Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  It felt . . . interesting, little tests of will that gave me glimmers of things I seemed to covet: a quiet sense of strength, a way to stand out, the outlines of a goal. At night, I’d often go with friends to a bar near campus where the waitresses served oversized baskets of buttered popcorn along with pitchers of beer. I’d determine not to eat the popcorn, not even a single kernel, and I found this oddly pleasing, this secret show of resolve. Others would reach into the basket, grab handfuls, ask the waitress for more. I’d sit back from the table and smoke a cigarette, a little surprised and a little proud to find I could exercise such restraint.

  I ate less and I grew thinner. People noticed, as they invariably do. “Oooh, you’re so skinny!” they’d say. Or, “Oooh, you’ve lost weight!” I’d raise my eyebrows and shrug, as though I hadn’t really noticed. “I have? Huh.” But inside, that little kernel of pride sprouted, watered by the attention and by what I understood to be envy; without even trying very hard, I could do what others tried and failed to do. So many women lived and died by the scale, self-worth dictated by it. To me, it was just a game.

  Anorexics are masters of exaggeration; they take a certain satisfaction in going the average woman one better, internalizing her worst fears and then inflating them, flaunting them, throwing them back in her face. Food had never been one of my big preoccupations, but I’d certainly witnessed its centrality in other women’s lives, and in some rudimentary way I understood that this excruciating focus on size and shape—the fleshy curve of a hip, the precise fit of a pair of jeans—communicated something more complicated about the larger matter of female appetite and its relationship to identity and value, a notion that a woman’s hunger was somehow inappropriate, possibly even grotesque. I saw how quietly tyrannized women could be by food and weight, how edgy they’d get when confronted by choices. I heard the high, anxious voices, the weighing of longing against deprivation, the endless, repetitive mantra: “Oh, I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t.” Decoded, the imperatives here were clear; we all live with them. Size matters. Control of size (of portions, of body, of desire itself) matters. Suppressing appetite is a valued ambition, even if it eclipses other ambitions, even if it makes you crazy. I paid attention. I lost five pounds, then another five. Message absorbed, amplified, and then (“How do you stay so thin?”) duly rewarded. Other women might struggle with hunger; I could transcend it.

  Starving, in its inimitably perverse way, gave me a way to address the anxiety I felt as a young, scared, ill-defined woman who was poised to enter the world and assume a new array of rights and privileges; it gave me a tiny, specific, manageable focus (popcorn kernels) instead of a monumental, vague, overwhelming one (work, love). Starving also gave me a way to address some nascent discomfort about my place in this newly altered landscape, a kind of psychic bargaining over the larger matter of hunger; permitted, at least in theory, to be big (ambitious, powerful, competitive), I would compensate by making myself small, fragile, and non-threatening as a wren. Starving also capitulated, again in exaggerated form, to a plethora of feelings (some handed down from my family, almost all of them supported by culture) about women in general and women’s bodies in particular, to the idea that there’s something inherently shameful and flawed about the female form, something that requires constant monitoring and control. And, of course, starving answered whatever long-standing feelings of yearning and emptiness and sorrow I’d carted off to college in the first place; it deflected all that longing into one place, concentrated it like a diamond. Food, over time, became a terrible, powerful symbol—of how much I wanted on the one hand and how certain I was that I’d never get enough on the other—and my denial of food thus became the most masterful solution. I’m so hungry, I’ll never get fed. If that is one’s baseline understanding of the world (and I suspect it was mine at the time), starving makes sense, controlling food becomes a way of expressing that conflict and also denying it. Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing. At a time when I felt adrift and confused and deeply unsure of myself, starving gave me a goal, a way to stand out and exert control, something I could be good at.

  I was very, very good at it. I grew smaller and smaller and smaller over time. I stopped menstruating. I began wearing jeans inherited from a friend’s twelve-year-old brother, who’d outgrown them. I literally ached with hunger: My stomach throbbed with it; my ribs dug into my sides when I tried to sleep at night. I took painstaking note of these changes—how visible and pronounced my bones became, even the tiny finger bones; how my abdomen curved inward, a taut, tight “C”—and I found each one of them both profoundly compelling and inexplicably satisfying. I could not express what I’d been feeling with words, but I could wear it. The inner life—hunger, confusion, longings unnamed and unmet, that whole overwhelming gamut—as a sculpture in bone.

  Today, I eat. That in itself is a statement of triumph, but the road toward a more peaceful relationship with food—which, of course, means a more peaceful relationship with my body, myself, my own demons—has been long, circuitous, and (would that this weren’t so) full of company. It’s hard to think of a woman who hasn’t grappled to one degree or another with precisely the same fears, feelings, and pressures that drove me to starve, even harder to think of a woman who experiences the full range of human hungers with Renoir’s brand of unfettered delight. Satisfying hungers, taking things in, indulging in bodily pleasures—these are not easy matters for a lot of women, and I suspect my own troubled relationship with food merely reflects the extreme end of a long continuum, and one venue among many others.

  Food, sex, shopping: Name your poison. Appetites, particularly as they’re experienced by women, have an uncanny shape-shifting quality, and a remarkable talent for glomming onto externals. One battle segues into the next, one promise proves false and another emerges on the horizon, glimmers, and beckons like a star: Follow me, this diet will do it, or this man, or this set of purchases for body and home; the holy grail as interpreted by Jenny Craig or Danielle Steele or Martha Stewart. In my case, starving gave way to drinking, denial of appetite—which made me feel highly controlled and rather superior and very safe—gradually mutating into a more all-encompassing denial of self, alcohol displacing food as the substance of choice. For others, the substances may be somewhat less tangible, but they’re often no less gripping, and no less linked to the broader theme of appetite: Obsessive relationships with men; compulsive shopping and debt; life-defining preoccupation with appearances; “isms” of all kinds—all of these are about emptiness, about misdirected attempts to fill internal voids, and all of them tend to spring from the same dark pool of feeling: a suspicion among many women that hungers themselves are somehow invalid or wrong, that indulgences must be earned and paid for, that the satisfaction of appetites often comes with a bill. Eat too much, want too much, act too sexual or too ambitious or too hungry, and the invoice will arrive, often delivered with an angry hiss of self-recrimination: You’re a pig, a sloth, you suck. Desire versus deprivation, indulgence versus constraint, nurturance versus self-abnegation; these are the constants on this stage, the lead players in a particularly female drama.

  This, of course, is a profoundly human stage—the clash between the desire to satisfy appetites and the fear that they may overwhelm us, control us, lead us astray is as old as the story of Adam and Eve—but the female journey across it can be experienced and expressed in particularly painful and confounding ways, women being the gender born and raised on the notion that the female appetite is limited and curtailed to begin with, that female hungers should be reined in, permitted satisfaction in only the most circumscribed, socially sanctioned ways. “Eat to survive.” A thirty-six-year-old television producer who’s wrestled with weight for most of her adult life was raised on that mandate, spoon-fed the admonishment by her mother, who believed that anything beyond subsistence-level consumption was greedy, dangerous, unfeminine, wrong. �
�Don’t be such a smarty pants; it’s not becoming.” A fifty-two-year-old scientist still has bad dreams about that one, which came from both parents and carried a similar warning: Good girls (interchangeable with desirable, deserving girls) have limited appetites for knowledge, limited brain power, limited aspirations. “So you really do wear high heels.” A forty-two-year-old architect, just out of graduate school at the time and quite pleased with her new professional identity, recalls being met by those words nearly twenty years ago, when she picked her mother up at the airport for a visit; the statement was contemptuous, laced with disappointment, and still stings two decades later: “The implication wasn’t that I was trying to be sexy by wearing high-heels and failing. It was that I was sexy, and therefore I was disgusting.” These are tales from the World of No. The messages may be delivered far less directly, or they may be mixed and contradictory, but if you’re a woman who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, you’ve no doubt heard them in one form or another: Don’t eat too much, don’t get too big, don’t reach too far, don’t climb too high, don’t want too much. No, no, no.

  That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women’s lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women’s troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite—specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it’s submerged and rerouted—is the thread that binds them together. One woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another’s maxed-out MasterCard; one woman’s soul-murdering love affair is another’s frenzied eating binge. The methods may differ, but boil any of these behaviors down to their essential ingredients and you are likely find a particularly female blend of anxiety, guilt, shame, and sorrow, the psychic roux of profound—and often profoundly misunderstood—hungers.

  With anorexia, I merely elevated to an art form what so many women do with their appetites all of the time, whether or not the behavior blossoms into a full-blown disorder. Weighing, measuring, calculating, monitoring. Withholding and then overcompensating. Reining in hunger in one area, letting go in another. The female appetite moves in guilty, circuitous ways, and although my own relationship with food is probably as normal today as it ever will be, I still carry around a flickering awareness of hunger’s pushes and pulls all the time, a chronic tug between the voice of longing and the voice of constraint that feels like a form of heightened alert, something that can make its presence felt in any arena where taking something in is at issue. A woman I know determines exactly how much she will eat from day to day based on the amount of exercise she gets: If she runs two miles, she gets second helpings at dinner; three miles, she gets dessert; no workout, no extras, no goodies. She understands that this is irrational (“It’s crazy,” she says, “Who’s keeping score?”), and she can’t say when or why she developed the system, which she recognizes as completely arbitrary, but she adheres to the rules every day, and has for so long she can’t fathom living any other way. Another woman, an economist who’s been craving recognition in her field for years, found herself glaring at her reflection in the mirror the day after she was nominated for a major award. She was at the gym, pumping away on the StairMaster, her face tightened into a scowl, and she was thinking: You fucking fraud; who the hell do you think you are? “Where does that come from?” she wonders, unable to answer. “Why is it so hard to just take the good stuff in?” Appetites for sex, for beautiful things, for physical pleasure—all of these can feel baffling, and all of them can leave a woman confused about the most ordinary daily decisions. Are you eating that second helping because you’re hungry or because you’re sad? If you work out for an extra thirty minutes, are you heeding the call to health and well-being or engaging in a bout of self-punishment? If you spend $600 on a fabulous jacket you don’t really need, are you permitting yourself a little well-earned luxury or are you spiraling out of control? Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?

  Despite its common association with food, the word “appetite” has a fairly broad meaning. Webster’s Third New International dictionary defines it as: (1) a natural desire; (2) an inherent or habitual desire or propensity for gratification or satisfaction; (3) an object of desire. I take a similarly wide view, using the word to refer to the things we take in and to the activities we engage in when we feel empty or restless or wanting, to the substances and behaviors that we imagine will make us feel full, satisfied, complete. In this sense, appetites differ from “needs” or “instincts” in that they’re not necessarily matters of life-and-death (an unsatisfied need for food or drink will, in due time, kill you; an unsatisfied appetite for chocolate probably won’t; a flight instinct that malfunctions in the face of a predator can be lethal; in the face of a destructive relationship, it will merely make you miserable). Instead, appetites inhabit the murky middle ground between survival needs, which are concrete and unambiguous, and desires, a more general and all-inclusive term. Appetite is desire in the “drive” gear, more revved up and goal-oriented than generalized wanting, a destination always on its agenda. Appetites give specificity to the inchoate and shape to the formless; they’re the feelings that bubble up from within and attach themselves to the tangible and external, turning elusive sensations (longing, yearning, emptiness) into actions, behaviors, substances, things. This meal, those shoes, that lover. The most obvious appetites, of course, are the physical ones, for food and sex, but I also consider material goods, ambition, and (perhaps above all) recognition by and connection with significant others to be among our most central and life-defining strivings. Along with food and sex, these are the things that propel us forward, that ignite craving, that guide and often dictate our behavior and choices.

  Today, at the turn of the most accelerated century in history, a woman’s appetites are (theoretically at least) under her sole control, hers to indulge or satisfy at will, for we live at a time when our most compelling hungers are almost wholly divorced from their essential purposes. Thanks to the sexual revolution, to widely available forms of contraception, and (for the time being) to access to abortion, a woman’s decisions about sex may have little, if anything, to do with reproduction; separated from procreation, sexual appetite becomes both less rule-bound and more personal, less socially and physically threatening and also more confusing. So do her appetites in other life-defining realms. Liberated, at least to an extent, from her economic dependence on men, a woman today exercises an unprecedented degree of control over such matters as what and how much to eat, what to do with her time, how to look, where to live, and what objects to acquire. More important, thanks to the period of abundance that has characterized national life almost without interruption for the last eighty years, those decisions are rarely matters of sheer survival. For the bulk of middle- and upper-middle-class American women today, even in our current economic downturn, questions about diet, material life, livelihood, and relationships have far more to do with individual striving and self-definition than they do with basic subsistence. In short, the things we once needed in order to survive—food, shelter, intimate partnerships—have become the things we want in order to feel sated.

  But satiety is itself a tricky subject, in large part because our culture—visual, commercially rapacious, oriented toward quick fixes and immediate gratification—both fuels and defines the wish for it at almost every turn, on almost every front. To the internal voice that whispers, I want, I want, consumer culture offers the reassuring, seductive words, You can, you c
an; it’s right here, within your grasp. And it does so relentlessly, so much so we may barely be aware of its persistence and power. In 1915, the average American could go weeks without observing an ad; today, some twelve billion display ads, three million radio commercials, and 200,000 TV commercials flood the nation on a daily basis—most of us see and hear about 3,000 of them a day, all of them lapping at appetite, promising satisfaction, pulling and tugging and yipping at desire like a terrier at a woman’s hemline. This is true for both genders, of course, but women in modern consumer culture are in the odd position of being both subjects of desire—people who are encouraged to desire things for themselves—and desire’s primary object, mass imagery’s main selling tool, sultry and thin and physically flawless. Thus, women are told not just to want but what to want. And the unstated promise here—that to want properly will make you be wanted—can create a powerful feeling of discord: Although in theory we may have the freedom and resources to satisfy our own appetites any way we choose, we have comparatively little freedom in determining, for ourselves, what those appetites should be, what true satisfaction might look or feel like. In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they’d rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite?

  In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one’s true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied. That a lot of women lack both sensations in sufficient measure is evident not just in the numbers on dieting and preoccupation with weight (which are stunning) but also in the kinds of gnawing sensations that can keep a woman up at night, worrying over questions of balance and perspective and priorities: There’s the awareness, sporadic perhaps but familiar to many, that we spend entirely too much time trying to suppress appetite instead of indulging it; there’s the sense that a lot of us waste precious energy worshipping false gods, trying to get fed in ways that never quite seem to satisfy (if losing ten pounds won’t do it, maybe that job will, or that house or that lover); there’s an ill-defined but persistent feeling that on the whole this is a painful way to live, that it leaves us more anxious than we ought to be, or more depressed, or somehow cheated, as though somewhere along the way our very entitlement to hunger—to want things that feed us and fill us and give us joy—has been stolen.