Anorexia and misinformation.

Approximately 150,000 women die each year in the United States of anorexia! Startling? Shocking? Unbelievable? Implausible? Well, it must be true. Gloria Steinem said so on page 222 of her best-seller Revolution Within: A Book of Self-Esteem: "in this country alone . . . about 150,000 females die of anorexia each year." Besides, Ann Landers, who works with an impressive coterie of experts, also said so in her syndicated column of April 1992: "Every year, 150,000 American women die from complications associated with anorexia and bulimia." Thus, it must be true. And surely no one should question its citation in the Preface of a women's studies text, entitled The Knowledge Explosion: Generations of Feminist Scholarship.

Indictment

The startling figure is not only true, thinks Naomi Wolf, but of such magnitude that it fully justifies a powerful indictment against America's (and no doubt, Canada's) misogynistic culture. She asks, indignantly, in her own bestseller, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, "How would America react to the mess of self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons?" Pushing her rhetoric a bit further, she finds the phenomenon of male-initiated anorexia comparable with the Holocaust: "When confronted with a vast number of emaciated bodies starved not by nature but by men, one must notice a certain resemblance."

We find evidence of the same transition from statistics to ideology in Joan Brumberg's book Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Brumberg, a historian and former director of women's studies at Cornell University, contends that the women who study eating problems "seek to demonstrate that these disorders are an inevitable consequence of a misogynistic society that demeans women . . . by objectifying their bodies."

Questions

Despite what the so-called authorities have said, is it really possible that almost three times as many women die each year in the United States of anorexia as the total number of American men who died in the Vietnam War? Brumberg takes her figure from the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association. Yet that organization insists it was misquoted.

In a 1985 newsletter, the association had referred to 150,000 to 200,00 sufferers (not fatalities) from anorexia. The National Center for Health Statistics has reported 101 deaths from anorexia in 1983, and 67 in 1988. In 1991 there were 54 deaths from anorexia nervosa, and none from bulimia. To her credit, Naomi Wolf, after being apprised of her error, has instructed her publisher that her statistics on anorexia are not accurate.

It may be true that more women die each year from complications associated with being overweight, rather than underweight. But statistics to this effect would not serve to indict the male establishment. It would be difficult to convince society that men everywhere are pressuring women to be grossly overweight.

Ideology and propaganda

The great danger connected with the current "misinformation explosion" is that it can readily attach itself to an ideology, in this case, a feminist ideology which, in turn, can actually fuel discrimination. People who fight discrimination, even where the discrimination is real and not merely imagined, with false information (or lies), will find that they are advancing the very thing they are trying to end.

Information is omnipresent. It is readily accessible and is available in limitless supply. But one has little of value to say or to write if his information has no relation to truth. Truth alone, not mere information, remains the sine qua non of education. It is what, in the final analysis, distinguishes education from propaganda. Because ideologies are essentially disconnected from reality, their principal means of sustenance and propagation must come through the exploitation of false data. The anorexia issue is hardly proof that contemporary culture is misogynistic.

Male-bashing is a popular sport these days, and men are now paying a heavy price for the fabrications that pass for feminist scholarship. There can be little question that men are, to a certain extent, themselves victims of discrimination.

Misinformation, rash judgment, irresponsible rhetoric, and toxic ideology are potent allies. Bernard Nathanson now readily admits that in the 1960's, when he and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws were fuelling pro-abortion propaganda with lies, approximately 300 women died each year from criminal abortions, not the 5,000 that they stated in a press release. Yet this calculated lie was a most powerful lever in lifting protection from the unborn.

It may be difficult to get at the truth. Internet is infested with mis-statements of fact, while the media are more disposed to disseminate fiction than fact. But ideologies, woven as they are by lies, deceptions, and inaccuracies, in the end serve no one. They may appear to be self-serving at first, but when the truth finally comes to light, as it inevitably does given enough time, they are sources of great embarrassment. The truth sets us free; the lie keeps us locked in fear.