Research on the influence of environmental and cultural factors, including media exposure, is mixed, and much of it is ideologically shaped and interpreted. It is distorted in two common ways: The first is by lumping serious eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia in with less serious episodes of disordered eating, or with simple dissatisfaction with the appearance of one’s body, and treating the aggregate as a unified pathology — rather like treating chronic alcoholism and short-term collegiate binge drinking as if they were the same phenomenon. The second distortion comes from inadequately dealing with — or flatly refusing to account for — the fact that people who are suffering from a disordered obsession with body image seek out media that affirm their ideals or that provide information about diet and weight-loss strategies. Reading diet articles does not make you anorexic, but being anorexic attracts you to diet articles. Some researchers believe this to be a circular phenomenon — the media-consumption body contributing to and resulting from the disorder — and perhaps it is, but the inconsistency of findings, the elusiveness of the mechanism of causality, and the prominence of relatively straightforward biological factors together suggest that the media-oriented explanation of anorexia is yet another in a long line of feminism-derived ideological assaults on reality, which have done so much harm to so many fields of social research.