictates that she should?
If so, what rot. Anorexia is a disease, an issue of mental health, with myriad and complex triggers which, in a long list, can include family dysfunction. What it is not is: 'Something Mummy does to you!' Despite this, there often seems this undercurrent in cases of food disorders in girls. If we are not blaming magazines and skinny models, it's Mum's diets, body consciousness, vanity, their selfish, screwed-up example. Too much bad influence, too little vigilance – for the mother of an anorexic, there is always a way to blame herself.
One presumes a lot of this information about mothers was gleaned from medical interviews with sufferers, the majority of whom are young girls. The problem is that young girls are likely to plant the blame on their mums, not just about anorexia, but about anything. There's a possibility that you could ask some girls about global warming or Iraq and they would find a way to pin it on their mothers. They're not being horrible, they're not even being anorexic, they're just being young girls. It doesn't make what they say true, but it does make for an impossible burden of guilt for mothers of anorexia sufferers everywhere.
In truth, blaming mothers, even partly, doesn't make sense. If anorexia is a disease, then would a different mum, a non-dieting, non-oppressive mum, have made much difference? Moreover, if maternal influence were really this powerful, then why do these girls not get better when mums, along with the rest of the family, do their best to get them to eat?
Indeed, the real amount of influence these mothers have over the onset of this condition seems all too evident in how pitifully little they have over its cure. It seems to me that where the dark dance of anorexia is concerned, the sufferer pirouettes alone, a twisted, broken ballerina. Meanwhile, the mother stands aside, forced to play wallflower, with the rest of the world.
Was this Marie Caro's story – crushing guilt, accepted and absorbed, but for no real reason? It seems that it's high time we took the maternal guilt out of anorexia in order to see it more clearly. If we accept that anorexia is a killer, what we have here looks like a double homicide.
Politicians dyeing? It's a grey area
What's with all the 'hair McCarthyism' towards male leaders at the moment? David Cameron and Barack Obama have both been 'outed' and denounced for dyeing their hair. Shots of them greying have been gleefully juxtaposed against more recent ones of them, looking furtive, with 'darker hair'. When they say 'darker', they mean 'trying to look younger'. Did you get that?
Personally, I prefer both men with the more 'pebble-dashed' look, or, should I say, distinguished. When 'darker', Cameron, in particular, takes on a ghoulish 'Westminster meets Twilight' air. All of a sudden I can imagine him sporting a black net kerchief at a 1980s goth disco, and dancing to Soft Cell nonchalantly. Not a great look for a prime minister.
As for Obama – things being the way they are, it makes a lot more sense for him to be ageing in front of our eyes. After all, the same thing happened to Tony Blair, whose boyish looks disappeared in office, to be replaced by someone so raddled he looked as if three ghosts were visiting him in the night. Every night.
Ed Miliband has yet to acquire the hot politico look of 'prematurely greying desperation', but give him time. One thing is for sure, there must be a more edifying way forward than the thought of Obama and Cameron sitting in hair salons, towels around necks, having Vaseline dabbed around their ears to avoid 'staining', reading old copies of Take a Break.
With this in mind, tipping a bottle of Nice'n'Easy 'natural medium brown' on to politicians' heads to make them look younger, fresher, more electable, could be viewed as counterproductive. If grey hair is the price of leadership then the dignified thing is not to fight it.
For a silent birth, we're hearing an awful lot about it
John Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, is said to have undergone 'silent birth', in keeping with her religion, Scientology. Personally, the idea of 'silent birth' seems creepy, woman-hating, and just plain wrong.
Whether intentional or not, it's as if Scientology itself is intoning: 'You are a woman. Only you are biologically equipped to give birth, I suppose we are going to put up with that. Just so long as you don't make too much of a fuss. While you are passing this new human being through your birth canal, we don't want to hear a peep out of you, for um, spiritual reasons – is that clear?'
Why is Preston buying into this tragic quasi-macho rot? Why is Travolta, for that matter?
Moreover, Scientology, like many other religions, has its sanctimonious, pompous and freaky sides – but if these rituals are really so sacred and divine, then why do they feel such an urgent need to broadcast every detail?
Do they get the Scientology equivalent of Blue Peter badges for this kind of thing? It seems a bit ironic that the only thing 'non silent' about Ms Preston's birth was all the bragging she's done since.
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