Studies as recent as 2000 indicated that 40% of all 6 year old girls wish they were thinner and 50% will have tried dieting by age 8. 80% of 17 year old girls evaluated as "at a healthy weight" described themselves as fat or overweight. And body image issues are increasing among young boys. What markers, characteristics, or warning signs distinguish these young people from their peers? More than 75% of them are white.

Though eating disorders among older and more affluent black and Latin women is on the rise, the increase is marginal, and among young people the acceptance of voluptuous figures in women remains a norm. Part of the staying power of the trend is directly tied to the hip-hop, rap, and Latino music cultures. While white cultural icons for young people remain thin, JLO, Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot, and others have carried the banner for curvy, even super-size bodies in their subcultures.

Few can forget Sir Mixalot's early 90's anthem "Baby Got Back," in which the big, loud rapper shouted: "I like big butts and I cannot lie!" Mixalot's video featured very full figured women shaking, gyrating, and grinding to his infectious lyrics. He extolled the joys of full figuredness, even broke the taboos of "feeding" by urging "ladies" who wanted to "roll his mercedes" to eat up. "Gimme a sister, can't resist her," he cried, "red beans and rice didn't miss her!"

In the neighbor-culture of white suburban copy-cats a small but growing pocket of acceptance has sprung up. Attend a school dance at your local middle or high school. Chaperones reared in the self-punishing 70's and 80's may be shocked to see young girls with plump figures sporting crop tops above hip-hugging bell bottoms with no apologies for their jiggling tummies. Anti-culture white heroines like Gwen Stephanie of No Doubt and Courtney Love of Hole, even bad-girl-come-uber-mom Madonna, made early in-roads by wearing what they wanted, when they wanted without worrying about their lack of waifishness. None of these women are plump, but neither are they showing ribs. And while this trend seems to meet resistance with older females, these youngsters will grow up.

So from where is the self-hate coming? All signposts and indicators seem to point to western culture, that sacred cow of bad self image. In both the US, France, and Great Britain the cult of thinness has permeated almost every public forum. Politicians who are portly are ridiculed (former President Clinton and his full figured intern du jour, Monica among them). Magazines, those bastions of self-loathing rhetoric, seem to be slipping almost into backlash mode in response to the undercurrent of growing size acceptance. Prime time television is a barrage of waifs in the latest from Karan and Tyler. In fact, 1999 Harvard Medical School study found disordered eating behaviors among adolescent women living in Fiji increased five-fold after the introduction of Western television programming three years earlier.

The message is that non-white cultures, while still not controlling the economic strings, are sending better messages to their children. Young people who have healthier body image tend to be of non-white ethnicity or belong to counter-culture movements emulating their non-white peers. How long it may take this trend to spread, or if it will spread at all remains to be seen. There is, however, a lesson. Young people will eagerly ignore the negative and damaging imagery hurled at them by mainstream media if they are given alternatives.