Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  This is a complicated legacy to bring to a world of blasted-open options, each yes in potential collision with an old no, and it makes for a great deal of confusion. The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable—What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness? —and until relatively recently, a lot of women haven’t been encouraged to explore them, at least not in a deep, concerted, uniform, socially supported way. We have what might be called post-feminist appetites, whetted and encouraged by a generation of opened doors and collapsed social structures, but not always granted unequivocal support or license, not always stripped of their traditional alarm bells and warnings, and not yet bolstered by a deeper sense of entitlement.

  Freedom, it is important to note, is not the same as power; the ability to make choices can feel unsettling and impermanent and thin if it’s not girded somehow with the heft of real economic and political strength. Women certainly have more of that heft than they did a generation ago; we are far less formally constrained, far more autonomous, and far more politically powerful, at least potentially so. Forty-three million women—forty percent of all adult women—live independently today, without traditional supports. Women make the vast majority of consumer purchases in this country—eighty-three percent—and buy one fifth of all homes. We have an unprecedented amount of legal protection, with equality on the basis of sex required by law in virtually every area of American life. We are better educated than the women of any preceding generation, with women representing more than half of full-time college enrollments. By all accounts, we ought to feel powerful, competent, and strong—and many women no doubt do, at least in some areas and at some times.

  But it’s also true that an overwhelming majority of women—estimates range from eighty to eighty-nine percent—wake up every morning aware of an anxious stirring of self-disgust, fixated on the feel of our thighs as we pull on our stockings, the feel of our bellies and hips as we zip up our pants and skirts. Women are three times as likely as men to feel negatively about their bodies. Eighty percent of women have been on a diet, half are actively dieting at any given time, and half report feeling dissatisfied with their bodies all the time. There is no doubt that this negativity is a culturally mediated phenomenon, that culture gives the female preoccupation with appearance (which in itself is nothing new) its particular cast, its particularly relentless focus on slenderness. But the sheer numbers, which indicate an unprecedented depth and breadth of anxiety about appearance in general and weight in particular, suggest that something more complex than imagery is at work, that our collective sense of power and competence and strength hasn’t quite made it to a visceral level.

  To be felt at that level, as visceral and permanent and real, entitlement must exist beyond the self; it must be known and acknowledged on a wider plane. And this is where women still get the short end of the stick; for all the gains of the last forty years, we are hardly ruling the world out there. Congress is still ninety percent male, as are ninety-eight percent of America’s top corporate officers. Ninety-five percent of all venture capital today flows into men’s bank accounts. The two hundred highest-paid CEOs in America are all men. Only three women head Fortune 500 companies, a number that hasn’t budged in twenty years. We also have less visibility than men; women—our lives, issues, concerns—are still featured in only fifteen percent of page-one stories, and when we do make front-page news, it is usually only as victims or perpetrators of crime. And we still have less earning power: Women continue to make eighty-four cents for every dollar a man makes; women who take time off from work to have children make seventeen percent less than those who don’t even six years after they return; men with children earn the most money while women with children earn the least.

  This gap, I think—this persistent imbalance between personal freedom on the one hand and political power on the other— amps up the anxiety factor behind desire; it can leave a woman with a sense that something does not quite compute; it can give choices a partial, qualified feel. A woman, today, can be a neurosurgeon, or an astrophysicist; she can marry or not marry, leave her spouse, pack up, and move across the country at will. But can she take such choices a step further, or two or ten? Can a woman be not just an astrophysicist, but a big, powerful, lusty astrophysicist who feels unequivocally entitled to food and sex and pleasure and acclaim? Can she move across the country and also leave behind all her deeply ingrained feelings about what women are really supposed to look and act and be like? External freedoms may still bump up against a lot of ancient and durable internal taboos; they may still collide with the awareness, however vague, that women still represent the least empowered portion of the population, and these collisions help explain why appetites are so particularly problematic today; they exist in a very murky context, and an inherently unstable one, consistently pulled between the opposing poles of possibility and constraint, power and powerlessness.

  The world mobilizes in the service of male appetite; it did during my upbringing and it does still. Whether or not this represents the actual experience of contemporary boys and men, our cultural stereotypes of male desire (and stereotypes exist precisely because they contain grains of truth) are all about facilitation and support: Mothers feed (Eat! Eat!), fathers model assertion and unabashed competitiveness, teachers encourage outspoken bravado. At home and at work, men have helpers, usually female, who clean and cook and shop and type and file and assist. And at every turn—on billboards, magazine covers, in ads—men are surrounded by images of offering, of breasts and parted lips and the sultry gazes of constant availability: Take me, you are entitled, I exist to please you. For all the expansion of opportunity in women’s lives, there is no such effort on behalf of female appetite, there are no comparable images of service and availability, there is no baseline expectation that a legion of others will rush forward to meet our needs or satisfy our hungers. The striving, self-oriented man is adapted to, cut slack, his transgressions and inadequacies explained and forgiven. Oh, well, you wouldn’t expect him to cook or take care of his kids, who cares if he’s put on a few pounds, so what if he’s controlling or narcissistic, he’s busy, he gets things done, he’s running the show, he’s running the company, he’s running the COUNTRY. That litany of understanding does not apply to women; it sounds discordant and artificial if you switch the genders, and if you need a single example of the double standard at work here, think about Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill’s pudginess and fondness for McDonald’s was seen as endearing, his sexual appetite criticized but ultimately forgiven by most Americans, or at least considered irrelevant to his abilities on the job; Hillary got no such latitude, the focus on her appearance (hairstyle, wardrobe, legs) was relentless, the hostility released toward her ambition venomous.

  The one exception to this rule, the one area where a legion of others might, in fact, rush forward in service to a woman’s needs, is shopping, particularly high-end retail shopping, but in itself, that merely underscores how lacking the phenomenon is in other areas, and how constricted the realm of appetite is for women in general: We can want, and even expect, the world to mobilize on our behalf when we’re equipped with an American Express gold card and an appetite for Armani. But beyond the world of appearances and consumer goods, expressions of physical hunger and selfish strivings rarely meet with such consistent support. Instead, the possibility of risk can hang in the air like a mildly poisonous mist; for every appetite, there may be a possible backlash, or a slap or a reprimand or a door that opens but has caveats stamped all over the welcome mat. A novelist tells me in a whisper about a glowing review she’s received; she can barely get the words out, so strong are the chastising echoes of her family: Now, don’t you let it go to your head, her mother used to say, and it took her decades to realize how truly defeating that phrase was. (“Where’s it supposed to go,” she asks today, “someone else’s head?”) A scientist, brilliant and r
espected, secures a major grant for a project she’s dreamed of taking on for years and later describes what an emotional hurdle it was to fully take pride in the accomplishment, to really revel in it: “I couldn’t say it aloud, I just couldn’t get the words out,” she says. “I don’t think a man would get that.” An educator, who’s taught high school for thirteen years and is now pursuing a PhD in education, tells me, “For years, I’ve carried around the feeling that if I really allow myself to follow my passions, something bad will happen.” She can’t follow that line of thought to any logical conclusion; rather, it expresses an amalgam of worries, some specific (she’s apprehensive about being consumed by work, and about making sacrifices in her personal life), but more of them generic, as though the admission of hunger and ambition is in itself a dangerous thing, quite likely a punishable offense.

  This quiet, dogged anxiety, this internalized mosquito whine of caveat, may explain why the memory of that hotel brunch would stick with me for so long; the experience seemed to capture something about the times, about the onset of a complicated set of conflicts between an expansive array of options on the one hand and a sense of deep uncertainty on the other, a feeling that this freedom was both incomplete and highly qualified, full of risks. Certainly that’s how I felt in those early unformed twentysomething years, as though I were standing before an enormous table of possibilities with no utensils, no serving spoons, no real sense that I was truly entitled to sample the goods, to experiment or indulge or design my own menu.

  In fact, I brought the opposite sensation to the table: a simmering conviction that appetites were perilous, hunger and indulgence a gateway to disappointment and shame. This, I think, was part of a silent family code in my household, a place I recall from the earliest ages as muted and hushed, the air infused by a quality of imperative restraint that sometimes felt like gentility and sometimes like depression, I could never quite tell which. My parents never actively discouraged expressions of hunger— growing up, there were no overt taboos against lust or gluttony or covetousness, no religious prohibitions, no moralizing. But there wasn’t any clear embrace of appetite, either, and there was certainly no sense of indulgence as an admirable or even desirable part of ordinary life. My father (a psychiatrist) and my mother (a painter) were deeply private and undemonstrative people. They did not fight or hug. They weren’t particularly interested in material luxuries; they didn’t get excited by food (I can’t remember either parent ever eating too much); and while they clearly valued intellectual appetites—it was good to hunger for knowledge, good to harbor professional ambitions, very good to do well in school—the world of pleasure felt off-limits somehow, a country we didn’t visit.

  Instead, we seemed to inhabit a realm of essential sparseness, sensuality and strong emotion not completely absent but muzzled and kept leashed in the yard. Anger or despair or yearning might leak out periodically—a sudden bellow of displaced rage when my father lost his car keys, a muffled hiss emanating from behind my mother’s bedroom door when she shut herself in there to talk on the phone—but these expressions were too sporadic and nonspecific to add up to anything serious or telling, and they left me with only the most ill-defined impression of parental dissatisfaction, faint etchings of hunger, a cloudy sense that underneath all that privacy and reserve was an ocean of unmet need too stormy and vast to contemplate. At dinner, my parents and brother and sister and I sat huddled around the table in separate orbits, linked only by an aura of the most obscure shared sadness, and the food always felt a bit incidental, a footnote to the meal. My father served. He’d stand at the head of the table and dole out portions so small they wouldn’t cover half the plate, not because he was deliberately withholding but because he was absent-minded and preoccupied, food a lesser concern. The message here wasn’t that bodily appetites were base or sinful, but that they were (at best) beside the point and (at worst) a Pandora’s box, best to keep the lid tightly sealed.

  My own hungers, by contrast, felt powerful and striking and out of place. I think I was a hungrier kid than my siblings, in several senses of the word: I was needy even as an infant, a baby who wanted to be picked up and held more than my twin sister did; later, I’d turn into a grabby pre-adolescent whose tastes didn’t quite square with the restrained family style. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want things: patent leather dress shoes to wear to birthday parties when I was a girl; a pair of bright red corduroy pants; fancy bedroom furniture. My parents took us on annual winter vacations to the most remote spots—rented beach houses way off the beaten path in Puerto Rico or on the gulf coast of Florida—and while everyone else fell easily into a mute and solitary pattern of relaxation (reading, bird-watching, ambling along the beach), I’d fume and squirm with boredom, longing for plush hotels, places with TVs and heated swimming pools and room service and elegant restaurants. Want, want, want. I wanted laughter in those quiet houses and I wanted all of us to pull our noses out of books and speak to each other, even to yell, and I wanted affection. As a child, running around barefoot in the summer, I’d occasionally get a splinter in my foot, something I came to relish because it meant my mother would soak my foot in hot water, then pat it dry with a towel and hold it in her hands while she worked at the sliver with a tweezers. She was not a toucher, and so I came to love that feeling: the pressure of her hand around my foot, the softness of the towel as she dabbed it against my skin.

  But wanting is a frightening thing, especially if you lack models for it, or permission to act on wants, or a sense that your own desires are valid and good and satiable. Not wanting, by contrast, can be far easier, at least in the short term. Long before I began to flirt with starving, long before I bit into my first cottage-cheese-covered rice cake, I suspect I’d learned a good deal about curbing appetites, disguising them, molding them into acceptable shapes and forms. I learned over time not to whine and storm on family vacations, withdrew instead into a stony adolescent silence. I learned to tolerate my father’s unnerving remoteness and preoccupation, to anticipate the leaden silences that descended when we found ourselves alone together in a room. I learned not to expect my mother’s touch. I learned that the most reliable way to feel valued and loved was to excel at school, to stamp my hunger on report cards: A-minus, A-plus.

  I also learned to be furtive about the world of pleasure. Once, around age fourteen, I snuck into the master bathroom at a friend’s house and spent several long moments poking through the shelves of cosmetics and lotions and potions. The friend’s mother was a beautiful, elegantly dressed woman who maintained a luxurious home—thick Oriental carpets, exquisite antiques—and her bathroom brimmed with stuff, glamorous and sweet-smelling, all of it prettily packaged in small glass bottles and slim tubes and perfect little compacts. I explored: unscrewed a cap here and a lipstick there, examined delicate vials of perfume, sifted through tiny pots of eyeshadow. And then, for reasons that utterly eluded me at the time, I reached toward the back of a shelf, picked up a small translucent bottle of Clinique moisturizer—a pale yellow liquid, obviously expensive and equipped with some vaguely scientific but lovely-sounding soothing property—and I stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans and took it home. This tiny bottle probably represented a whole world to me—access to femininity, a capacity for indulgence that I saw in other mothers but not always in my own, a longing on my part to be soothed, inside as well as out; I’m quite certain it also represented a sensation—nascent but strong—that there was something covert and unacceptable about pleasure, that it needed to be stolen.

  This feeling would grow, an inchoate wariness about indulgence that gathered momentum in adolescence, gradually coalesced into an understanding that hunger itself was a sign of weakness and greed, or an invitation to disappointment, something best satisfied only in secret. So I took to snatching pleasure on the sly: cigarettes here, dollar bills there, squares of Hershey’s chocolate from the supply my mother kept hidden in her dresser drawer, a small cache from which she herself would retriev
e one tiny piece each day. I discovered masturbation at age thirteen or so, a thrilling and guilt-ridden pleasure I discussed with no one, not even my closest friends. I discovered alcohol around that time, too, a transformative indulgence that washed away inhibition and unleashed social curiosity and required the utmost secrecy, not just from the watchful eyes of parents but also from my peers; privately I may have acknowledged the urgency I felt around drinking, the anticipation of its great golden relief, but I never said a word about that feeling to anyone.

  Unnamed hungers become frightening hungers, sources of self-mistrust. This is another one of appetite’s golden rules; we learn to fear what we cannot discuss or explore, we are both drawn toward and terrified of the forbidden, and over time I suspect I reacted to that understanding not just with furtiveness but with an increasingly sophisticated form of sublimation, appetites driven underground and channeled into safer places, less fearful routes. It was painful to differ from the family style, estranging and scary to hunger for things they seemed not to value, and so I learned what legions of good, approval-hungry girls learn, which was to want what others wanted for me. Blend into the environment. Scope it out. Determine what others expect and respond accordingly.

  This strategy was hardy unique. Whole bodies of work on teenage girls (most notably Carol Gilligan’s) have suggested that girls lose themselves in adolescence, that confidence and spirit and voice begin to go up in smoke, and that this is essentially a culturally supported phenomenon, the result of a girl’s growing awareness that the things she most fundamentally values (close relationships and connection) are demeaned and trivialized in the wider world. In order to stay connected, Gilligan theorizes, girls surrender their own perspectives, steer clear of conflict, and focus on what others need and want, learning as they grow to accept traditional feminine mandates about being attractive and “nice.” Simone de Beauvoir described the same dynamic in somewhat starker terms. Noting that adolescence is the time in a girl’s life when she realizes that men have all the power and that hers can come only from consenting to become a submissive, adored object, she wrote: “Girls stop being and stop seeing.”