Heroin Chic Happened Because of Pedophiles in the Modeling Industry

I was a teenager in the age of heroin chic. The 90s and 00s, anorexia, for years, was the dominant fashion. It was everywhere. On the television and the news. In the music industry. The tabloids printed the weights of teen celebs, endless speculation on the weight, up a few pounds, down a few pounds. There was anorexia everywhere but it started on the runway, everyone agrees. 

I was watching a documentary series about the dark side of the 90s from VICE, this hour focusing on the age of the supermodel. Most of it consisted of vital investigating and reporting from those especially victims, who spent years trying to whistleblow on the constant sexual abuse faced by these teen girls. The modeling world was the lair of multiple, highly prolific pedophiles, like Jean-Luc Brunel, who engaged in brutal, ongoing, systematic abuse and trafficking of aspiring teen models for decades. And Epstein was there too, co-abusing with Jean-Luc: you must remember that pedophiles are group predators and group hunters. Pedophiles will happily set up shop in a major center of commerce around teens (it is often a financial crimes as well) and take hundreds or thousands of victims; Andy Warhol’s Factory is another example of this. Other celebrity and Hollywood pedophiles including Hugh Hefner and R. Kelly have long established themselves as gatekeepers of money and power and access and then fed off the steady supply of young girls trying to get their careers off the ground. Donald Trump did the same thing with the Miss America contests. 

The doc does a really great job of talking about some of the sexual abuse and that is just so important and making sure we honor the experiences of these girls and go forward making sure it will never happen again. 

The doc also briefly discusses heroin chic, and I want to zoom in more and make that essential connection between the two phenomenons which we so often miss, which is that anorexia and other eating disorders are directly caused by child and teen sexual abuse; in fact, 30%-50% of eating disorder patients are victims of childhood sexual abuse. This is the direct medical result of sexual abuse and that is what we were seeing during the age of heroin chic where anorexia was turned into a global decadence and spectacle. A medical condition caused by pedophilia.  

Substance abuse was also a major theme of the heroin chic phase, you had heroin and cocaine as well as lots of alcohol as major themes of this time, happening both in the imagery and artifacts and being used by their producers.

 This is interesting because, dually, drugs were used by the predators in order to facilitate the sexual assaults; and that substance abuse is sky-high in victims of child and teen sexual assault, so you have these drugs functioning in the environment in multiple ways that all come back to the predator and to the pattern of predation. Heroin chic was literally the cultural capture of the aftermath of a pedophile attack or an ongoing abduction: substance abuse + eating disorders. These girls were consumed and exploited on so many dimensions: that was the substance of this cultural bauble of heroin chic.

When I think back to that time, I have very strong memories of Paris Hilton being the poster girl of the time and one of the teen celebs who was most focused on for her body and speculation about an eating disorder.

Paris has been incredibly brave in recent years, coming out to tell her story of being sexually abused at age 16 when she was sent to an abusive reform program for troubled youth by her parents. Just a few years later on the magazine covers, they listed her weight daily and showed spread after spread of photos of her, turning her into a freak show. In tabloids and press that was run by adult men. 

Something sickening and terrible happened during these years. As this was happening to teen celebrities and models and musicians, teen girls all over the country were getting internet in the homes; pedophiles lay in wait in the chat rooms and incalculable numbers of teens were sexually abused as a result, something that continues to this day.

That was when internet thinspo exploded as girls with eating disorders took to the internet to try to deal with their disease however they could. Thinspo leaves a deep mark on the internet to this day and also expresses this dichotomy between illness and the display and consumption of it we see coming up again and again. These are dimensions of the disease it is important to consider.

In the 90s and aughts, everywhere you looked was filled with sick girls. Your classmates in school became ill. Everyone was dieting and throwing up and snorting stimulants to get rid of the appetite.

Sometimes I have wondered if the social functions of anorexia, its seemingly contagious nature, is some kind of social warning, some evolutionary behavior. In an environment with an active pedophile you will inevitably see it in the bodies, shrieking an unmistakable warning. Spreading through the children. Marking the lair. It turns you into a sign of death, the walking corpses of the 90s runways.

We are entering another era of eating disorders, since early 2022 we have seen the body weights of celebrities and models plummet, from fast fashion sites for teenage girls to the Kardashians and other mega “body icons” we have seen morphed remarkably quickly in the past year or so, doubtlessly medically assisted through new “hot” weight loss strategies like… abusing insulin. 

And where we see a “trend” of eating disorders, what are we also going to see…

Recent findings from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Study show that rates of teen rape are up significantly… since 2019, up 27% over two years: “we see this increase from 11 percent to 14 percent of teenage girls saying that they’d been raped just between 2019 and 2021.” That represents over 200,000 more HIGH SCHOOLERS getting raped. Further, “1 in 5 (18%) experienced sexual violence in the past year.” The largest jump since the CDC started tracking it.

It is never probable that a change in cultural environment around eating disorders inflames without an influence from the results of large-scale sexual abuse, particularly of children and teens. Where there is one there is always the other; they are categorically inseperable phenomenon and we are in yet another cycle of it. 

Pedophilia, child and teen sexual abuse; these things change everything, they shape everything around us and the culture and society itself, particularly in a pedophilic and child abusing society where it is simply not enough that children be made sick, but that that illness is itself turned into a pleasurable spectacle, even a wealth engine, as Jean-Luc Brunel + his co-conspirators like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump profited on these abuses in many ways. These are mass-scale pedophiles committing serious physical crimes, resulting in serious physical illness, parading their skeletons around in front of the globe and making money off them. They produced sick girls and then pumped them into the mainline of the culture and suddenly the marks of pedophilia were everywhere. 

It throws the entire public obsession with eating disorders as spectacle into a terrible new light, huh.  

Pedophiles are irredeemable. The depravity of their acts and the degree of their crimes is so extreme that we can literally see it in the shape of the culture and in the cultural production itself. They carve massive damage into entire generations; whenever any further generation looks at the pictures of our most beautiful girls, the It girls we had when we were growing up, they will always be emaciated, waifs, sick girls, anas, many of them also addicts, abused by monsters, most of which were never stopped, and certainly not before it was already grotesquely too late. 

They call these times the “Age of Supermodel”.