by Naomi Wolf
Authoritative evidence is mounting that eating diseases are caused mainly by dieting. Ilana Attie and J. Brooks-Gunn quote investigators who found “chronic, restrained eating” to “constitute a cumulative stress of such magnitude that dieting itself may be ‘a sufficient condition for the development of anorexia nervosa or bulimia.’” Roberta Pollack Seid reaches the same conclusion. “Ironically, dieting . . . itself may provoke obsessive behaviour and binge-eating. It may indeed cause both eating disorders and obesity itself.” Sustained caloric deprivation appears to be a severe shock to the body that it remembers with destructive consequences. Seid writes that “women’s problems with food seem to stem . . . from their effort to get an ultra-lean body. . . . The only way 95% can get it is by putting themselves on deprivatory diets.” Attie and Brooks-Gunn concur: “Much of the behavior thought to cause anorexia nervosa and bulimia may actually be a consequence of starvation. . . . The normal weight dieter who diets to look and feel thin also is vulnerable to disturbed emotional, cognitive and behavioral patterns by virtue of the constant stress of trying to stay below the body’s ‘natural’ or biologically regulated weight.” Dieting and fashionable thinness make women seriously unwell.
Now, if female fat is sexuality and reproductive power; if food is honor; if dieting is semistarvation; if women have to lose 23 percent of their body weight to fit the Iron Maiden and chronic psychological disruption sets in at a body weight loss of 25 percent; if semistarvation is physically and psychologically debilitating, and female strength, sexuality, and self-respect pose the threats explored earlier against the vested interests of society; if women’s journalism is sponsored by a $33-billion industry whose capital is made out of the political fear of women; then we can understand why the Iron Maiden is so thin. The thin “ideal” is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.
The compulsion to imitate her is not something trivial that women choose freely to do to ourselves. It is something serious being done to us to safeguard political power. Seen in this light, it is inconceivable that women would not have to be compelled to grow thin at this point in our history.
The ideology of semistarvation undoes feminism; what happens to women’s bodies happens to our minds. If women’s bodies are and have always been wrong whereas men’s are right, then women are wrong and men are right. Where feminism taught women to put a higher value on ourselves, hunger teaches us how to erode our self-esteem. If a woman can be made to say, “I hate my fat thighs,” it is a way she has been made to hate femaleness. The more financially independent, in control of events, educated and sexually autonomous women become in the world, the more impoverished, out of control, foolish, and sexually insecure we are asked to feel in our bodies.
Hunger makes women feel poor and think poor. A wealthy woman on a diet feels physically at the mercy of a scarcity economy; the rare woman who makes $100,000 a year has a bodily income of 1,000 calories a day. Hunger makes successful women feel like failures: An architect learns that her work crumbles; a politician who oversees a long-range vision is returned to the details, to add up every bite; a woman who can afford to travel can’t “afford” rich foreign foods. It undermines each experience of control, economic security, and leadership that women have had only a generation to learn to enjoy. Those who were so recently freed to think beyond the basics are driven, with this psychology, back to the feminine mental yoke of economic dependence: fixation on getting sustenance and safety. Virginia Woolf believed that “one cannot think well, sleep well, love well if one has not dined well.” “The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes,” she wrote, contrasting the dispiriting food of poverty, of the hard-pressed women’s colleges with that of the rich men’s colleges, the “soles sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook has spread a counterpane of the whitest cream.” Now that some women at last have achieved the equivalent of £500 a year and a room of their own, it is back once more to four ounces of boiled beef and three unsweetened prunes, and the unlit lamp.
The anorexic may begin her journey defiant, but from the point of view of a male-dominated society, she ends up as the perfect woman. She is weak, sexless, and voiceless, and can only with difficulty focus on a world beyond her plate. The woman has been killed off in her. She is almost not there. Seeing her like this, unwomaned, it makes crystalline sense that a half-conscious but virulent mass movement of the imagination created the vital lie of skeletal female beauty. A future in which industrialized nations are peopled with anorexia-driven women is one of few conceivable that would save the current distribution of wealth and power from the claims made on it by women’s struggle for equality.
For theorists of anorexia to focus on the individual woman, even within her family, misses the tactical heart of this struggle. Economic and political retaliation against female appetite is far stronger at this point than family dynamics.
This can no longer be explained as a private issue. If suddenly 60 to 80 percent of college women can’t eat, it’s hard to believe that suddenly 60 to 80 percent of their families are dysfunctional in this particular way. There is a disease in the air; its cause was generated with intent; and young women are catching it.
Just as the thin Iron Maiden is not actually beautiful, anorexia, bulimia, even compulsive eating, symbolically understood, are not actually diseases. They begin, as Susie Orbach notes, as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation. The anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: By starving, she masters it. A bulimic may recognize the madness of the hunger cult, its built-in defeat, its denial of pleasure. A mentally healthy person will resist having to choose between food and sexuality—sexuality being bought, today, by maintenance of the official body. By vomiting, she gets around the masochistic choice. Eating diseases are often interpreted as symptomatic of a neurotic need for control. But surely it is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you, especially if you are a lone young woman and it is a massive industry fueled by the needs of an entire determined world order. Self-defense is the right plea when it comes to eating disasters; not insanity. Self-defense bears no stigma, whereas madness is a shame.
Victorian female hysteria, mysterious at the time, makes sense now that we see it in the light of the social pressures of sexual self-denial and incarceration in the home. Anorexia should be as simple to understand. What hysteria was to the nineteenth-century fetish of the asexual woman locked in the home, anorexia is to the late-twentieth-century fetish of the hungry woman.
Anorexia is spreading because it works. Not only does it solve the dilemma of the young woman faced with the hunger cult, it also protects her from street harassment and sexual coercion; construction workers leave walking skeletons alone. Having no fat means having no breasts, thighs, hips, or ass, which for once means not having asked for it. Women’s magazines tell women they can control their bodies; but women’s experiences of sexual harassment make them feel they cannot control what their bodies are said to provoke. Our culture gives a young woman only two dreams in which to imagine her body, like a coin with two faces: one pornographic, the other anorexic; the first for nighttime, the second for day—the one, supposedly, for men and the other for other women. She does not have the choice to refuse to toss it—nor, yet, to demand a better dream. The anorexic body is sexually safer to inhabit than the pornographic.
At the same time, it works for male-dominated institutions by processing women smoothly, unwomaned, into positions closer to power. It is “trickling down” to women of all social classes from elitist schools and universities because that is where women are getting too close to authority. There, it is emblematic of how hunger checkmates power in any woman’s life: Hundreds of thousands of well-educated young women, living and studying at the fulcrum of cultural influence, are causing no trouble. The anorexic woman student, like the anti-Semitic Jew and t
he self-hating black, fits in. She is politically castrate, with exactly enough energy to do her schoolwork, neatly and completely, and to run around the indoor track in eternal circles. She has no energy to get angry or get organized, to chase sex, to yell through a bullhorn, asking for money for night buses or for women’s studies programs or to know where all the women professors are. Administering a coed class half full of mentally anorexic women is an experience distinct from that of administering a class half full of healthy, confident young women. The woman in these women canceled out, it is closer to the administration of young men only, which was how things were comfortably managed before.
For women to stay at the official extreme of the weight spectrum requires 95 percent of us to infantilize or rigidify to some degree our mental lives. The beauty of thinness lies not in what it does to the body but to the mind, since it is not female thinness that is prized, but female hunger, with thinness merely symptomatic. Hunger attractively narrows the focus of a mind that has “let itself go.” Babies cannot feed themselves; invalids and the orthodox require special diets. Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies. Only this new mystique could prove strong and deep-reaching enough to take on the work given up by domestic isolation and enforced chastity. “Natural” is a word that is rightly challenged. But if there is a most natural urge, it is to satisfy hunger. If there is a natural female shape, it is the one in which women are sexual and fertile and not always thinking about it. To maintain hunger where food is available, as Western women are doing, is to submit to a life state as unnatural as anything with which the species has come up yet. It is more bizarre than cannibalism.
Dieting is the essence of contemporary femininity. Denying oneself food is seen as good in a woman, bad in a man. For women, the Austin (Texas) Stress Clinic found, “dieting concern” was strongly related to “positive feminine traits”; for men, food restraint was related to “socially undesirable femininity.” Where the feminine woman of the Feminine Mystique denied herself gratification in the world, the current successful and “mature” model of femininity submits to a life of self-denial in her body.
But this hallmark of enviable adjustment has as little innate validity as the earlier one. It too is based upon a vital lie. Where “immature” women in the 1950s wanted clitoral orgasms while “mature” ones passively yielded, today oral desire is interpreted in a similar sexual code. It is considered immature for women to eat heartily, since they’re told they risk their sexuality; they are seen as mature if they starve, promised to win sexuality that way. In the 1970s, when clitoral pleasure was reclaimed, many women must have wondered how they had lived in an atmosphere that denied it. In the 1980s women were forced to deny their tongues and mouths and lips and bellies. In the 1990s, if women can reclaim the pleasure of appetite, we may wonder what possessed us during the long, mean, pointless years of hunger. Women’s self-denial where food is concerned is represented today as good for her mate and even better for herself. Beyond the beauty myth, feminine hunger will look as obviously destructive to the well-being of women and their loved ones as their earlier enforced suffocation in the home looks to us from here.
Sex, food, and flesh; it is only political ideology—not health, not men’s desires, not any law of loveliness—that keeps women from believing we can have all three. Young women believe what they have no memory to question, that they may not have sex, food, and flesh in any abundance; that those three terms cancel each other out.
Dead Easy
It is dead easy to become an anorexic. When I was twelve I went to visit an older, voluptuous cousin. “I try,” she said, to explain the deep-breathing exercises she did before bedtime, “to visualize my belly as something I can love and accept and live with.” Still compact in a one-piece kid’s body, I was alarmed to think that womanhood involved breaking apart into pieces that floated around, since my cousin seemed to be trying to hold herself together by a feat of concentration. It was not a comforting thought. The buds of my breasts hurt already. As she did her exercises, I leafed through a copy of Cosmopolitan, which had an article demonstrating to women how to undress and pose and move in bed with their partners so as to disguise their fatness.
My cousin looked me over. “Do you know how much you weigh?” No, I told her. “Why don’t you just hop on the scale?” I could feel how much my cousin wished to inhabit a simple, slight twelve-year-old body. That could only mean, I thought, that when I was a woman, I would want to get out of my own body into some little kid’s.
A year later, while bent over the drinking fountain in the hall of my junior high school, Bobby Werner, whom I hardly knew, gave me a hard poke in the soft part of my stomach, just below the navel. It would be a decade before I would remember that he was the class fat boy.
That evening I let the juice of the lamb chop congeal on my plate. I could see viscous nodules of fat, a charred outer edge of yellow matter, cooling from liquid to solid, marked USDA CHOICE in edible blue dye. The center bone, serrated, had been cloven with a powerful rotary blade. I felt a new feeling, a nausea wicked with the pleasure of loathing. Rising hungry from the table, a jet of self-righteousness lit up under my esophagus, intoxicating me. All night long I inhaled it.
The next day I passed the small notepad kept by the dishwasher. I knew what it said, though it was my mother’s and private: “½ grpfruit. Blk. coff. 4 Wheat Thins. 1 Popsicle.” A black scrawl: “binge.” I wanted to tear it up. Some memoir.
I had no more patience for the trivial confessions of women. I could taste from my mouth that my body had entered ketosis, imbalanced electrolytes—good. The girl stood on the burning deck. I put the dishes in the sink with a crash of declaration.
At thirteen, I was taking in the caloric equivalent of the food energy available to the famine victims of the siege of Paris. I did my schoolwork diligently and kept quiet in the classroom. I was a wind-up obedience toy. Not a teacher or principal or guidance counselor confronted me with an objection to my evident deportation in stages from the land of the living.
There were many starving girls in my junior high school, and every one was a teacher’s paragon. We were allowed to come and go, racking up gold stars, as our hair fell out in fistfuls and the pads flattened behind the sockets of our eyes. When our eyeballs moved, we felt the resistance. They allowed us to haul our bones around the swinging rope in gym class, where nothing but the force of an exhausted will stood between the ceiling, to which we clung with hands so wasted the jute seemed to abrade the cartilage itself, and the polished wooden floor thirty-five feet below.
An alien voice took mine over. I have never been so soft-spoken. It lost expression and timbre and sank to a monotone, a dull murmur the opposite of strident. My teachers approved of me. They saw nothing wrong with what I was doing, and I could swear they looked straight at me. My school had stopped dissecting alleycats, since it was considered inhumane. There was no interference in my self-directed science experiment: to find out just how little food could keep a human body alive.
The dreams I could muster were none of the adolescent visions that boys have, or free and healthy girls; no fantasies of sex or escape, rebellion or future success. All the space I had for dreaming was taken up by food. When I lay on my bed, in that posture of adolescent reverie, I could find no comfort. My bones pressed sharply into the mattress. My ribs were hooks and my spine a dull blade and my hunger a heavy shield, all I had to stave off the trivialities that would attach themselves like parasites to my body the minute it made a misstep into the world of women. My doctor put his hand on my stomach and said he could feel my spine. I turned an eye cold with loathing on women who evidently lacked the mettle to suffer as I was suffering.
I made a drawing: myself, small, small, curled in a sort of burrow, surrounded by nesting materials, with a store of nuts and raisins, protected. This smallness and hiddenness was what I craved at the time of life when Stephen Dedalus longed to burst like a meteor on the world. What did that drawin
g mean? It was not a longing to return to the womb, but to return to my body. I was not longing to be safe from the choices of the world, but from the obligation to enter into a combat in which I could only believe if I forgot all about myself, and submitted to starting again dumber, like someone hit hard on the back of the head.
I’d have to forget they were my friends and believe they were really my enemies: the other playground gamblers of jacks, my fellow thieves of Pepsi-flavored lip gloss: Gemma and Stacey and Kim, who used to stand beside me in a row in the dark master bedroom, staring into the mirror. Our chins lit up from below by a candle, we chanted, scared rigid, We’re not afraid of Bloody Mary. I knew that if I let myself fall forward into time, I would never be able to stand like that again: shoulder to shoulder before the one mirror, with the ghoul on the far side of the glass; nothing in ourselves, nothing in each other.