Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  In an act that seems to cast the matter of choice in a new light, Leslie has reinvented that master, altered its conception of identity, traded in the words I want to be skinny for something considerably broader and less enslaving: I want to be myself, I want to have a life beyond the scale and the calorie counting, I want my sense of dignity and value and strength to exist independently of my weight.

  This is not to say that Leslie’s is necessarily an enviable situation. I can’t really know how deeply her confidence runs, or how shaken it gets, and I get fuzzy on medical questions, physical and psychological. Is it healthier to stay on the treadmill of constant dieting, gaining and losing the same forty pounds year after year, or to hold steady at two-sixty-five? If the latter cuts a decade off your life, is that a fair exchange for a lifetime of anguished dieting, deprivation, and mangled self-esteem? Over the long haul, where are the lines between physical health and emotional well-being?

  Those are complicated questions, personal as well as medical, but the primary differences between Leslie and me at twenty-four are what stuck with me: a fat woman with power, a thin one with no power; a fat woman with confidence and humor, a thin one with nothing but a grimace; a fat woman who’d burst out of her self-imposed exile, a thin one kneeling in front of a refrigerator, a portrait in shame. What’s astonishing to me, always, is the level of self-hatred a woman can live with, which is really a way of living with chronic pain. As Leslie and I both understand, from our opposite vantage points, tying self-worth to appearance is painful, a daily tightrope walk that requires constant vigilance. Dieting is painful, the body always resisting deprivation, never understanding why it cannot be permitted that simple baked potato, that pat of butter, that smooth dollop of sour cream. And self-criticism is painful, especially in the merciless way it’s practiced by women: the sour, defeated thud of disgust that hits when a woman steps on a scale, or feels her thighs brush against each other as she walks down a hallway, or sees her silhouette in a three-way mirror, butt too wide, belly too big, disgusting, I’m disgusting—this can be an excruciating way to think, to feel, to live.

  But, untreated, pain lingers. Unchallenged, it may be difficult even to acknowledge. Some time after my meeting with Leslie, I described her to a woman I know, someone who has worried about her weight for most of her adult life and who harbors such strong dissatisfaction with her own legs she has not worn a skirt in forty years. Her reaction surprised me. “You see strength,” she said. “I see heart attack, diabetes, and stroke, for starters. It’s hard to celebrate that kind of denial and self-destruction.”

  I’m not so sure about that, not sure our definitions of denial and self-destruction quite match up. I look at the cosmetic surgery numbers. I think about my own slavish and profoundly unhealthy relationship to slenderness. I watch a woman hiss at her reflection in the mirror, grab at her own flesh with revulsion, pour the fifth packet of Equal into her iced tea. And I can’t help but see Leslie as the embodiment of a paradigm shift, one that many women could learn something from. She sits tall in her chair, as though proud to take up so much space. She speaks with an authority that belies her age. There is nothing passive about her, nothing fragile or weak or non-threatening or deferentially hesitant. In Leslie, you see something exceedingly rare in this culture: size, heft, and not an ounce of apology.

  4

  FROM BRA BURNING TO BINGE SHOPPING

  APPETITE AND THE ZEITGEIST

  I HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO say I rowed my way out of anorexia, which is partly true. In the summer of 1985, I discovered sculling on the Charles River, a rigorous, insanely exacting sport and an endeavor that very gradually began to coax my sense of the body in a new direction. A skinny woman atop a skinny boat, poised to learn something about strength, and confidence, and the nature of power.

  There was nothing the least bit deliberate about this. I’d moved to Boston the previous fall, leaving Providence not so much because I had a clear goal in mind, and certainly not out of any wish to take up obscure water sports, but because I sensed I’d die if I stayed there, the rut of starving had grown so deep, the style so entrenched, the sense of stagnation so oppressive. Anorexia takes on such an airless, empty, mind-numbing sameness over time, life at a flat-line, each hour each minute each breath punctuated by the ache of hunger; each decision dictated by it; each day a grinding replica of the one before, same minuscule breakfast, same tiny lunch, same non-dinner, same cripplingly predictable chain of thought, a closed circle that begins and ends with no: No no no no . . . maybe . . . will you won’t you . . . how much . . . can’t . . . no no no. I put whatever energy reserves I had during those years into work. Beyond that, not much: a lot of TV.

  The move to Boston forced a slight loosening of anorexia’s vice-grip, catalyzed tiny changes, all of which I resisted. I rented an apartment in a western suburb, and I remember trying to replicate my old rituals from Providence, every detail: I spent weeks trying to find a deli that sold bagels like the ones I’d eaten daily for the previous three years; I looked for a shop that consistently carried Dannon coffee-flavored yogurt, my lunch of choice; I set up my bedroom just so—TV here, bed there, close attention paid to every angle—so that I could sit in the exact same physical position I’d sat in Providence while I watched TV and ate my apple and cheese. None of it worked quite the same way; the bagels tasted different, the stores all seemed to stock vanilla yogurt and not coffee, or Columbo and not Dannon, the light in my new bedroom was not the same as the light in my old bedroom, and even these tiny changes felt unnerving, a jarring erosion of the solace of ritual.

  On some level, too, I must have recognized the inanity of the effort, of trying to duplicate something so profoundly self-limiting. Within several months of moving to Boston, I got hired as a reporter for a newspaper that covered the local business community; the staff was larger than it had been at my old newspaper and I found it harder to cling to my old routines in front of them: impossible to eat my yogurt in my practiced style—tiny measured spoonfuls—in the midst of so many people, distressing to turn down invitations to join the others for lunch or drinks after work, and disheartening to be aware of wanting to turn them down. Ambivalence crept into the edges of my rigor, some wish to rejoin the world asserted itself, and for a long time, I danced back and forth across the line of deprivation I’d drawn so deeply in the sand, clung to anorexia’s deep familiarity, then released, then clung again. I’d join my colleagues for lunch and eat a normal amount (a sandwich, or soup and bread) but return to the apple-and-cheese for dinner. I’d go out to dinner, eat a regular meal, then eat nothing or next to nothing the following day. As I had in the year prior to full-blown starving, I’d binge here, starve there, a few steps forward, a few steps back.

  The impulse to retreat was constant, the simple matter of gaining weight terrifying. Even the most minute shift—the jeans just slightly more snug in the thighs, the face just slightly less hollow beneath the cheekbones—could make me feel panicked and invaded—fat creeping in, I could practically feel it, oozing into legs and arms and belly, undoing all that painstaking work, dismantling that carefully constructed temple of angle and bone, leaving me with that old sensation of terrifying boundlessness and self-mistrust. If I let myself go, how unstoppable might I be, how much weight might I gain? And who would I turn out to be? That’s what I remember most clearly from those years, the post-anorexic riddle of identity, a sense of wild shapelessness, as though a thousand different questions had been thrown open at once, all of them unanswerable, even the tiniest ones. A work friend would ask me to dinner, and I’d writhe with indecision: Did I want to? And if I didn’t, was the reluctance about fear of human contact or fear of food? Often, I honestly couldn’t tell.

  The one unequivocally bright spot on that horizon emerged, quite inadvertently, over the Charles River. My sister had pointed me in that direction: She’d come over during a particularly bleak period that spring and tried to cajole me into making a list of things that might make me fee
l better, activities, hobbies, anything to coax me out of my own head. Characteristically, I found the idea moronic (Hobbies? What, like needlepoint?), but then one of us hit on the idea of rowing. Sculling: long sleek delicate crafts, skimming across the water like perfectly skipped stones. I’d gone to high school across the street from the Charles, so I’d grown up watching rowers on the river, and the sight of them must have lodged in my consciousness, an image of power and grace and symmetry that held out some deep appeal. My sister mentioned that a local university had a summer rowing program; in a completely atypical fit of spontaneity, I called and signed up; in a slightly less atypical act of determination, I followed through and took the course.

  Maneuvering a single shell is like trying to stay upright on a giant knitting needle, and from the beginning I think I was aware that rowing offered an alternative challenge, something to master besides my own weight. A typical boat is twenty-six feet long and less than a foot wide; balance is either assisted or impeded by the oars, which measure about nine feet each. It’s like an aquatic version of tightrope walking, a merciless and unforgiving sport that requires nerve and enormous precision, and it captivated me utterly. All summer I watched good rowers glide by on the water, their strength echoed in the steady woosh of water against hull, their power seemingly effortless. I watched them lift their single shells out of the water at the end of a row, hoisting them up from the edge of the dock to the top of their heads in a single arcing motion, something as graceful and controlled as a piece of ballet. And I studied their bodies: strong bodies, muscular thighs and ropy arms; bodies that moved with confidence and ease; bodies that seemed to reflect the possession of something unimaginable to me, a deep and hard-won joy.

  I was nothing like those rowers for years. I flailed on the water, jerked and teetered, held the oars in a blistering death grip, nearly flipped the boat on every outing. But as it turns out, I had the right personality style (rowers, not unlike anorexics, are a fairly compulsive population) and I stuck with it. I rowed and rowed, wobbled and floundered, hacked my way up and down that river hundreds of times, and very gradually, I learned. The muscles in my arms and legs and back began to do what they were supposed to do; my motions became fluid and smooth instead of choppy and tense. And slowly, over the course of several years, I began to feel something I may never quite have felt as a woman before, which was integrated and strong and whole, the body as a piece, the body as responsive and connected to the mind, the body as a worthy place to live.

  Oddly enough, for a woman born and raised in a changing world, a climate in which old assumptions about women were being challenged daily, this may have been my first truly radicalizing experience—perhaps even a feminist one.

  Timing, as they say, is everything. I’ve always considered myself a feminist and yet in some very defining ways, I missed the feminist boat entirely, missed large passages on what I think of as the truly transformative parts of the journey. This may be a romantic assumption about the heyday of second-wave feminism, but I’ve always believed, perhaps naively, that if I’d reached my college years in 1968 instead of 1978, I might have turned out quite differently, developed a more radicalized view of myself and other women, found my sense of the personal and the political more intricately entwined. The second wave, after all, was in so many respects about appetite, about demanding the freedom to take in: sexual freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, the freedom to be as ambitious or headstrong or entitled as any man, the freedom to hunger and to satisfy hunger in all its varied forms. I am something of a zeitgeist sheep, and I suspect this powers my romanticized view. If I’d been twenty-one during the Summer of Love, might I have gone to Woodstock, moved to Haight-Ashbury, marched and rallied my way into a healthier view of my self, my body, my appetite? Might I have fought not against my own flesh but against actual, external enemies, the “establishment,” the patriarchy, the Vietnam war?

  Such questions may be unanswerable, but I think they’re important; they have to do with feminism’s reach, and about what happened to that movement on behalf of female hunger, and about how the struggle for freedom did—and did not—transform the experience of appetite for women of my generation. There’s no question that I’m a classic heiress of feminism, that second-wave activism shaped my sense of possibilities in countless ways, that it gave me both the intellectual and practical wherewithal to satisfy all manner of hungers. And yet for all that, I remained somehow immune to its transformative potential, some sense of its collective and radicalizing power never quite made it to the gut level. As a journalist in Providence, I was particularly drawn toward stories about women’s issues: I wrote about discrimination, abortion, violence against women. I wrote about women’s health, sexism in the media, cultural imagery. I even wrote about women (other women) with eating disorders. And quietly, privately, I starved myself half to death. There you have it: intellectual belief without the correlary emotional roots; feminist power understood in the mind but not known, somehow, in the body.

  I’ve noticed this phenomenon, this sense of missing a key of sorts, primarily in contrasts; women friends just ten or fifteen years older than I, particularly those who spent their college and young adult years in cities with large activist communities like Boston, San Francisco, and New York, seem to have absorbed feminist beliefs at an almost cellular level, the internal shifts wrought in dramatic and durable ways, which seems to me the essence of revolutionary change. There’s a visceral quality to their accounts that I find deeply enviable: stories of scales falling from the eyes and belief systems up-ended and reinvented; stories about founding feminist presses and women’s health care advocacy groups, about rejecting unenlightened husbands and repressive assumptions about female sexuality, about joining women’s groups, talking honestly and graphically for the first time about what it meant to inhabit a female body. Context feels vital in such tales—time and place and the power of collective energy—and whenever I hear about a woman’s sixties-style personal revolution, the image of an earthquake often comes to mind, a massive tectonic shift that may have altered the landscape permanently but that also affected the women in mid-tremor quite differently from those who arrived on the scene later, after the dust had settled, or who weren’t standing directly on the fault lines when the quake first hit.

  In the late 1960s, when the earth was rumbling, I was still in elementary school: nine, ten years old. In the mid-1970s, when women ten and fifteen years my senior were talking in earnest about women’s health and reproductive freedom and sexuality, I was in high school, not generally the most enlightened period in a person’s life; my own feelings about the body were immune to the political climate, defined instead by decidedly non-feminist concerns: zits, breast size, the approval of boys. And by the 1980s, which spanned both my starving and early recovery years, feminism had gone into its long (and on-going) period of retrenchment, its momentum dwindled, its unity given way to fragmentation and backlash. The tenor of the times had changed dramatically by then—these were the having-it-all years, the decade of Dynasty and Reagan-Bush—and so had the dominant cultural constructions of appetite. Feminism defined hunger broadly, its focus encompassing a woman’s sexuality, ambition, economic life, legal freedoms. Consumerism, the ethos that washed over the landscape in its wake, defines hunger in the narrowest terms, as the desire for quick fixes, external solutions, things.

  This was the mindset that seemed to affect me most dramatically, leached into consciousness in a way that feminism hadn’t quite had time to. I may have managed to row my way into some sense of personal empowerment during those years. But some of my most essential feelings about appetite—the body, its sexuality and its value, its link to emotional well-being—remained stubbornly unaffected for a long time, lodged in a past that wasn’t quite touched by feminism, and in a present that was guided by an entirely different sensibility.

  My formal education about the body took place in 1971, just two years after the Summer of Love and two years before
the passage of Roe v. Wade, in a sixth-grade classroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Outside, the world was crackling with activist energy; inside, it was not. Sex ed, for my peers and me, consisted of a single lecture on menstruation given by the school principal, a tall forbidding woman with hair the color of steel wool. Her name was Mrs. Morse. She separated the girls from the boys for one hour, stood at the front of the class, and used a pointer to familiarize us with the female reproductive system, detailed on a large poster. These are the fallopian tubes, she said. This is the uterus. She told us how eggs got fertilized by sperm, and she talked at some length about the lining of the uterine wall, and just before she moved onto cramps and Kotex pads, she spent a few minutes talking about the act of sex itself. This part was vague: a few words about hormones and changing bodily sensations; some cautionary sentiments about boys, whose hormones apparently would affect them more dramatically than ours would; and the briefest suggestion that sex could be an expression of feeling between people who loved each other. I believe she used the word “pleasurable,” but she said this with so much reticence and strain she might as well have been describing a periodontal procedure.

  This is a textbook example of what some feminist scholars call the “missing discourse of desire” among and in regard to adolescent girls. Girls of my generation did not—and girls for the most part still do not—receive a lot of honest information about the body, particularly the female sexual body and the subject of its arousal. This is an old taboo, culturally and academically. Freud never explored the subject of female sexuality, dismissing it in his infamous phrase as “a dark continent.” Most major theories of adolescent development have ignored it, as though sexual feelings don’t really play much of a role in the lives of girls. Even feminist theorists have tended to steer clear of the subject, and the silence on all fronts has been both deafening and deeply disconnecting. The French philosopher Michel Foucault first popularized the idea that discourse about sexuality can significantly shape sexual experience, noting that the language and tone we use when we talk about sex, the things we hear or (equally important) do not hear, have a direct impact on the way we register, interpret, and respond to our own bodily feelings. When you hear nothing about the body, he suggests, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity.