Anexoria nervosa was first identified as a medical condition some four or five generations ago, in the 1870s (Brumberg, 1988, p. 3). For a century after it was identified and named, it remained an obscure psychiatric condition, considered almost freakishly rare. The term itself was known only to medical professionals. Then, beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, anexoria nervosa entered the popular culture. Popular magazines began to run articles on it. The term has become so familiar that anyone may say of a woman who is thin beyond the dictates of fashion that she looks anorexic (Brumberg, 1988, p. 8).
Notice that we said "of a woman." Anexoria nervosa and its cousin, bulimia, are overwhelming conditions that afflict women. If a man appears unhealthfully thin, we do not think in terms of anorexia; we merely think of him as thin. If he fits the appropriate stereotypes, we may suspect drugs such as speed or cocaine. Yet we do not make the same presumptions about a woman; we suspect anexoria, or at any rate we use "anexoric" as a generic term for unhealthfully thin women.
Not only is anorexia associated almost exclusively with women (not only in the popular culture, but in medical practice); it is a condition found largely among women of a certain class and age. It is in America predominantly a condition of young white women of the middle class and upwards, and has appeared among their counterparts in other Western countries and in Japan. Culturally it is the opposite of the drug abuser's thinness. It is a nice girls' disease.
It has been estimated that five to ten percent of young women may suffer from anexoria or bulimia; on college campuses, where young women of the appropriate social background are concentrated, the incidence may reach as high as twenty percent (Brumberg, 1988, p. 12). Now, the increasing incidence may in part be a consequence of "diagnostic drift;" once a condition is ...