“Never Just Pictures,” by Susan Bordo, presents cultural criticism in an objective style. Her reaction to the currently popular “cult of the cadaverous” is meant to warn and complicate the causes of such a bizarre American cultural phenomenon. Bordo makes sure to analyze this problem within the American culture because, to most people, it does not seem possible that such an issue could derive from such a hedonist culture. This obsession with thinness seems to be perpetuated by fashion icons who, in Bordo’s opinion, want to perpetuate this negative image in order to profit from the sale of their products. Bordo is trying to warn her audience of the dangers of “normalization” and the false solutions for anxieties caused by consumerism. In her essay, Bordo’s analysis of the “cult of the cadaverous” is shaped after both a magazine editorial and a scholarly article. In the beginning of the essay, Bordo mentions celebrity names like Alicia Silverstone (85) and famous dieting products like Citra Lean (86) in order to illustrate the influence of the “cadaverous” trend in popular culture. The mentioning of pop icons emulates the editorial form of writing. At the same time, Bordo also mentions psychological research in which children identified obesity as a handicap (86). The mentioning of the research imitates research citations in scholarly articles. This interchange of editorial and academic styles is repeated throughout the essay, with mentioning of the cult of the perfectly fit body of the 1996 Olympic Games (87), the ex-anorexic novelist Stephanie Grant’s confessions after conquering her eating disorder, the analysis of the New York Times articles on fashion ads, and the comments by model Zoe Fleischauer (89). In every paragraph Bordo mixes these two styles to give the essay a tone that’s both scholarly and approachable. She wants to convince the audience that this is an issue that must be addressed by the gener