'I feel too fat to fit through a doorway'

Anorexics make an effort to ‘squeeze’ through doorways even when they don’t have to. Young women with the eating disorder turned side-on to get though a gap when it was 40% wider than their shoulders. In contrast, healthy women only started to swivel when the space was much narrower.

Anorexia accounts for around one in ten of the 1.6million cases of eating disorders in the UK, is much more common in females than males and usually develops in adolescence. Sufferers try to stay as thin as possible by drastically cutting back on food and undertaking extreme exercise. Long-term, it can cause health problems from brittle bones to life-threatening heart damage.

It appears that for those with anorexia nervosa, experience their body as fat goes beyond thinking and perceiving themselves in such a way, it is even reflected in how they move around the world.

It is recently concluded that among teenage girls, eating disorders are now second only to depression as the most common new mental health problem they will be diagnosed with. However, boys are not exempt, with increasing numbers being diagnosed, including some as young as ten.

With the young under increasing pressure to ‘be perfect and look perfect’, the problem is now so severe it threatens the mental health of an entire generation.

Slaping men is still abuse

I have recently read in a news article titled "Women: hitting your man is not cute, it's abuse" and I had to agree with it. (The article I just stabled across whilst I was at work)

In telegraph online they said: "pop culture gives the impression it is cute, or empowering, or even sexy when women hit men. The scene reversed would carry a single connotation of misogyny and out-of-control male aggression, but here we are expected to laugh, or even to be turned on by these characters' resort to the grim shortcut of violence to deal with problems. And young women are clearly taking note. It was revealed this week that one in seven women aged 15-22 in the US admits to hitting their partner, compared to just one in twenty men."

The thing is that there have been many cases in the media where a woman slaps a man or lashes out at a guy by hitting him or kneeing them in the groin. There hasn't been much in the news about any reported cases of this nature but in TV soaps and movie Rom-com's, this sort of thing has happened (worryingly) often.

It is supposed to "empower" the woman. Make the women stronger, and men are supposed to accept it as a consequence of there actions.

This has become a problem because it is still classed as abuse and it goes unreported because it has become accepted by the younger generation. Mostly the 15 to 22 year old. It does not make the problem go away, but increases the chance of a similar incident reoccurring, whether a man is hitting a woman or a woman is smacking him back.

Young women are internalising messages that dominance is the only way to conduct a relationship successfully, in keeping with the individualistic streak that feminism has acquired in recent years, where to be empowered means getting what you want, not working together for what you can both accept from each other.

I have had incidence where I have met women where they seem to think that are the most dominate person in the room, they have to make sure that every one knows it and they abuse their power because of it.

I am not trying to say that women shouldn't feel empowered and more on a level as men, they should. It's just hitting or harming one another is abuse what ever gender you are or who you are harming.