"One of the hardest challenges I faced, in presenting these ideas at conferences and public lectures, was getting medical professionals and academics to take cultural imagery seriously. Most clinicians, unaccustomated to viewing images as anything other than “mere fashion,” saw cultural interpretation as somehow minimizing the seriousness of eating disorders. I insisted-an argument I laid out explicitly in a later book, ‘Twilight Zones”-that images of slenderness are never “just pictures,” as the fashion magazines continually maintain (disingenuously) in their own defense. Not only are the artfully arranged bodies in the ads and videos and fashion spreads powerful lessons in how to see (and evaluate) bodies, but also they offer fantasies of safety, self-containment, acceptance, immunity from pain and hurt. They speak to young people not just about how to be beautiful but about how to become what the dominant culture admires, how to be cool, how to “get it together.” To girls who have been abused they may speak of transcendence or armoring or too-vulnerable female flesh. For racial and ethnic groups whose bodies have been marked as foreign, healthy, and primitive, or considered unattractive by Anglo-Saxon norms, they may cast the lure of assimilation, of becoming (metaphorically speaking) “white.”"