Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  I think there’s truth to that idea, but I also believe that culture merely fanned the fire, kindling an already smoldering sense of mistrust in my own beliefs, judgments, wants. Appetites, which are selfish and self-serving and aggressive, are scary for many girls, particularly those who’ve been brought up to believe that such qualities are unfeminine and inappropriate; they’re scarier still when they’re shrouded in mystery and tinged with danger, when they make you feel like an alien at the table, orbiting a planet too frightening and solitary to inhabit for very long.

  And so I landed, parked my hungers on smoother terrain. In high school, I wore what my friends wore, listened to the music they listened to, lusted after boys they identified as attractive. In college, I “chose” my major—nineteenth-century British history and literature—not because I had any abiding fascination with the subject but because a few of the professors in the program took an interest in me and thus gave me a familiar focus: approval to covet, people to please. I was an excellent student, always—that hunger, so wrapped up in parental love and approval, was clearly labeled, unequivocally rewarded, easily acted upon—and I was very adept at fitting in, and by the time I hit my early twenties, by the time I reached that expansive array of real choices (career, relationships, lifestyle), I was lost.

  In a sense, then, that hotel buffet was a perfect metaphor, the specific question—what to eat—a stand-in for much larger and more daunting questions: Who to be? What to strive for, whom to sleep with, how to live? What to want? At the time, I didn’t really have a clue.

  Such questions not only persist for women; they’ve multiplied, the potential answers wildly varied, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Sexual tolerance is higher than it was even a decade ago; a woman can be straight or live openly as a lesbian or explore bi-sexuality. Gender barriers are diminished in more professions; a woman can be an engineer, a paramedic, a cop. The traditional adult trajectories (marriage, child-raising) are less clearly defined. Even the boundaries of biology are more flexible; at least theoretically, a woman can delay childbirth until she’s well into her forties.

  Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, has written about what he calls “the tyranny of freedom,” arguing that the sheer volume of choices in American life has come to feel oppressive and overwhelming; the proliferation ratchets up expectations and anxieties (there’s always something better around the corner) and overloads the psyche. Studies from the business world bear this out, indicating that when consumers are faced with too many choices, they feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and paralyzed with indecision. But this brand of stress also has a less generic, more privately felt counterpart, which has to do with the burden of knowing—or, more aptly, trying to know or not quite knowing—your own heart, who you are, where you belong in the world, what you’re feeling, wanting, driven by.

  This is daunting all by itself, more daunting still when the volume of choices is relatively new, the sense of entitlement behind it not deeply ingrained. “Women have infinite choices,” says Louise Kaplan, a New York psychoanalyst and author, “and this is very frightening. It means you’re stuck with who you are. No one is going to tell you who to marry, or what career to pursue, or how to cut your hair, and so you’re thrown back onto yourself.” The freedom to choose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

  This, I think, is the steady pulse of agitation behind an unsettled appetite, this wobbling, reaching anxiety, which craves relief, stalks it, hunts it down in tangible forms: Eat that cake, which will assuage some internal emptiness; buy that jacket, which will cloak you in an identity; call that man, who will define and give shape to your life. In its most explosive forms, the steady pulse becomes a high and driving whine. I was overwhelmed. I felt like a blank slate. I didn’t know who I was, what I needed, how to take care of myself. These are the whispers of half-formed selves groping in the dark, and you hear them voiced with particular clarity by people who’ve actively grappled with the conflicts and consequences surrounding hunger, who know that dark and shapeless territory.

  A former compulsive shopper tells me about tearing into Saks Fifth Avenue in New York in the fifteen minutes before a blind date, pawing through the racks, spending $400 she didn’t have on some sleek black outfit, then stuffing her old clothes in a bag and racing out, clad—she hoped—“in a uniform that would tell me who I was.” An impossible task, literally shopping for an identity, but one that took her years to understand and tackle differently.

  A long-time member of Overeaters Anonymous talks about the panic-laced insatiability that once drove the need to eat, about what it was like to consume an entire carton of Dunkin’ Munchkins on the way home from work and to gain 120 pounds in a single year, about the way in which the endlessly daunting business of defining a self—naming one’s needs, speaking up for oneself, tolerating pain and frustration and disappointment—simply ground to a halt in the narcotizing stupor of a binge, all anxiety focused on the procuring of food, then eased, briefly but powerfully, in its consumption. This, too, took years to undo, painful and painstaking lessons in teasing out physical hunger from the emotional brand, in identifying the yearnings so easily obscured by sugar and lard, in self-acceptance.

  And a woman with a long history of promiscuity describes the deeply disorienting, utterly ungrounded sense of urgency behind sexual obsession, the life-shaping need for definition that can drive a woman to call a man’s answering machine for four consecutive hours on a bad night, or to get in her car and spend an entire evening parked outside his house; she describes what it feels like to tie every molecule of your value and loveability to another person’s sexual interest, to feel “as though you have to attach yourself to someone else in order to feel that you’re even allowed to exist.” Now married, monogamous, and far more familiar with the real hungers (for validation, acceptance, love) that propelled such frenzy, she recalls that period of her life as “eight years of blind terror.”

  This is what I mean about the strange solace of starving, the cocoon of safety it seemed to offer; in my own blind terror, anorexia beckoned, the memory of those early sensations of mastery and control seemed to promise the most exquisite relief. One morning, about eight months into my year of weight gain and weight loss, I sat at my desk reading a profile of an anorexic girl in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I’d never heard the term “anorexia” before or the phrase “eating disorder,” and I pored over the piece, read it straight through to the end then read it again. The woman in the profile was young, in her teens. Her weight had dropped to below eighty. She did thousands of sit-ups, late into the night, and she’d become so skeletal that her arms and belly had grown a soft dark downy fur called lunago, a sign of the body’s attempt to compensate for the lack of insulating body fat. I don’t remember any other details, but I do remember my response, which was so peculiar I wouldn’t quite identify it for many years: I envied her. I envied her drive and her focus and the power of her will, and I suspect I saw in this poor girl’s sheer determination the outlines of a strategy: one anxiety (weight) as the repository for many anxieties (men, family, work, hunger itself); emaciated thinness as a shortcut of sorts, a detour around painful and confusing feelings, a way to take all hungers—so varied and vast—and boil them down to their essence, one appetite to manage, just one.

  Which is precisely what starving accomplished, precisely what any singular obsession accomplishes. Several months after I read that piece, my West Coast boyfriend returned from California to spend the summer with me. At the last minute, he decided to spend six weeks of that time traveling in Europe with a friend, then two weeks with me before heading back to school in the fall. I felt devastated by this change of plans, and I suspect his departure stirred up an old set of fears about the relationship between hunger and disappointment
, about how painful it was to be deprived of something you felt you needed; I suspect it touched the hungry kid in me, too, scraped at some of the scar tissue that had formed around forgotten childhood wounds. But I said nothing about this at the time, and probably couldn’t have articulated the feelings if I’d tried. Instead, I remember taking him to the train station in Providence, then walking back to my office by myself, and thinking: Okay, I’ll just stop eating. The sentence just popped into my head, fully formed and nonnegotiable. A solution: I am overwhelmed (by need, by disappointment, by uncertainty) and this is how I’m going to react. By the time the boyfriend returned from Europe, I’d cut off all my hair and lost seventeen pounds.

  From there, the line on the graph would dip and dip and dip: 110 pounds, 102 pounds, ninety-six pounds, eighty-three pounds. In the mathematics of desire, I chose the simplest equation: Just subtract.

  To an extent, the strategy worked. When you’re starving, or wrapped up in a cycle of bingeing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with a man, it is very hard to think about anything else, very hard to see the larger picture of options that is your life, very hard to consider what else you might need or want or fear were you not so intently focused on one crushing passion. I sat in my room every night, with rare exceptions, for three-and-a-half years. In secret, and with painstaking deliberation, I carved an apple and a one-inch square of cheddar cheese into tiny bits, sixteen individual slivers, each one so translucently thin you could see the light shine through it if you held it up to a lamp. Then I lined up the apple slices on a tiny china saucer and placed a square of cheese on each. And then I ate them one by one, nibbled at them like a rabbit, edge by tiny edge, so slowly and with such concentrated precision the meal took two hours to consume. I planned for this ritual all day, yearned for it, carried it out with the utmost focus and care. And I did not think, during those years, about how scared I was of the world, or how lost and shapeless I felt, or how needy I might have been if I hadn’t slammed the door on need altogether. I did not think about, much less participate in, the redoubtable realms of men and sexuality. I didn’t hunger for anything but that apple and that cube of cheese, I snuffed out all other desires, and with them all other anxieties. I felt nothing but the taut pull of my stomach, throbbing with a hunger so tangible and distinct I could practically hold it in my hand.

  To say that I “lost” my appetite during those years would be a joke. On the contrary, I ate, slept, and breathed appetite. I thought about food constantly, pored over food magazines and restaurant reviews like a teenage boy with a pile of porn, copied down recipes on index cards: breads, cakes, chocolate desserts, pies with the richest fillings, things I longed for and wouldn’t let myself have. In truth, I had appetites the size of Mack trucks—driving and insistent longings for food and connection and bodily pleasure—but I found their very power too daunting and fearsome to contend with, and so I split the world into the most rigid place of black and white, yes and no. I’d eat nothing or I’d eat everything, I’d clamp down on appetite or I’d yield to it utterly.

  Obsessions—even mild ones, even the run-of-the-mill, mundane daily obsessions that can pepper a woman’s thoughts (Do these jeans make my butt look too big? Should I go to the gym?)—have such extraordinary deflective power. They stop desire in its tracks, drive it underground, twist and disguise its form, then send it back out into the world in a wholly altered form, one that’s particularly insidious because it feels so very real; even the murkiest desire can re-emerge with a face and a name and the specificity of a goal. I want to be thin, says the woman on a diet, who may actually want any number of other attributes, who may want the sense of value and belonging and loveability that thinness represents but cannot guarantee. I want that wardrobe, I need that relationship, I just need to lose ten pounds. These become the felt and articulated wishes, the tangible hungers, appetite’s pressing focus, and they can take over landscape, override all other desires, coax into the background the real hunger and the anxiety behind it, a woman’s sense of ravenous need, or her lust and fear of lust, or the anguished empty spaces she carries inside; these simply evaporate in the active daily thrum of worry, they coil out of sight like smoke.

  This is what I want. I remember saying that to a therapist at the time: this, I meant, this angular body, this steely cocoon, this proof of transcendence over ordinary human need, this is my wish, my desire, nothing else.

  And yet this is precisely the point, this is why the mathematics of desire can be so compelling. Few people will tell a woman what to want these days, at least not formally. Women are not marched off to Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers at gunpoint, we are not ticketed or fined if we choose to eat chocolate cake every night instead fat-free sorbet, there are no rules, no externally imposed sanctions against having an active sex life or a hearty appetite for food or a headful of ambitions and dreams. But the erosion of rules has created a vacuum, one that certainly frightens a lot of men and may well frighten a lot of women, as well, particularly today, when our general sense of safety in the world—our belief in American inviolability and endless economic stability—has grown so fragile. The mathematics of desire mitigates precisely that anxiety. A woman—particularly a woman who feels fundamentally disempowered and uncertain—makes up new rules, replaces external constraints with internal ones, installs systems of mastery that operate from the inside out, the tyranny of freedom reconfigured as the tyranny of self.

  In a sense, this is a form of cooking the psychic books. Whether its form is extreme, as in anorexia, or more low-level and reflexive, the business of taking stock, of monitoring and calculating and tinkering with the budget serves a purpose; it gives the illusion of control, and logic and order, as though some independent second party—a meticulous inner accountant—is holding the reins on hunger, literally counting the beans. And although all that calculating may generate a fair amount of conscious anxiety—it can keep you actively worried about specific things, about what you ate last night, and how your clothes are fitting, and whether or not you should go to the gym—it does a masterful job of keeping less tangible, more daunting matters at bay. The flood of options is reduced to a manageable trickle. Unnamed anxieties are replaced with tangible ones. The formidable social and personal questions that might plague a woman (how to be in the world, how much space to occupy, where to direct her energy, how much to demand for herself) are reframed, minimized, broken down into small, individual questions, palatable bites: how the jeans look, what to order for lunch. You can’t worry about Appetite (joy, passion, lust, hunger) when you’re worrying about appetite (frosting, fat grams).

  What the math cannot do, of course, is eradicate anxiety altogether. On the contrary, that needling voice of cans and can’ts keeps you scared—not in a large, existential, potentially radicalizing way, but in a mild and chronic daily way, which is ultimately corrosive and undermining. It feeds that reservoir of self-mistrust, where authentic hungers are unknown and unexplored. And it supports a larger system of discord, in which a woman’s socially sanctioned appetites (for beauty, for slenderness, for shopping) are clearly defined and encouraged while her more complex internal ones are left on the back burner, fuzzy and indistinct.

  A friend, who recently lost about ten pounds, says she’s astonished at the number of people who compliment her. This is a proud, ambitious woman, someone who’s worked very hard to figure out what she wants in her life, who’s raised a healthy, well-adjusted child, and who’s made great strides in her professional life, recently securing a book contract for a project she finds deeply engaging. But, she says, “You cannot believe how many people comment about the weight. Forget the book contract. Forget the achievements of motherhood. It’s all, ‘Wow! You’ve lost weight!’ As though this is the supreme achievement of my life.”

  If a woman herself believes that weight loss is, or would be, a supreme achievement, the internal picture gets murkier still. Beverly, a thirty-seven-year-old physical therapist, hints at this when she starts mus
ing aloud about what her life might be like were she genuinely liberated from concerns about diet and weight. Renoir would love Beverly; he would see in her a portrait of plenitude with smooth rosy skin and a wild mane of auburn hair pulled into a loose braid and ample breasts and hips, but she sees only fat. A veteran in the diet wars, she has wrestled with food for most of her life, gained and lost the same twenty pounds more times than she can count, tried everything from Atkins to the Zone. “Sometimes I think about how much of my time and energy has gone into this, and I’m truly appalled,” she says. “It’s like what people say about workaholics: Not many people lie on their deathbeds and say, ‘Gee, I really wish I’d worked more hours.’ It’s the same thing. Am I really going to reach the end of my life and think, ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time dieting’? It’s scary. Because probably I’ll end up lying there and berating myself for putting all this energy into my goddamn weight when I could have—you know, had a life.”