Eating disorders are the perfect comparison.
I'm old enough to remember when the word of them exploded into the mainstream. All of a sudden, all the cool girls in high school had anorexia or bulimia.
I read somewhere that there was an Asian country (Hong Kong?) that had next to no incidences of eating disorders. Then a TV news show did a big feature on the subject. All of a sudden, the country had a mini-crisis on its hands with girl after girl seeking treatment.
My conclusion: People are sheep and will mindlessly follow whatever is trendy. Now that our society has PR people promoting things like being trans, this is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. It was so much easier when PR people peddled things like grunge music, pet rocks, and aerobics (yes, I had to get my obligatory reference to the 1980s in).
I'm old enough to remember when the word of them exploded into the mainstream. All of a sudden, all the cool girls in high school had anorexia or bulimia.
I read somewhere that there was an Asian country (Hong Kong?) that had next to no incidences of eating disorders. Then a TV news show did a big feature on the subject. All of a sudden, the country had a mini-crisis on its hands with girl after girl seeking treatment.
My conclusion: People are sheep and will mindlessly follow whatever is trendy. Now that our society has PR people promoting things like being trans, this is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. It was so much easier when PR people peddled things like grunge music, pet rocks, and aerobics (yes, I had to get my obligatory reference to the 1980s in).