Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  These are the if onlys I did not consider twenty years ago, ones that still seem so terribly difficult to imagine, or even talk about: If only we lived in a culture in which internal measures of satisfaction and success—a capacity for joy and caring, an ability to laugh, a sense of connection to others, a belief in social justice—were as highly valued as external measures. If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms.

  And—painfully, truly—if only we didn’t care so much about how we looked, how much we weighed, what we wore. This one was brought home to me with particular clarity after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I was in my office the morning of the 9/11, working on this very chapter, when my cousin phoned with the news. It was about nine-thirty by then. I rushed downstairs to the TV and, like the rest of the nation, spent the rest of the day glued there in horror and then the next several weeks in a state of mild shock, some rock of stability and permanence having turned to shifting sands, the familiar suddenly eerily unfamiliar. For a long time, my normal opiates (TV, crossword puzzles) seemed ludicrously ineffective. My concentration withered. And work—in particular this work—felt hopelessly irrelevant.

  “Women and their thighs,” I sputtered to a friend. “Who cares?” It took me quite a while, many weeks, not just to feel reengaged by the subject of appetite, but also to link that specific question—who cares?—to broader questions about female power, energy, values, to that whole wide spectrum of if onlys. The years I spent obsessing about weight were also years spent not obsessing about the wider world, not considering alternative visions, not appreciating how deeply and fully this merciless, nagging distress can obscure the larger picture, with all its horrors and injustices. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, I was struck by many feelings, but one of the more bitter and lingering was a kind of deep embarrassment about my own complacency: my blindness to the depth of hatred harbored in other parts of the world toward the United States; my ignorance about our role in fomenting it; my eminently comfortable remove from the circumstances in which so many others live, the poverty and desperation that drives women to madness and men to homicidal rage. I’ll put it this way: In the late 1980s, when American troops pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving legions of Afghanis in the sea of chaos that would give rise to the Taliban, I was worrying about whether my jeans were too tight.

  I care about women and their thighs for precisely this reason: because so many women care, and because that care is so devastatingly blinding.

  About a year ago, Carré Otis, one-time cover girl of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, abruptly ended seventeen consecutive years of dieting after taking a charitable trek through Katmandu with an organization called Medicine for Nepal. “I was in an orphanage,” she told The New York Times, “and there was an infant that was totally swathed in cloth; it was dying. There was absolutely nothing anyone could do. No medical attention, no doctor, no food. Mothers are crying, mothers can’t feed their babies. And it’s just like, Whoa! All this time I’ve been spent being unhappy with my precious human body and it gets me where I need to go, it doesn’t break down, it functions perfectly. I’ve spent a lifetime being upset with the way I look. That experience was key.” At five foot ten inches, Otis now weighs 155 pounds, a thirty-pound increase over her Vogue days, and wears a size 12. She says she’s never been happier or healthier.

  It is so difficult to wrest the focus away from externals: It can take bombs, and starving infants, but it can happen, and in the aftermath of September 11, I briefly entertained the possibility of a major zeitgeist shift, our grab-it consumer mentality and quick-fix approach to problems detonated along with the twin towers. No one can say precisely how (or how permanently) the events of September 11 will alter the national psyche, but a chunk of that fantasy went out the window within a week of the attacks, when shopping was neatly recast as a patriotic act, when I started seeing Web sites advertising “red, white, and blue sales” and American flag T-shirts, when a major department store left a prerecorded message on scores of local answering machines, intoning with great gravitas that the company’s heart went out to the victims of the attack but that its fabulous fall sale would go on, some tiny percentage of the proceeds to be donated to relief organizations.

  We may be a more sober nation than we were in the binge-happy eighties and nineties, a warier, less indulgent and less jaded one, but wariness does not always go hand in hand with depth, fear does not always pave the way to change. And so we muddle along, many of us, stumbling toward private solutions to pain, worried about the world and our thighs, eyes opened but vision still easily blurred.

  Mid-row the other day, a bright fall morning just this side of crisp, I found myself thinking about a conversation I’d had with a friend, who’d stated rather bluntly: “I think the gym has done more for women than forty years of feminism.” This is not entirely accurate: Women wouldn’t have access to gyms today without those forty years of effort; nor have gyms done much to liberate women beyond middle-class America. Then, too, exercise has its dark side, serving in its less healthy incarnations as a substitute addiction, or a way to stay in battle with the flesh, or yet another consumer experience, the body a commodity that must be wrapped in Lycra, properly accessorized, and meticulously maintained.

  I’m not unaware of those tensions in my own life—I am nothing if not compulsive—but as I moved across the water that morning, the boat balanced and the muscles strong, I appreciated my friend’s sentiment. Rowing is the most rhythmic of sports, exhilarating and also deeply calming, and when it’s working smoothly, you feel like some kind of prehistoric water bird, a creature designed to skim across the river’s surface, oars like extensions of your own arms, the boat moving through the water in a steady balanced rush of exertion, each body part—legs, back, shoulders, abdomen, even wrists and fingers and thumbs—following a set of learned rules, reaching out to catch the water and pull through in a way that comes to feel as ingrained as instinct. This is where the world began to open up for me. It was on the river, in that daily repetition of physical motions, that I first got a glimmer of what satisfaction felt like when it came from within: The sense of mastery I’d sought from starving, the confidence I’d tried to eke out of clothing and men, the release I’d found in drinking—all of this came to feel possible, and available and known, as visible as the concentric circles of water that form when the blades break through the surface of the water. It was there, too, that I began to redefine words like power and strength, to understand and experience them as qualities that existed within my own musculature, to re-write the rules of triumph. Building up versus paring down; taking in versus taking away. Starving had been about what I could do to my body, sculling about what I could do with it.

  This thought led, oddly enough, to a memory of a woman I’d heard at a meeting of Overeaters Anonymous several months earlier, an earnest, dark-haired young mother who’d stated, very simply and clearly, I know if I don’t speak, I will eat. She was talking quite specifically about her own life, her understanding that she over-eats in order to stuff down the rage and disappointment she feels when she is unable to tell the people in her life what she needs, but I interpreted her words more broadly, as a rearticulation of what second-wave feminists understood so well: the power of language. I suppose that’s why they came back to me at that moment: They reminded me of those early lessons on the river, of words gradually redefined, truths gradually gleaned, new p
aths painstakingly made as a result.

  Pain festers in isolation, it thrives in secrecy. Words are its nemesis, naming anguish the first step in defusing it, talking about the muck a woman slogs through—the squirms of self-hatred and guilt, the echoes of emptiness and need—a prerequisite for moving beyond it. This is what I admire about twelve-step groups in general, OA groups in particular: Like the gym, they’ve supplanted the sixties consciousness-raising group as a locus of self-radicalization; unlike the gym, where the lines between health, compulsivity, and narcissism can blur, they focus quite deliberately on mind and spirit, the body’s shape and well-being conceived as a reflection of state of mind rather than a specific target. They are places where women can talk as freely and fervidly about anxiety and turmoil and sorrow as they once talked about appearance and weight, where knee-jerk self-reproach and self-destruction can be replaced by honest conversation about pains, joys, risks, ordinary human struggles. In a culture so doggedly oriented toward quick fixes and immediate gratification, their very existence can seem extraordinary.

  This struck me, too, as I rowed along: the similarities between an open river and a church basement, the myriad ways in which women learn to talk differently about themselves and their bodies, and the ways in which this powers change. I thought about a woman I’d heard in a meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, an incest survivor, who told a hushed crowd of twenty about her efforts to feel safe in her own skin: years of therapy, years of meetings, and now a long stint with yoga, meditation, massage, all efforts to help her feel connected to her body, which she needed to do long before she could contemplate sharing it with someone else. “I couldn’t have done this work without all of you,” she said. “I was so isolated with all this pain before I started coming here, it would have killed me if I hadn’t found other people who really got it.” I thought about a conversation I’d had with an artist named Diane, from Los Angeles, who described redefining the word wealth in meetings of Debtors Anonymous, slowly coming to see that she’d understood it for most of her adult life in the most passive and external terms—the right job would come along, or (preferably) the right man with the right job, she’d glom onto him, he’d rescue her from her mountain of debt, all would be well. She couldn’t unlock that mindset until she’d sat and listened to dozens of other people, all of them struggling to break free of the allure of fantasy, all of them trying to face instead their own very ordinary strengths and limitations. Wealth, today, means something very different to Diane. She is far from rich, but she has a decent job, some pride in responsibility, and a sense of well-being that utterly eluded her five years earlier, the inside at last aligned with the outside. Just the other night, she told me, she sat down to make a list of things she’d really like in her life and to her great surprise, there wasn’t much on it she didn’t already have. Connection, check. Loved ones, check. A sense of belonging to a community, check. All that and enough money. She felt infused with hope, looking at that list. “That’s where real meaning comes from,” she told me. “It’s better than any shopping spree, better than any picture you see on the cover of a magazine.”

  Steering hope away from false gods, shepherding the focus back toward the heart, learning to see one’s private pain in a larger context, coming to link body with spirit: This, of course, is the essence of revolutionary work, and it always requires the reframing potential of language, the ability of words to fuel insight, rearrange facts, break down old paradigms. A psychiatrist tells me about her efforts to get women to think differently about sexuality, which is often a battle fought with words: Her patients get terribly hung up on language; they hear the word sexy and they think, a black garter belt that you never wear; they hear the word masturbation and they want to run screaming from the room. She is forever steering her clients away from imagery, forever telling them, This is junk, forget about it, this is a bubble-gum fantasy dreamed up for men, it has nothing to do with reality, all it does is keep you disconnected from your own body. She tries to use different language instead: She talks about sexuality in terms that evoke its internal nature, a man’s native level of desire as “sharp and daily,” a woman’s as more “hidden and complex.” She uses food metaphors to describe differences in need and satisfaction—the sexual ideal for a man might be quick and frequent and focused, the equivalent of grabbing a bite to eat; the ideal for a woman might be more leisurely and indulgent, a gourmet meal in a restaurant instead of a sandwich on the fly, an encounter preceded by a lot of thought, a lot of planning and preening and fantasizing during the day, a lot of warm-up time, no distractions, no work to get done or bills to pay or piles of dishes to wash. Her descriptions are peppered with words you rarely hear applied to female sexuality—“dark” and “glittery” and “mysterious”—and when I listen to her, I’m impressed by the power of even those hints at a reconfiguration, a word like “glittery” so much more apt and evocative than a word like “sexy,” its path so clearly headed inward instead of outward. She understands this: “We have to find new ways to talk about sexuality, to describe who we are and what we need,” she says. “It’s the only way to break free of this ridiculously narrow, disconnecting, image-oriented crap.”

  Even the smallest steps toward change involve linguistic shifts, gateways marked with nouns and verbs. Toward the end of my row, I remembered a young woman, a recovering anorexic, who’d told me about writing down three words in a notebook, shells, blankets, cat: They referred to a list she made during the earliest stages of her recovery at the urging of her therapist, who asked her to write down things that had given her pleasure in the past, memories of simple tactile sensations that once soothed her, activities and behaviors that once intrigued or engaged her. And so she recalled searching for sea shells on a beach with her brother as a child, the feel of sand beneath her feet, the smell of salt air. She recalled how pleasant it felt to lie under a great pile of blankets in the middle of winter, the weight and heft offering a sense of shelter, a safe woolen harbor. She recalled a cat she had as a teenager, the feel of its silky fur, the low rumble of its purr. This, she told me, was her “reintroduction to the world of sensuality,” a place from which she’d become utterly detached and to which she’s become gradually reacquainted, in part by rediscovering those lost pleasures: walking on the beach again; trading in her electric blanket for a new heap of blankets; acquiring a kitten.

  I steered the boat into the dock and sat for a moment looking out at the water, a wide ribbon of blue, glassy as a mirror in patches, rippled and glinting with diamonds of sunlight in others. I thought about that young woman with her cat and her pile of blankets, and I thought about how sculling had served a similar purpose, reintroducing me to beauty and grace, reframing the body as a source of pleasure. Defining desire in new ways is achingly complicated, painstaking work; it requires developing a vision that runs counter to consumerism, counter to a corporate and political culture that’s still tightly structured to meet male needs, perhaps even counter to one’s own deeply-ingrained assumptions. That vision may be elusive and under-discussed, it may not exist in Glamour magazine or Redbook, and it may be difficult to discern in the externalizing clatter of culture. But new visions do get forged, and if they’re not political in a large social sense, they certainly involve shifts in personal politics, in defining what works, what fits, what matters. A group of women in a church basement reconceiving hunger and satiety; a fashion model redefining starvation; a therapist and a client in an office carving out a path toward sensuality; a solitary sculler on a river learning to see strength in a new light. The public battlefields may be private ones today, but the dynamics are largely the same. Anything that connects you—to the body, to the self, to other women—can free. Anything that frees may also feed.

  5

  BODY AS VOICE

  THE HIDDEN PANTOMIME OF SORROW

  BUT BEFORE THERE IS FOOD, there are tears. Before the pound can lose its power, something ancient and equally potent must be felt.


  I remember grieving anorexia quite distinctly, weeping over the loss of that predictable futile safety, which was really a way of weeping over the self, the poor scared self who needed that safety and felt there was no other way to attain it. This must have taken place in therapy, although I can’t quite retrieve a specific memory. Instead, I have a sense memory of it, several years in which that initial post-starving frenzy gave way to a quiet, persistent sadness, an emptiness I could neither identify nor shop nor drink nor obsess away, as though a heaviness had crept into the edges of things and refused to budge.

  Once, right around this time, I told the therapist about what may well have been my worst anorexic day, a Sunday afternoon in August in the very thick of the starving years, when my parents had arranged to come visit. They’d been in southern Rhode Island for an event of some kind early in the day, and they’d planned to stop in Providence to spend some time with me before heading home. I’m not sure we made an actual plan, but I’d assumed dinner would be involved, and I’d hungered for that dinner for weeks: fantasized about it, worried about it, and planned for it with a vengeance, sticking fast to my 800-calorie-a-day diet for three straight weeks prior, not one variation, running extra miles, earning that meal, every bite.