Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  Why shouldn’t you? I asked a woman that question not long ago while she was demurring about whether to order dessert at a restaurant.

  Immediate answer: “Because I’ll feel gross.”

  Why gross?

  “Because I’ll feel fat.”

  And what would happen if you felt fat?

  “I hate myself when I feel fat. I feel ugly and out of control. I feel really un-sexy. I feel unlovable.”

  And if you deny yourself the dessert?

  “I may feel a little deprived, but I’ll also feel pious,” she said.

  So it’s worth the cost?

  “Yes.”

  These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake—add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem—and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow. Hidden within that thirty-second exchange is an entire set of mathematical principles, equations that can dictate a woman’s most fundamental approach to hunger. Mastery over the body—its impulses, its needs, its size—is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem. Desires collide, the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous. The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it’s something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled. e = mc2.

  During the acute phases of my starving years, I took a perverse kind of pleasure in these exhibitions of personal calculus, the anxious little jigs that women would do around food. Every day at lunchtime, I’d stand in line at a café in downtown Providence clutching my 200-calorie yogurt, and while I waited, I’d watch the other women deliberate. I’d see a woman mince edgily around the glass case that held muffins and cookies, and I’d recognize the look in her eye, the longing for something sweet or gooey, the sudden flicker of No. I’d overhear fragments of conversation: debates between women (I can’t eat that, I’ll feel huge), and cajolings (Oh, c’mon, have the fries), and collaborations in surrender (I will if you will). I listened for these, I paid attention, and I always felt a little stab of superiority when someone yielded (Okay, fuck it, fries, onion rings, PIE). I would not yield—to do so, I understood, would imply lack of restraint, an unseemly, indulgent female greed—and in my stern resistance I got to feel coolly superior while they felt, or so it seemed to me, anxious.

  But I knew that anxiety. I know it still, and I know how stubbornly pressing it can feel, the niggling worry about food and calories and size and heft cutting to the quick somehow, as though to fully surrender to hunger might lead to mayhem, the appetite proven unstoppable. If you plotted my food intake on a graph from that initial cottage cheese purchase onward, you wouldn’t see anything very dramatic at first: a slight decline in consumption over my junior and senior years, and an increasing though not yet excessive pattern of rigidity, that edgy whir about food and weight at only the edges of consciousness at first. I lived off campus my senior year with a boyfriend, studied enormously hard, ate normal dinners at home with him, but permitted myself only a single plain donut in the morning, coffee all day, not a calorie more. The concept of “permission” was new to me—it heralded the introduction of rules and by-laws, a nascent internal tyrant issuing commands—but I didn’t question it. I just ate the donut, drank the coffee, obeyed the rules, aware on some level that the rigidity and restraint served a purpose, reinforced those first heady feelings of will and determination, a proud sensation that I was somehow beyond ordinary need. I wrote a prize-winning honors thesis on two hundred calories a day.

  The following year, my first out of college, the line on the graph would begin to waver, slowly at first, then peaking and dipping more erratically: five pounds up, five pounds down, six hundred calories here, six thousand there, the dieting female’s private NASDAQ, a personal index of self-torture.

  This was not a happy time. I’d taken a job in a university news bureau, an ostensible entree into writing and a fairly hefty disappointment (I was an editorial assistant in title, a glorified secretary in fact, bored nearly senseless from day one). The boyfriend had left for graduate school in California, and I was living alone for the first time, missing him with the particularly consuming brand of desperation afforded by long-distance love. I was restless and lonely and full of self-doubt, and the low-level tampering I’d been doing with my appetite began to intensify, my relationship with food thrown increasingly out of whack. This is familiar territory to anyone with a long history of dieting: a fundamental severing between need and want begins to take place, eating gradually loses its basic associations with nourishment and physical satisfaction and veers onto a more complex emotional plane in which the whole notion of hunger grows loaded and confusing. Sometimes I was very rigid with my diet during this period, resolving to consume nothing but coffee all day, only cheese and crackers at night. Other times I ate for comfort, or because I was bored, or because I felt empty, all reasons that frightened and confused me. I’d make huge salads at night, filled with nuts and cubes of cheese and slathered in creamy dressings; I’d eat big bowls of salty soups, enormous tuna melts, hideously sweet oversized chocolate chip cookies, purchased in little frenzies of preservation (should I? shouldn’t I?) from a local bakery. I started drinking heavily during this period, too, which weakened my restraint; I’d wake up feeling bloated and hungover and I’d try to compensate by eating nothing, or next to nothing, during the day.

  For a year, I gained weight, lost weight, gained the weight back, and I found this deeply unnerving, as though some critical sense of bodily integrity were at risk, my sense of limits and proportion eroding. I’d feel my belly protrude against the waistband of my skirt, or one thigh chafing against another, and I’d be aware of a potent stab of alarm: Shit, the vigilance has been insufficiently upheld, the body is growing soft and doughy, something central and dark about me—a lazy, gluttonous, insatiable second self—is poised to emerge. Women often brought pastries into the office where I worked. Sometimes I’d steadfastly avoid them, resolve not even to look; other times I’d eye the pastry box warily from across the room, get up periodically and circle the table, conscious of a new sensation of self-mistrust, questions beginning to flitter and nag. Could I eat one pastry, or would one lead to three, or four or six? Was I actually hungry for a Danish or a croissant, or was I trying to satisfy some other appetite? How hungry—how rapacious, greedy, selfish, needy—was I? The dance of the hungry woman—two steps toward the refrigerator, one step back, that endless loop of hunger and indulgence and guilt—had ceased to be a game; some key middle ground between gluttony and restraint, a place that used to be easily accessible to me, had grown elusive and I didn’t know how to get back there.

  This, of course, is one of appetite’s insidious golden rules: The more you meddle with a hunger, the more taboo and confusing it will become. Feed the body too little and then too much, feed it erratically, launch that maddening cycle of deprivation and overcompensation, and the sensation of physical hunger itself becomes divorced from the body, food loaded with alternative meanings: symbol of longing, symbol of constraint, form of torture, form of reward, source of anxiety, source of succor, measure of self-worth. And thus the simple experience of hunger—of wanting something to eat—becomes frightening and fraught. What does it mean this time? Where will it lead? Will you eat everything if you let yourself go? Will you prove unstoppable, a famished dog at a garbage bin? Young and unsure of myself and groping for direction, I was scared of many things that year—leaving the structure of college was scary, entering the work world was scary, living on my own was scary, the future loomed like a monumental question mark—but I suspect I was scared above all of hunger itself, which felt increasingly boundless and insatiable, its limits and possible ravages unknown.

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bsp; I suspect, too, that this feeling went well beyond the specific issue of food, that anxiety about caloric intake and body size were merely threads in a much larger tapestry of feeling that had to do with female self-worth and power and identity—for me and for legions of other women. This time period—late 1970s, early 1980s—coincided with the early stages of the well-documented shift in the culture’s collective definition of beauty, its sudden and dramatically unambiguous pairing with slenderness. There is nothing new about this today; the pressure (internal and external) to be thin is so familiar and so widespread by now that most of us take it for granted, breathe it in like air, can’t remember a time when we weren’t aware of it, can’t remember how different the average model or actress or beauty pageant contestant looked before her weight began to plummet (in the last twenty-five years, it’s dropped to twenty-five percent below that of the average woman), can’t remember a world in which grocery store shelves didn’t brim with low-cal and “lite” products, in which mannequins wore size eight clothes instead of size two, in which images of beauty were less wildly out of reach.

  But it’s worth recalling that all of this—the ratcheted-up emphasis on thinness, the aesthetic shift from Marilyn Monroe to Kate Moss, the concomitant rise in eating disorders—is relatively recent, that the emphasis on diminishing one’s size, on miniaturizing the very self, didn’t really heat up until women began making gains in other areas of their lives. By the time I started to flirt with anorexia, in the late 1970s, women had gained access to education, birth control, and abortion, as well as widespread protection from discrimination in most areas of their lives. At the same time, doctors were handing out some ten billion appetite-suppressing amphetamines per year, Weight Watchers had spread to forty-nine states, its membership three million strong, and the diet-food business was about to eclipse all other categories as the fastest-growing segment of the food industry.

  This parallel has been widely, and sensibly, described as the aesthetic expression of the backlash against feminist strength that Susan Faludi would document in 1992. At a time when increasing numbers of women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world, it is no surprise that they’d be hit with the opposite message from a culture that was (and still is) both male-dominated and deeply committed to its traditional power structures. Women get psychically larger, and they’re told to grow physically smaller. Women begin to play active roles in realms once dominated by men (schools, universities, athletic fields, the workplace, the bedroom), and they’re countered with images of femininity that infantilize them, render them passive and frail and non-threatening. “The female body is the place where this society writes its messages,” writes Rosalind Coward in Female Desires, and its response to feminism was etched with increasing clarity on the whittled-down silhouette of the average American model: Don’t get too hungry, don’t overstep your bounds.

  The whispers of this mandate, audible in the 1970s and 1980s, have grown far louder today; they are roars, howls, screams. The average American, bombarded with advertisements on a daily basis, will spend approximately three years of his or her lifetime watching television commercials, and you don’t have to look too closely to see what that deluge of imagery has to say about the female body and its hungers. A controlled appetite, prerequisite for slenderness, connotes beauty, desirability, worthiness. An uncontrolled appetite—a fat woman—connotes the opposite, she is ugly, repulsive, and so fundamentally unworthy that, according to a New York Times report on cultural attitudes toward fat, sixteen percent of adults would choose to abort a child if they knew he or she would be untreatably obese.

  Hatred of fat, inextricably linked to fear of fat, is so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness it can arouse a surprising depth of discomfort and mean-spiritedness, even among people who consider themselves to be otherwise tolerant and sensitive to women. Gail Dines, director of women’s studies and professor of sociology at Wheelock College in Boston and one of the nation’s foremost advocates of media literacy, travels around the country giving a slide show/lecture called “Sexy or Sexist: Images of Women in the Media.” The first half of the presentation consists of images, one after the other, of svelte perfection: a sultry Brooke Shields clad in a blue bikini on a Cosmo cover, an achingly slender leg in an ad for Givenchy pantyhose, a whisper-thin Kate Moss. Then, about halfway into the presentation, a slide of a postcard flashes onto the screen, a picture of a woman on a beach in Hawaii. The woman is clad in a bright blue two-piece bathing suit, and she is very fat; she’s shown from the rear, her buttocks enormous, her thighs pocked with fleshy folds, and the words on the postcard read: HAVING A WHALE OF A TIME IN HAWAII. The first time I saw this, I felt a jolt of something critical and mean—part pity, part judgment, an impulse to recoil—and I felt immediately embarrassed by this, which is precisely the sensation Dines intends to flush out. At another showing before a crowd at North-eastern University, the image appears on the screen and several people begin to guffaw, nervous titters echo across the room. Dines stops and turns to the audience. “Now why is this considered funny?” she demands. “Explain that to me. Does she not have the right to the dignity that you and I have a right to? Does having extra pounds on your body deny you that right?” The crowd falls silent, and Dines sighs. There it is: This obese woman, this object of hoots and jeers, is a tangible focus of female anxiety, a 350-pound picture of the shame and humiliation that will be visited upon a woman if her hunger is allowed to go unchecked.

  Dines, among many others, might identify culture as the primary protagonist in this narrative, a sneering villain cleverly disguised as Beauty who skulks around injecting women with a irrational but morbid fear of fat. There is certainly some truth to that—a woman who isn’t affected to some degree by the images and injunctions of fat-and-thin is about as rare as a black orchid. But I also think the intensity of the struggle around appetite that began to plague me twenty years ago, that continues to plague so many women today, speaks not just to cultural anxiety about female hunger, profound though it may be, but also to deep reservoirs of personal anxiety. Fear of fat merely exists on the rippled surface of that reservoir; mass-market images are mere reflections upon it. Underneath, the real story—each woman in her own sea of experience—is more individual and private; it’s about what happens when hunger is not quite paired with power, when the license to hunger is new and unfamiliar, when a woman is teased with freedom—to define herself as she sees fit, to attend to her own needs and wishes, to fully explore her own desires—but may not quite feel that freedom in her bones or believe that it will last.

  Once, several months into that first year of weight gain and weight loss, I met some friends for Sunday brunch, an all-you-can-eat buffet at a local hotel restaurant. All-you-can-eat buffets terrify me to this day—I find them sadistic and grotesque in particularly American way, the emphasis on quantity and excess reflecting something insatiably greedy and short-sighted about the culture’s ethos—and I date the onset of my terror to that very morning. Such horrifying abundance! Such potential for unleashed gluttony! The buffet table seemed to stretch out for a mile: at one station, made-to-order omelets, and bacon and sausage; at another, waffles and pancakes and crêpes; at another, bagels and muffins and croissants and pastries; at yet another, an entire array of desserts, cakes and pies and individual soufflés. If you’re confused about hunger, if the internal mechanisms that signal physical satiety have gone haywire, if food has become symbolically loaded, or a stand-in for other longings, this kind of array can topple you. I couldn’t choose. More to the point, I couldn’t trust myself to choose moderately or responsibly, or to stop when I was full, or even to know what I wanted to begin with, what would satisfy and how much. And so I ate everything. The suppressed appetite always rages just beneath the surface of will, and as often happened during that period, it simmered, then bubbled up, then boiled over. I ate. I ate eggs and bacon and waffles and slabs of cake, I ate knowing full well that I’d feel bloated and
flooded with disgust later on and that I’d have to make restitution—I’d starve the next day, or go for a six-mile run, or both. I ate without pleasure, I ate until I hurt.

  Years later, I’d see that brunch in metaphorical terms, a high-calorie, high-carbohydrate testament to the ambiguous blessings of abundance, its promise and its agonizing terror. As a rule, women of my generation were brought up without knowing a great deal about how to understand hunger, with very little discussion about how to assess and respond adequately to our own appetites, and with precious few examples of how to negotiate a buffet of possibility, much less embrace one. Eating too much—then as now—was a standard taboo, a mother’s concern with her own body and weight handed down to her daughter in a mantle of admonishments: Always take the smallest portion; always eat a meal before you go on a date lest you eat too much in front of him; don’t eat that, it’ll go straight to your hips. Sexual hunger was at best undiscussed, at worst presented as a bubbling cauldron of danger and sin, potentially ruinous; the memory banks of women my age are riddled with images of scowling mothers, echoes of recriminating hisses (Take that off, you look like a slut!), fragments of threat-laden lectures about the predatory hunger of boys. And the world of ambition was in many ways uncharted territory, one that required qualities and skills—ego strength, competitiveness, intellectual confidence—that were sometimes actively discouraged in girls (Don’t brag, don’t get a swelled head, don’t be so smart), rarely modeled.