Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  This, I think, is the soul of anorexia, its fevered core, the body as a country that needs to be subdued, its appetites an enemy force so base and treacherous it must be eradicated entirely. How else to explain that sorry sense of pride? I’d watched women do battle with their hungers my whole life, listened to the harangues, participated in the hate-my-body, hate-my-thighs daily raking of the self over hot coals. I’d shared the horrified sensation of overspilling, needing too much, seeping beyond my prescribed boundaries. I understood the wariness with which so many women experienced their bodies and, by extension it seemed, themselves. I’d seen how bound together and twisted a person’s appetites could be, validation merging with sex, sex merging with betrayal, needs of body and soul tangled in unknowable, undoable knots. I’d seen where hunger, controlling or surrendering to it, could take a person.

  I just carried this knowledge to its logical conclusion and did what others could not do. I vanquished the enemy and with it, the threat of danger, the threat of consequences.

  Over time, unexamined, hatred of the body can assume enormous power, even in seemingly inconsequential ways. I know of a woman who will not go camping unless she is equipped with a butane-powered curling iron; she will not travel without it; she literally does not feel she can be in the world—even the natural world, where the only person likely to see her is her husband— unless her hair is coiffed just so. This behavior may not seem directly related to the matter of body-loathing, or even to the matter of appetite—it may seem just plain silly—but I think it says something about how entrenched a woman’s sense of constraint can be, and how much those constraints can affect her experience of desire. When anxiety about the body runs deeply enough, adherence to the rules—don’t eat, keep the mouth shut, pack up the butane-powered curling iron, starve yourself half crazy—comes to feel voluntary, the mandates self-generated and freely embraced.

  I witnessed a display of this several years ago, in a chic mid-town Manhattan bistro, while dining with two women—both thin, although not as thin as they’d like to be—who have given the matter of female bodies a lot of thought. Susan Orlean, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and Patricia Marx, a freelance writer, are both veterans in the diet wars. They have both gained weight and lost weight, clamped down and surrendered control, exercised compulsively and slacked off, marched into rooms feeling beautiful and svelte, slunk into rooms feeling porky and grotesque. They have been sufficiently preoccupied with the subject of food and weight and bodies to write a book about it, a cheeky little collection of satirical weight-loss tips and dieting strategies called The Skinny: What Every Skinny Woman Knows About Dieting (And Won’t Tell You!), which sprung from a year’s worth of anecdote-collecting “skinny lunches,” held over salads and steamed vegetables with like-minded peers. And although they both say the worst is behind them (neither is “obsessed” with food today, they both have full, busy lives, they understand that this stuff can take over your whole being if you’re not careful), they nonetheless have strong feelings about the subject.

  They have particularly strong feelings about the words “fat” and “thin,” which generated a good hour’s worth of free association.

  The word “thin” evoked bright expressions and tones of breathless wonder. Susan said, “When I am thin, I feel quick and light and sprightly.”

  Patricia agreed: “And you are! I used to swim a mile a day, and when I was thin, it was easier. I was sleeker and faster.”

  Susan talked about how she felt while training for a marathon, some years back: “I was lean and mean and just—you know, I would run past fat people and just feel so strong, and kind of clean and mean—”

  Patricia interrupted: “Superhuman. You feel like a machine.”

  Susan: “Right. It was just a very particular feeling, and there was a kind of arrogance, like I had all this denial and will power. And people were jealous.”

  Patricia: “They are jealous. Totally.”

  Fat had the opposite connotations, words uttered with pursed lips and scowls of disdain. Susan used the words plump, matronly, and (inaccurately, but you get her drift) lumpen. At times when she was “a little fat,” she felt unsexy and blobby and fleshy. “I didn’t like looking at myself,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone else to look at me.”

  Patricia said when she first started worrying about weight, in her senior year of high school, “it was a conscious desire to look young and boyish, sporty.” Describing her less rigorous approach to dieting today, she used words like soft and lazy and undisciplined.

  Later, she added, “There’s something very Normal Rockwell about food, do you know what I mean? That’s why I hate Thanksgiving.”

  Susan said, “Yeah, it’s all this maternal stuff.”

  Patricia agreed, “Like the term ‘comfort food’ sickens me.”

  Susan: “Me, too. Although I like to eat it.”

  These are confident, accomplished, attractive women who enjoy laughing at themselves, at the hoops they’ve jumped through in the service of skinny. They like being ironic and irreverent about it, they peppered their book with deliberately outrageous, non-PC quips (sample “oddball tips:” “Travel to a third-world country—you’ll lose an easy eight pounds,” and “Swallow a whole hard-boiled egg without any other food or liquid to wash it down; if all goes well, it will get stuck in your throat so that you can’t eat anything else”), and when you ask them whether they think the female preoccupation with food and weight has to do with self-loathing or shame or internalized misogyny or anything of a sociopolitical nature, their eyes get a bit glazed, as though this is akin to asking if a feminist can wear lipstick. Please: aren’t we past that by now?

  Is fat a feminist issue? Patricia wrinkled her nose. “I kind of resent that argument,” she said, “because I think people have a right to look the way they want to look.”

  Susan agreed. “The one flaw in that logic is that women are a part of culture. We’re part of what drives it. I mean, it’s not that culture is being imposed on us by men. We want to be skinny.”

  They dismissed the idea—it seemed passé and irrelevant, skinny is an aesthetic matter, not a political one, a choice, not mandate—and ordered lunch. Patricia had an iced tea with five packets of Equal, and an egg-white omelet-of-the-day, which was studded with lox and came with a pile of French fries (she requested it sans lox and didn’t touch one fry). Susan had a diet Coke and a salade niçoise, no dressing.

  And there you have it. Amid all the skinny wit and egg whites, Susan and Patricia kept articulating precisely how tangled the lines of personal desire and social expectation can be, how merged they may feel. Both women claim to have more peaceful relationships with their bodies than they once did, and to have left behind some of their earlier anguish and preoccupation (“I have a perspective,” says Patricia, “that allows me to know that it’s not that important”). And yet fat—the idea of it, the memory of it, the threat of it—sat at that table like a third person, ominous and stern and warning. Fat jeopardizes social cachet: Susan talked about how much attention a thin woman gets, how people invariably remark on it, how “when you’re average, no one talks about what you look like.” Fat diminishes sexuality (Susan: “I feel really gross if I’m a little heavy, and really, really unsexy”). Fat even puts identity at risk; describing how it felt to be really skinny, Patricia said, “You had a character, you didn’t have to come up with a personality, you had an easy eccentricity and you didn’t have to create it.”

  Fat, fat, fat. Don’t, don’t, don’t. You can almost hear that internalized presence in such sentiments, the omniscient second self issuing its warnings, making its judgments, ordering the hand away from the fries. You can hear, too, the echoes of ancient philosophers, the abundant, natural female body articulated as a base and ignoble thing (blobby, lazy, undisciplined) that grows more worthy and powerful (sleek, clean-and-mean, superhuman) as it’s stripped down, whipped into more masculine form. Above all, you can hear strains of the same lo
gic I applied to hunger, in typically inflated style, in anorexia: an embrace of restraint based on a fervid belief in its benefits, many of which feel and may actually be quite real, at least in a transient and limited way.

  Motives get tied in knots under this thinking. Does a woman work hard to stay thin—exercise regularly, watch the appetite, worry when she overeats—because she’d hate herself if she grew fat, because she’d be ashamed by its associations with sloth or laziness or lack of control? Or is it simply because she feels better when she’s slender and fit? Is this effort a form of cultural enslavement, an offering to the gods of patriarchy, who are known to penalize women if they exceed their prescribed limits? Or, as Susan and Patricia might argue, is it a choice, part of an aesthetic that women themselves have cultivated and embraced? I can make either case, I can make both: Yes, a salade niçoise would make me feel better than a fat-spattered cheeseburger (in the interest of full disclosure, salade niçoise is precisely what I ordered, dressing intact) and yes, I can acknowledge culture’s influence in the matter, its grip on the subjective experience of “feeling good.” The lines between choice and mandate are thin because the lines between self and culture are thin, the internal and the external tightly entwined and difficult to separate. “We want to be skinny,” Susan says. How can you argue with that?

  One place to begin, at least for me, is in a bookstore-café in downtown Boston, a world away from Susan and Patricia, where I spent some time with a young graduate student named Leslie Kinzel, a woman who has worshipped at the altar of slenderness for many years, as well.

  Leslie, twenty-four at the time of our meeting, has chin-length blondish hair, large gray eyes, a low-key, confident manner, and she is fat, her word, 265 pounds. She likes to say it bluntly: I’m fat. People are unnerved by this, a response she has come to find amusing. When you ask her how much she weighs, she rattles off the number—two-sixty-five, her tone very matter-of-fact—and then waits for the inevitable pause, a little squirm of surprise and projected discomfort. People always expect Leslie to be embarrassed about her weight, to cast her eyes downward and mutter the number, and when she fails to do this, they’re taken aback. So they usually mutter for her: “Really? But you don’t look that big,” they say, and change the subject.

  Leslie understands this discomfort. She says, “I am their worst nightmare,” and she knows precisely what the nightmare represents: Women look at her and they see a case study in appetite run amok, two-hundred-and-sixty-five pounds worth of evidence about where a woman’s hunger might lead her if she let it, an embodiment of shame. In fact, she is an embodiment of power, or of a kind of power, in which the slithering underside of body-loathing has been held up to the light, examined, and summarily dismissed.

  Leslie, who has been heavy all her life, certainly knows what it’s like to detest her own body, to perceive it as the enemy. She went on her first diet at age nine, dieted all through junior high and all through high school. Like many fat women, she put whole chunks of her life on hold because of her weight, carrying around a laundry list of things she’d be entitled to only if she became thin: She’d see a cute boy in school and she’d automatically think, Well, if I go on a diet for two months and lose twenty pounds, maybe I can talk to him. Beautiful clothes: maybe when I’m thin. Romance, ambition: maybe when I’m thin. Which never happened. Leslie would lose thirty pounds, and then the pounds would come back and they’d bring friends: another ten, another twenty. This is not unusual (the vast majority of people who diet will gain the weight back within five years), and Leslie is quite convinced that dieting—which screws with both mind and metabolism—is the most effective way to pack on pounds. It is also, she believes, “a fabulous way to keep women very, very preoccupied—the side effects of dieting are irritability, loss of concentration, and self-absorption.” She, of course, was a case in point, too locked into the cycle of gain-and-lose-and-gain-some-more to think about the larger meanings of body image, too full of self-hatred to address its roots and consequences.

  When Leslie was about nineteen, a friend gave her a copy of a book called Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size, by Marilyn Wann, an early pioneer in what’s variously known as the “weightism” or “size activism” movement. The book squared with feelings she hadn’t yet named—an exhausted sense of self-defeat and futility, an awareness that something was very wrong with her enslavement to the scale—and it had a transforming effect; the light of epiphany went on. She thought, “Wow, there are people who exist who think this is okay, and there are people who exist who know that fat people do not eat more than thin people, and in some cases even eat less, and that this is not a reflection of your character any more than if you refer to someone as being thin.” There are people, in other words, who exist in the world with fat bodies and healthy egos and a full range of entitlements, shame-free.

  She has not dieted since. She stopped poring through women’s magazines for weight-loss tips and dieting how-tos. She gave up the constant vigilance and worry. She began to inhabit her body, instead of fighting it, and to embrace the idea of her own presence. This has been a daunting enterprise in many respects, a coming out of the fat closet. For her, it meant talking about being fat, acknowledging to friends and family the fact of it and her decision to live with it, which generated new forms of criticism, raised eyebrows and skeptical commentary: Oh, she’s just angry, she’s upset that she can’t fit in with the rest of us, she’s upset that she doesn’t have the will power to lose weight like my mother or my aunt or my sister did. Embracing fat also meant disavowing her mother’s worldview, the gateway to guilt. Her mother is also a heavy woman, one who’s spent her whole life trying to live up to the slender ideal, and although she’s come to accept Leslie’s I’m-Fat proclamations, Leslie says she found them threatening for some time, as though her daughter were calling into question her lifestyle, her aesthetics, even her most deeply held beliefs.

  Which, to an extent, she was. Leslie’s stance on fat required a fundamental reframing of values, and a slow stripping away of the most ingrained assumptions behind them. She has been blessed in this endeavor by a very accepting father, who loves women in general and large women in particular; she’s also been blessed with the native fearlessness and indignation of an activist, not a shy bone in her body. In the last few years, Leslie has become something of a lone gunman on the weightism front. On occasion, she’s formally engaged to speak about the subject to groups of students, but she’s more apt to target one person at a time: acquaintances, fellow students, strangers at subway stations, anyone who seems willing or able to hear what she has to say.

  Anger is an important ingredient here; directed outward instead of inward, it’s what breaks the connections between size and entitlement, size and dignity, size and value; it’s what turns body-loathing into pride; it’s what defuses that grinding, punitive voice, shuts down its warnings about staying on the diet, shutting your mouth, putting your life on hold.

  “When you’re fat,” Leslie says, “you’re constantly pretending that it’s a temporary state.” In a nod to that, she used to wear her weight like a secret, as though it wasn’t really hers; her friends never talked about it, nor did she, no one ever used the word “fat.” They ignored it the way you might ignore a bad smell in the room; it would go away in time, the real Leslie would emerge. In an allusion to the internalized voice of self-hatred, she says, “It’s part of the dieting mindset. There’s this whole notion that there’s a thin person inside who’s waiting to get out.”

  She pauses, then adds: “I like to say I sat on her and killed her.”

  Leslie threw back her head and laughed when she said this, a vigorous hearty laugh so palpably self-accepting it seemed to linger over the table for several moments like a wisp of perfume. The sound stayed with me for hours, and so did the image: a woman suffocating self-hatred with her own heft. A young woman, no less. At Leslie’s age, twenty-four, I was in the most acute phases of starving. I was
isolated and lonely and weak, I hardly could have suffocated a fly, and I certainly couldn’t have understood that anything internal—self-disgust, fear, the ingrained messages of culture—needed to be snuffed out.

  Back then, a woman like Leslie was my worst nightmare, and that thought stayed with me for a long time, too. The night after we met, I went home and found myself thinking about my periodic binges, hideous little exercises in body-loathing that spoke to precisely that nightmare: the appetite unleashed and insatiable, the steely will exposed as a lie. These episodes took place every six or eight weeks, when I simply couldn’t bear the hunger anymore, couldn’t bear the sense of deprivation and longing behind it, and they were always meticulously, painfully planned. Typically, I’d invite people over for dinner, and I’d spend all day cooking, making foods I’d dreamed about but wouldn’t eat—huge pasta dishes with four kinds of cheese, and loaves of the best crusty bread, and the densest chocolate cakes, with hazelnut buttercream and thick sweet frosting—and I’d anticipate the meal with an anguished combination of greed and abject terror. I’d long ago lost the ability to eat “normally,” to gauge with any certainty how much food I needed or when I’d had enough—that capacity had vanished way back at the all-you-can-eat buffet, replaced by the knowledge that once I caved in, I’d be insatiable. Which, of course, I was. During the actual meal, I’d pretend to eat casually, trying to mask my preoccupation by imitating the others: ignoring the bread basket until they passed it, taking seconds only after they took more, too. But later, after everyone had left, I’d steal back into the kitchen, kneel by the refrigerator light, surrender in full. More pasta, more bread, hunks of the cake. I’d eat and eat and eat, and then I’d reel off to bed feeling stuffed, bloated, dizzy, humiliated. The feeling of self-hatred behind those frenzies was leveling, total, soul-deep, the sense of disgust with my own body as literal and defining as an exclamation point. But this is how body-loathing works; hatred of the flesh gets embedded in the heart, constraint (or lack of it) becomes fused with identity. This is bad—this solitary binge; this needy, demanding, hungry body; this flesh—becomes I am bad. The master must be obeyed because the master is you.