Feeding women with animal metaphors that promote eating disorders in the written media

Abstract

This paper looks at animal-based metaphors used by the written media in order to convey negative messages about the relationship of women with food. By analyzing a corpus of met-aphors extracted from different sorts of publications, which include newspapers and maga-zines, this article tries to shed some light on how such figurative usages together with their visual representation may contribute to women's body dissatisfaction, thin ideal internaliza-tion and disordered eating.