It’s the French, again

I know, I know, the French are targets of easy ridicule here in the USA. But still. Seems French lawmakers passed a bill making it illegal for fashion houses and so forth to show extremely thin models. (See Yahoo! story.) Seems the author of the law, Conservative lawmaker Valery Boyer, had insisted this sort of display encourages anorexia or severe weight loss and should be punishable in court. True, the photo accompanying the Yahoo! story is rather grim – a model with extremely protruding shoulders and ribs. It seems quite unfathomable that a fashion designer would walk that, literally, skeletal look down the runway. But, do we really need a government law to tell us this? A little bit of independent thinking and decision-making would go a long way here. Sure, we are all subject to social pressures – how to dress, how to present ourselves, how much to weigh, etc. But the best advice I can think of is to encourage people (children included) to exercise some independent judgment. Even if we make bad decisions from time to time, we have opportunity to make better decisions in the future. The alternative, as we see in France, is to use government as a tool to treat us all like idiots incapable of making good decisions.