Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  NOTES

  Prologue

  ix Renoir once said that were it not for the female body. . . : Götz Adriani, Renoir (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1996; distributed by Yale University Press), p. 270.

  Introduction

  15 . . . some twelve billion display ads, three million radio commercials, and 200,000 TV commercials flood the nation on a daily basis: Harry Flood, “Manufacturing Desire,” Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment, no. 28, Winter 2000, p. 20.

  15 . . . most of us see 3,000 ads a day: James B. Twitchell, AdCult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 2.

  16 Nearly 30,000 women [said] they’d rather lose weight than attain any other goal: “Feeling Fat in a Thin Society,” survey by Drs. Susan and Wayne Wooley, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Glamour, February 1984.

  16 More than half of all Americans between the ages of twenty and seventy-four are overweight, and one fifth are obese: Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “The Fat Get Fatter: Overweight Was Bad Enough,” The New York Times, Ideas and Trends, May 2, 1999, p. 4.

  16 Cost of obesity-related illness is expected to reach into the hundreds of billions within the next twenty years: Greg Critser, “Let Them Eat Fat: The Heavy Truths About American Obesity,” Harper’s, March 2000, p. 42.

  17 Obesity also appears to be a class issue: Ibid., pp. 41-47. Also see David Barboza, “Rampant Obesity, a Debilitating Reality for the Urban Poor,” The New York Times, December 26, 2000, p. D5.

  20 Five million women in the United States suffer from eating disorders: National Institutes of Mental Health, Eating Disorders, NIIH1 Publication No. 943477, Rockland, Md., 1994. See also “Dying to Be Thin: Desperate for a Better Body, More and More Americans Are Taking Bigger Risks—and Paying with Their Lives,” People, October 30, 2000, p. 109, and Jane E. Brody, “Exposing the Perils of Eating Disorders,” The New York Times, December 12, 2000, p. D8, both of which put the figure at about seven million.

  20 Eighty percent of women report that the experience of being female means “feeling too fat”: C. Steiner-Adair and M. Purcell, “Approaches to Mainstreaming Eating Disorders Prevention,” Eating Disorders, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1996, pp. 294-299.

  20 More than forty percent of women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine report some kind of sexual dysfunction: Edward O. Laumann, Ph.D., Anthony Paik, M.A., and Raymond C. Rosen, Ph.D., “Sexual Dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and Predictors,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281, February 10, 1999, p. 537.

  20 Estimates on compulsive shopping range from two to eight percent of the general female population, fifteen to sixteen percent of a college-age sample: Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 159.

  Chapter 1: Add

  Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem

  23 Eating disorders are the third most common chronic illness among females in the United States: Steiner-Adair and Purcell, “Approaches to Mainstreaming Eating Disorders Prevention,” p. 296.

  23 Fifteen percent of young women have substantially disordered attitudes and behaviors toward food and eating: L. B. Mintz and N. E. Betz, “Prevalence and Correlates of Eating Disordered Behaviors Among Undergraduate Women,” Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 354, 1988, pp. 463-471.

  23 The incidence of eating disorders has increased by thirty-six percent every five years since the 1950s: Brody, “Exposing the Perils of Eating Disorders.”

  30 Weight of the average model or actress or beauty pageant contestant has dropped to twenty-five percent below that of the average woman: Terry Poulton, No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits by Making Women Hate Their Bodies—And How to Fight Back (Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1997), p. 13.

  31 By the late 1970s, doctors were handing out some ten billion appetite-suppressing amphetamines per year: Ibid., p. 47.

  31 Weight Watchers had spread to forty-nine states, its membership three million strong: Ibid.

  31 The diet-food business was about to eclipse all other categories as the fastest-growing segment of the food industry: “The Food Giants See the ‘Light,’” Business Week, June 1, 1981, p. 112.

  31 “The female body is the place. . . ”: Rosalind Coward, Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought and Packaged (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), p. 60.

  32 Sixteen percent of adults would choose to abort a child if they knew he or she would be untreatably obese: Carey Goldberg, “Fighting the Stigma: Citing Intolerance, Obese People Take Steps to Press Cause,” The New York Times, November 5, 2000, p. Al.

  35 Forty-three million women live independently today: Tamala M. Edwards, “Flying Solo: More Women Are Deciding That Marriage Is Not Inevitable,” Time, August 28, 2000.

  35 Women make the vast majority of consumer purchases in this country—eighty-three percent: Susan Estrich, Sex and Power (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000), p. 24.

  35 Women buy one fifth of all homes: Edwards, “Flying Solo.”

  35 Women represent more than half of full-time college enrollments: “Who Needs Men? Addressing the Prospect of a Matrilinear Millennium,” a forum with Barbara Ehrenreich and Lionel Tiger, Harper’s, June 1999, pp. 33-46.

  35 An overwhelming majority of women—estimates range from eighty to eighty-nine percent: See Steiner-Adair and Purcell, “Approaches to Mainstreaming Eating Disorders Prevention,” p. 298; see also Deborah Pike, “Mental Makeover,” Vogue, May 1995, p. 219; and “Searching for the Perfect Body,” People, August 25, 2000.

  36 Women are three times as likely as men to feel negatively about their bodies: “Mission Impossible: Deluged by Images from TV, Movies, and Magazines, Teenage Girls to Battle with an Increasingly Unrealistic Standard of Beauty—and Pay a Price,” People, June 3, 1996.

  36 Eighty percent of women have been on a diet: Ibid.

  36 Half of all women are actively dieting at any given time: Ibid.

  36 Half report feeling dissatisfied with their bodies all the time: Ibid.

  36 Congress is still ninety percent male, as are ninety-eight percent of America’s top corporate officers: Estrich, Sex and Power, p. 8.

  36 Ninety-five percent of all venture capital today flows into men’s bank accounts: Ibid., p. 12.

  36 The two hundred highest-paid CEOS in America are all men: Ibid., p. 8.

  36 Only three women head Fortune 500 companies: Ibid.

  36 Women are still featured in only fifteen percent of page-one stories, and when we do make front-page news, it is usually only as victims or perpetrators of crime: Naomi Wolf, “The Future Is Ours to Lose,” The New York Times Magazine, May 16, 1999, p. 134.

  36 Women continue to make eighty-four cents for every dollar a man makes: “Ask a Working Woman,” AFL-CIO Working Women Survey, 2000.

  36 Women who take time off from work to have children make seventeen percent less than those who don’t even six years after they return: Estrich, Sex and Power, p. 104.

  36 Men with children earn the most money while women with children earn the least: Ibid., p. 93.

  43 In order to stay connected, Gilligan theorizes: See Carol Gilligan, “Women’s Psychological Development: Implications for Psychotherapy,” in Carol Gilligan, Annie G. Rogers, and Deborah L. Tolman, ed., Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1991), pp. 12-13. Also see Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine, 1994); Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  44 “Girls stop being and stop seeing”: Pipher, Reviving Ophelia, p. 22.

  45 “The tyranny of freedom”: See Erica Goode, “In Weird Math of Choices, 6 Choices Can Beat 600,” The New York Times, January 9, 2001, p. Al.

  Chapter 2: The

  Mother Connection

  63 In The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, Betty Friedan b
egan to articulate what women of my mother’s generation were feeling, the “problem with no name”: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, new edition, 2001).

  65 “It is too often assumed that a mother . . . ”: Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 24.

  73 “The stressed-out, sometimes burned-out front line of the women’s movement. . . ”: Ellen Goodman, “Feminism Hits Home for the Women on MIT’s Faculty,” The Boston Globe, April 11, 1999, p. D7.

  75 “Suddenly, in coming of age and entering the world . . . ”: Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985), p. 91.

  79 “Pay-as-you-go plan”: Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1991), p. 230.

  79 “All the time she has been. . . ”: Ibid.

  81 In her collection of essays . . . : Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), p. 73.

  Chapter 3: I Hate My

  Stomach, I Hate My Thighs

  86 “Anonymous disciplinary power”: Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, K. Conboy, N. Medina, and S. Stanbury, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 148.

  87 “Panoptical male connoisseur”: Ibid., p. 140.

  90 “This not only makes real intimacy impossible. . . ”: Jean Kilbourne, Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power of Advertising (New York: The Free Press, 1999),pp. 261-262.

  92 Describing the historic ubiquity of misogyny. . . : David D. Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1-9.

  93 “This multitiered ambivalence creates an uncomfortable and endless tension. . . ”: Ibid., pp. 14-15.

  96 American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women’s bodies into bits and pieces: Kilbourne, Deadly Persuasion, p. 33.

  99 The female adolescent “moment of revision”: Gilligan, “Women’s Psychological Development,” p. 26.

  100 Notion of inscription, an idea frequently evoked to explain the shaping of a woman’s self-image: See collected essays in Writing on the Body; also see: Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, l995) and Susan Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  100 Statistics on plastic surgery: Anne Barnard, “When Plastic Surgeons Should Just Say ‘No,” The Boston Globe, September 12, 2000, p. El.

  100 Image of calligraphy: Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 191.

  104 “There remains a common coding of the female body as a body which leaks. . . ”: Ibid., p. 204.

  110 Oddball tips: Patricia Marx and Susan Sistrom, The Skinny: What Every Skinny Woman Knows About Dieting (And Won’t Tell You!) (New York: Dell, 1999), p. 196.

  114 Fat!So?, by Marilyn Wann, an early pioneer in what’s variously known as the “weightism” or “size activism” movement: Marilyn Wann, Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1999).

  Chapter 4: From Bra

  Burning to Binge Shopping

  126 The “missing discourse of desire” among and in regard to adolescent girls: See M. Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 29-53. Also see Deborah L. Tolman, “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls’ Struggles for/with Sexuality,” in Gender and Society, vol. 8, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 324-342; and Deborah L. Tolman, “Adolescent Girls, Women and Sexuality: Discerning Dilemmas of Desire,” in Women, Girls and Psychotherapy.

  126 Foucault and discourse about sexuality: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 69.

  129 A girl’s sexual impulses and hungers become “the feelings that no one names”: Deborah L. Tolman, “Adolescent Girls, Women and Sexuality: Discerning Dilemmas of Desire,” in Women, Girls and Psychotherapy, p. 57.

  130 “Many girls may in fact solve the dilemma of their own sexual desire. . . ”: Ibid., p. 65.

  132 Feminist sex researchers have argued about the persistence of this thinking throughout the twentieth century: See J. H. Gagnon, “Scripts and the Coordination of Sexual Conduct,” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, no. 21, 1973, pp. 27-60; M. Jackson, “Sexology and the Universalization of Male Sexuality (from Ellis to Kinsey and Masters and Johnson),” in L. Coveney, M. Jackson, S. Jeffreys, L. Kaye, and P. Mahony, eds., The Sexuality Papers (London: Hutchinson Press, 1984); Gina Ogden, Women Who Love Sex (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), pp. 9-13; Lenore Tiefer, Sex Is Not A Natural Act and Other Essays (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 97-102.

  132 “Normalcy can be easily summarized. . . ” : Tiefer, Sex Is Not A Natural Act and Other Essays, p. 102.

  134 Girls appear to be physically maturing at earlier ages today: Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert, “The Truth About Tweens,” Newsweek, October 18, 1999, p. 62. Also see Richard Saltus, “Growing Up Too Soon? Ready or Not, Sexual Maturity Comes Earlier Than Ever for Today’s Girls,” The Boston Globe, October 10, 2000, p. El; and Paul B. Kaplowitz, Sharon E. Oberfield, and the Drug and Therapeutics and Executive Committees of the Lawsun Kilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, “Reexamination of the Age Limit for Defining When Puberty Is Precocious in Girls in the US: Implications for Evaluation and Treatment,” Pediatrics, vol. 104, no. 4, October 1999, pp. 936-941.

  134 Nearly half of all teenagers lose their virginity by age sixteen: Lynn Ponton, M.D., The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls (New York: Dutton, 2000), p. 257.

  134 “As a society, we discarded the Victorian moral umbrella around girls. . . ”: Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 200.

  135 Figures on teenage sex-education—Most kids today (about 89 percent) will get some kind of sex education between grades seven and twelve: See “Sex Education in America: A Series of National Surveys of Students, Parents, Teachers, and Principals,” Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, September, 2000. Figures on abstinence-only curricula: see Leora Tanenbaum, Slut: Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000), p. 216.

  136 In its 1999 report on sexual dysfunction: Laumann, Paik, and Rosen, “Sexual Dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and Predictors,” p. 537.

  140 Americans spend three to four times as many hours shopping as Western Europeans: Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 107.

  140 Americans consume more than $5 trillion worth of goods and services a year: John Cassidy, “No Satisfaction: The Trials of the Shopping Nation,” The New Yorker, January 25, 1999, p. 88.

  140 Americans rack up a staggering amount of credit card debt: Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 46.

  141 Four billion square feet of the total land area have been converted into shopping centers: Schor, The Overspent American, p. 107.

  141 In 1995, financial institutions sent out more than two and a half billion preapproved credit card applications: Frank, Luxury Fever, p. 46.

  142 Gap between haves and have-nots; emergence of extremely high earners within more and more occupations; growing insecurity in the middle class: see Robert Frank’s discussion of “winner-take-all” markets in ibid., p. 44; also see Juliet Schor’s discussion of social changes leading to shifts in the nature of comparative consumption in the 1970s and 1980s, The Overspent American, pp. 9-24.

  144 A Time/CNN poll found that only thirty-th
ree percent of women called themselves feminists, only sixteen percent of college-age women: Naomi Wolf, “The Future Is Ours to Lose,” The New York Times Magazine, May 16, 1999.

  144 Membership in the League of Women Voters began its precipitous decline in the eighties: Susan Estrich, Sex and Power (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000), p. 228.

  145 The number of women running for state legislatures began to level off, then decline: Ibid.

  146 Karl Marx described the ways in which commodities become substitutes for “real human and natural faculties”: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Third Manuscript, “Need, Production, and Division of Labor,” Gregor Benton translation, 1974.

  149 Advertisers spend $1.1 billion a year marketing alcohol: Janet Evans and Richard F. Kelly, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Division of Advertising Practices, “Self Regulation in the Alcohol Industry: A Review of Industry Efforts to Avoid Promoting Alcohol to Underage Consumers,” Federal Trade Commission report, Appendix B, September 1999.

  150 Magazine circulation figures: Laura Q. Hughes, “Print Rolling out Heavy Artillery,” Advertising Age, July 30, 2001, p. S2.

  151 Women today still spend on average about twenty-five hours a week doing unpaid household labor: “A Man’s Place: A Panel of Experts Looks at Women’s Economic Power,” The New York Times Magazine, May 16, 1999, p. 48.

  151 More than half of all women and nearly two thirds of women with children expect to be responsible for caring for an elderly parent or relative in the future: Women’s Voices 2000, Center for Policy Alternatives /Lifetime TV poll, September 29, 2000.