PARIS — In
the capital of high fashion and ultrathin models, conservative French
legislators adopted a pioneering law on Tuesday aimed at stifling a
proliferation of Web sites that promote eating disorders with “thinspiration”
and starvation tips.
Reuters
The
death in 2006 of the Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston from anorexia caused
soul-searching in France.
The
bill, approved by the lower house of Parliament, faces a Senate vote. If
passed, it would take aim at any means of mass communication — including
magazines and Web sites — that promote eating disorders like anorexia or
bulimia with punishments of up to three years in prison and more than $70,000
in fines.
The
legislation was sponsored by Valérie Boyer, a conservative lawmaker from the
Bouches-du-Rhône region in the south of France,
and was also backed by the government’s health minister, Roselyne Bachelot. It
is one of the strongest measures proposed since the 2006 death of a Brazilian
model, Ana Carolina Reston, from anorexia.
“We have
noticed,” Ms. Boyer said in an interview with The Associated Press, “that the
sociocultural and media environment seems to favor the emergence of troubled
nutritional behavior, and that is why I think it necessary to act.”
But the
proposed law was criticized by the French Federation of Couture. Didier Grumbach,
the federation president, told The Associated Press that it was impossible to
legislate body weight. “Never will we accept in our profession that a judge
decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny,” he said. “That doesn’t exist
in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France.”
With the
proposed law, the French legislators are seeking to tame a murky world of some
400 sites extolling “ana” and “mia,” nicknames for anorexia and bulimia. Since
2000, such Web sites have multiplied in many languages, offering blunt tips on
crash dieting, bingeing, vomiting and hiding weight loss from concerned
parents.
The bill
would make it illegal to “provoke a person to seek excessive weight loss by
encouraging prolonged nutritional deprivation that would have the effect of
exposing them to risk of death or endangering health.”
Critics from
the French Socialist Party complained that the bill was vaguely worded and
rushed through the lower house by the U.M.P., the conservative party of
President Nicolas
Sarkozy.
Eating
disorder experts also expressed doubts about whether such a law would help
victims or create even more demand for the sites by publicizing them.
“Ultimately,
I think it’s a mistake to ban them because I think that you’re going to be hard
pressed to demonstrate in a very clear way that these sites have a direct
negative affect,” said Michael Levine, a psychology professor at Kenyon College
in Ohio whose specialty is eating disorders and the mass media.
As written,
the proposed French law does not make it clear who would be ultimately
responsible for the content of such sites — the content creator or the Internet
service hosting the site.
An aide to
Ms. Boyer, the lawmaker, said the U.M.P. expected the proposed law to be
amended to address those questions. He added that the idea was to focus on
institutions that promote eating disorders, noting that “we cannot exclude
fashion shows if there is a problem of health” or the death of a model.
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