Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  And what of women whose mothers don’t harbor lofty ambitions for their daughters, who won’t beam with pride at their accomplishments or greet them in the kitchen with fresh-baked cookies at the end of a tough day? What of women, like Lisa, whose independence and hunger and strivings really do involve a kind of psychic betrayal, reminding a mother of her own failings and thwarted ambitions?

  In her collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick describes an autobiographical novel called Mary Olivier, which details precisely this scenario. Written by May Sinclair and published in 1919, the novel concerns a young protagonist named Mary, an intelligent and precocious girl whose mother resents her budding skill and independence. This conflict puts both mother and daughter in an impossible bind, a Gordian knot of attachment: Mary, who’s devastated by her mother’s disapproval, understands that she cannot truly leave home and follow her own dreams without sacrificing her mother’s love; her mother, who can’t bear such a separation, understands that in order to hold onto her daughter, she must continue to withhold her affection. In a poignant passage about how this kind of attachment, with its threats of jealousy and betrayal, can compromise a young woman’s ambition, Mary, who has particular talent as a pianist, sits down at age sixteen to play Chopin:She exulted in her power over the Polonaise. Nothing could touch you, nothing could hurt you while you played. If only you could go on playing forever. . . . Her mother came in from the garden. “Mary,” she said, “if you play, you must play gently.” “But Mamma—I can’t. It goes like that.” “Then don’t play it. You can be heard all over the village.” “Bother the village. I don’t care if I’m heard all over everywhere!” She went on playing. But it was no use. She struck a wrong note. Her hands trembled and lost their grip. They stiffened, dropped from the keys. She sat and stared idiotically at the white page, at the black bars swaying. She had forgotten how to play Chopin.

  Mary never becomes a pianist, and although she understands her own complicity in this surrender of power and voice (there’s “a bit of me,” she confides in her brother, “that claws onto her and can’t get away”), she never makes the psychological break, either.

  We may presume, nearly a century later, that Mary is not alone. The personal accounting that operates in the world of appetite—the internal equations about how much to take in; how to balance longing with constraint; how much to pay, literally or figuratively, for satisfaction—can also become an interpersonal calculus, equations measured and weighed against a second party: a spouse, a child, a colleague, a mother. Mary Olivier framed the dilemma perfectly: If you satisfy your own hunger, will you risk starving someone else?

  3

  I HATE MY STOMACH, I HATE MY THIGHS

  BODY-LOATHING AND THE LEARNED EMBRACE OF RESTRAINT

  I REACHED MY LOWEST weight sometime after that day in the kitchen. Eighty-seven, eighty-five, eighty-three. I stopped menstruating. I had no breasts. The body was tight, taut, bolted down. It did not curve or bulge or protrude, it did not bleed.

  During this time, I used to walk home from work along a strip of shops and restaurants on the east side of Providence, a deliberate route that took me out of my way and past a great deal of food. I’d pass women with armloads of groceries. I’d see couples hunched over hamburgers through the windows of a café. I’d walk past a delicatessen and a bakery and a Dunkin’ Donuts, I’d smell spiced meats and freshly baked bread and the heavy sweetness of honey glaze, and I’d feel virtually transcendent, resisting this bounty while others surrendered. Nothing. No appetite: not for me.

  The insidious thing is that this felt like a kind of triumph, victory echoed in the deep steady pressing throb of physical hunger, the stomach pulling inward, inward, inward. That hunger was like air to me, I needed the assurance of will it gave me, and I measured its effects with the quiet astonishment of a scientist whose radical experiment is actually working. At night, I’d stand in front of the mirror in my bathroom and take stock—my hip bones jutted out nearly an inch on either side, my abdomen a concave dip between them; my thighs were so narrow I could ring each one with my hands without touching any skin. I’d hold my arm out in front of me and observe its skeletal outlines: the ulna, a long and tapering bone; the elbow, a distinct flare below the upper arm; the tiny wrist bones, angry little knobs the shape of marbles. I’d stand there and count each rib. I lived and walked and breathed hunger, and although my body felt tight and drawn and pained, although I was so faint my vision blurred if I stood up too suddenly, I also felt driven and strong and focused, unyielding in my control and unwilling to relinquish it. This was the hunger of women, hidden and conflicted and forbidden. This was the infinite hunger for love and recognition, the hunger for sex and satisfaction and beauty, the hunger to be seen and known and fed, the hunger to take and take, and I had conquered it, mastered it, roped it like a steer.

  I was ruler of my own corporeal continent, the Queen of Anhedonia.

  No fat, no fleshy protrusions.

  No blood, no seepings.

  No needs.

  What an extraordinary sensation: anorexia, the most profound form of antagonism toward body and self, experienced as pride.

  More extraordinary, really, is that there’s nothing so unusual about this view of the body, nothing remarkable about this scrutiny of form and shape or about the underlying concern with potential excesses. This, albeit in exaggerated form, is part of the female voice: body-loathing as a language, sharp verbs, venomous nouns.

  I hate my body, I hate my thighs, I ate too much. I can’t believe I spent so much money, I haven’t been to the gym in weeks, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m such an idiot, I’m such a piece of shit. This kind of internal harangue, which is relentless and cruel and so humiliating a woman would be appalled if the words were spoken by an outsider, can be utterly commonplace, conducted so reflexively it’s easy not to notice how harsh it is. It simply pops out: the instinctive “ugh” uttered in front of the mirror, the daily ego-lashing over bad hair and imperfect skin, the acknowledged revulsion in the locker room, Look at me, I’m a mess. On a bad day, hatred of the specific (a thigh, a belly) can become indistinguishable from hatred of the self, as though they’re one and the same. A women I know describes feeling as though the zipper on her jeans triggers an audiotape in her head; the jeans feel too tight, the tape clicks on: You’re a pig, you’re a fucking, fucking fat pig. Another shares a page of her journal with me, kept while she was abusing laxatives during a bulimic phase. Twenty-two at the time, she wrote: I don’t just do disgusting things, I am disgusting, every fiber of me disgusting. I swallow these pills every night and there I am the next morning: literally just shit.

  Anxiety and guilt are about what we do, or fear doing, or fear we’ve done to others. Body-loathing is about who we are. Fat. Disgusting. Pig. Out of control, or about to be; too big, too much, women. The sensation behind it is slithering, poisonous, laced with self-contempt, and it can hit like a slap, a reflexive, often wholly irrational jolt of self-disgust that rises up from a place so deep it feels like instinct. This is the dieting woman’s background music, to be sure, that castigating hiss particularly audible around food and weight, but it can rise up anytime a perceived boundary is crossed, anytime a tacit rule about size or presence or hunger is broken. An editor—very skilled, very confident—describes meeting with a group of educators, who’d hired her to consult on a curriculum they were designing for a course in teenage health. She arrived, performed quite brilliantly—she was articulate, forceful, persuasive—but the minute she walked out the door, she was flooded with shame: She’d been way too pushy, too opinionated, she’d alienated the whole group. She had to call a colleague to ask for reassurance, and it took her days to realize where her reaction had come from: terrible discomfort with her own power, a feeling that some hideous eruption had taken place, the self exposed as domineering, loud, uncontained. A therapist—smart, culturally savvy, deeply self-aware—felt a similar stab to the gut while writing a t
hank-you note to a former boyfriend, who’d sent her a present for her fiftieth birthday. She knows all about the cult of youthfulness in this day and age, she knows how profoundly insulting and also how ludicrous it is to assign value only to inexperienced, wrinkle-free naifs, she gets all this. And yet the simple acknowledgment of those two numbers—5-0—hit her like a fist: Fifty meant old, a direct threat to the link between identity and beauty; it meant being ejected from the realm of vibrancy and sexual appeal, a place she’d once inhabited with this old boyfriend; it meant being cast into some other realm of sagging brokenness and loss.

  Anorexia took all of this away from me, at least in a superficial, immediate sense. On days when I successfully resisted food and held fast to my 800-calorie regimen, which was most days, that voice of self-admonishment grew thin as a butterfly’s wing, it evanesced, and its absence made me feel different and strong. See? See what an iron will I have? One of the most common misconceptions about anorexia is that women who suffer from it actually believe they’re fat: They look in a mirror and see imaginary bulges, heft, fleshy curves where there are only bones. This was not my experience. My view of my body was certainly distorted—I could not see how truly grim and gruesome and alien I looked, I had no real sense of the extent of the emaciation—but I knew I was stripped down, spare, angular, I knew I had pared away those bulges and curves, I knew I was winning the war, which was precisely how daily life felt, like a state of siege. Body versus mind, flesh versus the purest will.

  Sandra Lee Bartky, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes about the feeling among women—widespread, she believes—that they are under constant observation, monitored by a cool critical “anonymous disciplinary power” that’s so ingrained it almost feels like a second self. Disciplinary is an apt word; even now, years past anorexia, that sense of an independent force persists, as though some judgmental entity—me, but not quite me—lives on in a corner of my mind where it stands watch, always aware of the body, attuned to every nuance of shape and heft and contour, always anticipating the worst, always poised to deliver a slap at any hint of laziness or sloth or relaxed control. Sometimes its voice is proactive: Don’t eat that brownie, don’t take seconds; you’ll feel pious, you’ll feel resolute and thin. More often, it’s punitive, a voice of sneering disdain: Look at that stomach. Look at those thighs. You’re turning into a cow.

  I don’t think this is something men experience, at least not in the routine, daily way that women often do. Many years ago, during a meeting at work, a male editor asked me to loan him my pen. I handed it over, then sat and watched as he took the pen, wrote something down, then stuck the pen in his ear. Then he twisted the pen around, took it out, and looked at it. Then he stuck it back in, twisted it around again, and looked at it some more. I found this so stunning—shameless is the word—I wrote a column about it, detailing the kinds of things that men (at least some men) feel free to do in public that a woman almost never does: vehicular nose picking, Kleenex-free nose blowing, phlegm-hurling, public belching. I called the column “Gross Men” but it really had less to do with decorum or manners than with a kind of freedom from stricture and judgment. Bartky also refers to her “disciplinary power” as a “panoptical male connoisseur [which] resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgments.” If this connoisseur resides within men at all, it does not appear to plague them the way it plagues women; if it sees a man spit some huge specimen of phlegm onto the street while jogging, it (or the man himself) at least seems not to care.

  But this monitoring presence does care what women do, how they look, how they behave in public, and its castigating tones are very difficult to get purchase on because they feel both deeply rooted and rootless, part of self and also part of the wider world. The other day, I cut a workout short, swam three quarters of a mile instead of a mile, which I understand is absolutely no big deal in the grand scheme of things, or even the small scheme of things: completely inconsequential, completely fine. And yet as I got out of the pool and headed toward the showers, I could feel the presence stir, the beast rattling in its cage, even this tiny infraction triggering its contemptuous mutterings about thighs, body fat, potential excesses, you pig. This is a holdover from anorexia, no doubt, this feeling that all hell will break loose if the vigilance isn’t scrupulously maintained, but I think it’s a fairly common sensation and also an extraordinarily far-reaching one. Self-contempt of this sort has a deep, visceral, almost subterranean quality—it seems lodged in a woman’s soul somehow, its voice of admonishment as real and core as conscience—but it also has a more diffuse character, as though it lives in the air beyond consciousness and intellect, a kind of emotional radon that leaks its poison perpetually but invisibly. I ignored the voice that morning and went about my business, but I’m still a little awed by its persistence: I can reason with the beast, I can temporarily defuse it, but I can’t seem to kill it.

  Actually, no individual effort seems to kill it. To a large extent, this castigating beast exists quite independently of consciousness; it’s part of the air we breathe, part of the earth beneath our feet, a entire universe a woman may come to know simply by being female. In my office is a stack of women’s magazines: temples of self-scrutiny, bibles of body-loathing. On the top of the pile is a Shape magazine, July 2000, its cover featuring a lean, smooth-skinned Elle Macpherson, pictured two years after giving birth to a baby. Elle Macpherson is a modern goddess, stunning to behold: Her hair is shot through with glimmers of blond, her skin is absolutely poreless and smooth, her teeth are so pearly-white they look like they could blind you if you caught them in the right light. She wears a pale blue spaghetti-strapped tank top, which exposes a wide expanse of creamy skin, beautifully rounded and glossy shoulders, the barest shadow of cleavage. Her eyes shine; she is beaming.

  Beside Elle’s image, several stories are promoted, among them: “Burn 1,000 Extra Calories a Week!,” “Weight-loss News: You Don’t Need Willpower,” “One Great at-Home Pilates Move for Bikini Abs,” “SPECIAL: New Ways to Stop Stress Eating,” and “We Found the Best 12 Moves for Your Abs, Butt & Thighs.”

  I look at this and sigh. Weight, weight, weight; abs, butt, thighs. Any woman with a modicum of self-awareness understands what this material is intended to do. It is goddess worship, goddess religion for the consumer age, commandments chiseled on skin and bone, and it’s designed to whip us mere mortals into a frenzy of inadequacy so potent it causes us to act, to go forth and buy the magazine and the many products it advertises. Thou shalt be thin, the goddess commands. Thou shalt not have wrinkles. Thou shalt compare and contrast. Thou shalt fail to measure up. Thou shalt beget a child and two years later, when instead of resembling the vibrant and dizzyingly happy Elle Macpherson thou hast become the very picture of exhaustion, with sagging breasts and dark circles beneath thine eyes and not an ounce of energy, thou shalt blame thyself and feel like shit, and then thou shalt go forth and buy Shape magazine and learn that great at-home Pilates move for bikini abs.

  And yet no matter how objectively you look at it or how efficiently you deconstruct it, this stuff sinks in, it gets to you. When the goddess is not cast in an Elle-like euphoric glow—so happy, so beautiful, so much happier and more beautiful than you’ll ever be—she pouts and smirks into the camera, her chin uplifted in a gesture of faint superiority, her ice-princess gaze at once sexy and mocking, as inviting to men as it is shaming to women. The expression here doesn’t just trigger a woman’s own private denigration about weight and skin and hair; it also externalizes it, gives it a body and a face, provides a constant visual slap to reinforce the internal one. Look at me, the goddess says. You’re so fat compared to me. You’ll never have hair like mine. You’ll never be so desirable. As Wheelock professor Gail Dines puts it, “To men, the look says ‘Fuck me’; to women, it says, ‘Fuck you.’”

  Constantly slapped, constantly measured against perfection, a woman stops se
eing straight; the goddess hammers away at perception. In the course of a week, I might see a half dozen ordinary naked female bodies in the locker room at my gym, usually the same half dozen, and literally hundreds of goddess bodies on TV, billboards, and in ads; over time—weeks turned into months, years, decades—reality starts to erode, the ideal bodies start to look normal, the normal bodies ungainly and aesthetically off, the gap between the beautiful and the ordinary grows wider and more distinct. This is why the simple act of walking past a mirror or catching your reflection in a store window can so easily set off the alarm of comparison and critique: flash, a bulge here; flash, a flaw there; flash, imperfect hair, imperfect skin, imperfect breasts, imperfect stomach, imperfect legs; flash, not Elle Macpherson. This, too, is why the goddess has such a simultaneously ego-battering and seductive effect: a mere glance at the cover of Shape, and the phenomenon of self-scrutiny can kick in as reflexively as breathing. Hair: Elle’s is so shiny. Skin: Mine is awful compared to hers. Burn 1,000 extra calories a week: How?