The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead (7 page)

Dying Just a Little

Whereas many boys want to be superheroes who dominate the world, anorexic girls retreat from the world and sexuality. Adolescent boys are trying to become strong and aggressive, but anorexic girls are trying to become weak and fragile. Anorexia, the feminine flip side to masculine violence and heroic fantasy, comes directly from pubescent peer pressure. Teenage girls develop anorexia in specific response to sex changes. Girls become anorexic because they're trying to meet a cultural ideal of extreme thinness and/or desexualize themselves. They don't want to develop hips and breasts, and they're afraid of their bodies getting fat. The anorexic girl, wasted, tired, not menstruating, her secondary sexual characteristics slowed by poor nutrition, thus delays her entry into adulthood.

A superstition among “primitive” peoples: if a woman touches a cadaver, she'll stop menstruating.

         

Ninety percent of anorexics are female. Seventy percent of women say that looking at models in fashion magazines causes them to feel depressed, guilty, and shameful. Ninety-five percent of people who enroll in formal weight-reduction programs are women. Ninety-eight percent of women gain back the weight they lose by dieting. Women regard themselves as fat if they're 15 pounds overweight; men don't think of themselves as fat unless they're 35 pounds above the U.S. average. My father has always been girlishly proud of his quite thin waist; the first thing he comments upon whenever he sees me is whether I've lost or gained weight. His most rapturous praise: “You're slender as a reed.” Eighty percent of people who have part of their small intestines removed in order to help themselves lose weight are women. Fifty-five percent of adolescent girls believe they're overweight; only 13 percent of adolescent girls are actually overweight. Anorexia has the highest fatality rate of any psychiatric illness. Eleven percent of Americans would abort a fetus if they were told it had a tendency toward obesity. When asked to identify good-looking individuals, 5-year-olds invariably select pictures of thin people. Elementary school children have more negative attitudes toward the obese than toward bullies, the disabled, or children of another race. Teachers routinely underestimate the intelligence of fat kids and overestimate the intelligence of slender kids. Corpulent students are less likely to be granted scholarships. Anorexics often grow lanugo, which is soft, woolly body hair that grows to compensate for the loss of fat cells so the body can hold in heat. Anorexics have many of the physical symptoms of starvation: their bellies are distended, their hair is dull and brittle, their periods stop, they're weak, and they're vulnerable to infections. They also have the psychological characteristics of the starving: they're depressed, irritable, pessimistic, apathetic, and preoccupied with food. They dream of feasts.

Girls and women quoted in Kim Chernin's
The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness
:

“I've heard about that illness, anorexia nervosa, and I keep looking around for someone who has it. I want to go sit next to her. I think to myself, maybe I'll catch it.”

“One of my cousins used to throw food under the table when no one was looking. Finally, she got so thin they had to take her to the hospital. I always admired her.”

“I'm embarrassed to have bulimia. It's such a preppy disease.”

“I don't care how long it takes. One day I'm going to get my body to obey me. I'm going to make it lean and tight and hard. I'll succeed in this, even if it kills me.”

“To have control over your body becomes an extreme accomplishment. You make of your body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator.”

“Look, see how thin I am, even thinner than you wanted me to be. You can't make me eat more. I am in control of my fate, even if my fate is starving.”

“I get lots of compliments. My friends are jealous, but I've made new friends. Guys who never considered me before have been asking me out.”

“I hate to say this, but I'd rather binge than make out.”

“In all the years I've been a therapist, I've yet to meet one girl who likes her body.”

I was in my mid-20s. Before taking off her clothes, she said she needed to tell me something: she had herpes. Madly in love with her witchy bitchiness, I found occasional enforced celibacy insanely erotic, the way a chastity belt glamorizes what it locks out. We wound up living together, and as we fell out of love with each other, her herpes became a debate point between us. She suggested that we just get married and then if I got it, I got it, and who would care? I suggested she at least explore some of the possibilities of which modern medicine availed us.

For a multitude of reasons, the two of us didn't belong together, but what interests me now is what, for lack of a better term, a free-floating signifier the virus was. When I was in love with her, it eroticized her. When I wasn't, it repelled me. The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it.

As psychologist Nancy Etcoff says, in
Survival of the Prettiest,
“In a context where only a king can control enough food resources and labor supply to eat enough and do no physical labor so that he becomes fat, prestige is conferred by signs of abundance. A thin person is a person too poor to afford the calories, and maybe one who does so much physical labor that she cannot keep weight on. When poor women are fat (because junk food is so cheap and available, and they are less educated about its hazards and unable to afford expensive healthy foods), then it's in to be thin and dietary restraint and physical exercise become prestigious.”

“I can't stand fat women,” a thin woman says in
The Obsession.
“If one of them has been sitting on a chair in a coffee shop, or on the bus, and there's no other place to sit, I won't go in there or sit in that place.”

“It's like watching a death's head,” another woman says about a fat woman at the market. “The co-op ought to pay her to get out of here. Who can go home to a good dinner with that in mind?”

My father's term of derision for big-bellied men: “watermelon smugglers.”

         

Laurie and I stage monthly dieting competitions, though neither of us is overweight. “Want a second helping?” “I made some banana bread for you.” What's going on here? We're each saying: you're beautiful; I, though, am wanting; I will do anything for love.

Fasting frees one from carnal needs and desires, prepares one for visions and trances. Moses fasted 40 days before receiving the Ten Commandments. Jesus fasted 40 days before his enlightenment. Medieval saints (especially women) fasted to demonstrate their purity and holiness, and if their fasting appeared to continue far beyond normal human bounds, it was proof of God's grace. By controlling their breathing, nuns in ancient times were able to stop menstruating and limit their need for food.

Fasting is a constant for female saints. In the thirteenth century, Margaret of Cortona said, “I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor.” Thérèse of Lisieux died of tuberculosis in 1897, just short of her 25th birthday. As she lay dying, bleeding from her intestines and unable to keep down water, she was tormented by the thought of banquets. Gemma Galgani died in 1903—also of TB, also at 25. She dreamed of food; would it be all right, she asked her confessor, to ask Jesus to take away her sense of taste? Permission was granted. She arranged with Jesus that she should begin to expiate, through her own suffering, all the sins committed by priests. For the next 60 days she vomited whenever she tried to eat.

In 1859, an American doctor, William Stout Chipley, published an article describing a condition he called “sitophobia,” fear of food. In 1868, William Withey Gull, the English physician who was suspected of being Jack the Ripper, first mentioned anorexia nervosa; in 1873, he delivered a lecture on the disorder. The same year, a French doctor, Charles-Ernest Lasègue, published a long article on what he called “hysterical anorexia.” Lasègue described the following symptoms: menstruation ceases, thirst increases, the abdomen retracts and loses elasticity, constipation becomes obstinate, the skin is pale and dry, the pulse is quickened, the patient tires easily, and when she rises from resting often experiences vertigo—all of which are still associated with anorexia.

In the late nineteenth century, a tepid appetite was proof of a woman's delicacy and elegance. A young lady who admitted to a hearty appetite would be said to “eat like a ploughboy” and would be the object of sneers and jests. Victorian women, even when they became mothers, were admonished never to demonstrate their hunger. If they did confess to hunger, they were expected to yearn only for light, sweet, delicate morsels and not for meat, which was thought to stimulate sexual desire. For a woman to enjoy a slab of roast beef was to suggest a baser nature that she was not supposed to acknowledge in herself.

In 2004, Hilary Mantel wrote, “Why do women still feel so hounded? The ideal body seems now attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a chief executive, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all, and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated 6-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There's no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out. Anorexia itself seems like mad behaviour, but I don't think it is madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ,
noli me tangere.
Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all. Anorexia can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival.”

In
Cymbeline,
Imogen apparently dies when she's about 15. Her brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus, stand over her grave and chant a dirge over what they think is her lifeless body inside her coffin: “Golden lads and girls all must / As chimneysweepers, come to dust.” Then Imogen opens her eyes and comes back to life.

Ye Olde Mind-Body Problem

In accordance with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, all advertisements for tobacco products in the United States must include one of these four Surgeon General's warning labels:

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.

All four warnings must be used with equal frequency, but tobacco companies can choose when to use each warning. In compliance with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, advertisements feature each of the four Surgeon General's warnings with the same frequency—about 25 percent each. However, in the study sample of 52 ads in eighteen magazines, the warning to pregnant women occurs far more often in the ads in men's magazines (
Sports Illustrated, Esquire, GQ
), 53 percent of the time, while this same warning occurs in only 20 percent of the ads in women's magazines (
Mademoiselle, McCall's, Ms., Vogue, Working Woman
).

The warning that cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide occurs in 37 percent of the ads in women's magazines but occurs in none of the ads in men's magazines. The advertisements featuring the carbon monoxide warning usually feature youthful, carefree, and less serious-appearing women. Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas that interferes with the body's oxygen-carrying mechanisms; advertisers apparently assume that women, especially young women, are less apt than men to know this fact.

The magazine with the most cigarette advertisements,
Mademoiselle,
has a young, female audience. Eighty-eight percent of smokers start before age 20, and the only group that smokes more now than it did 20 years ago is adolescent girls.

Tobacco companies appear to manipulate the use of the Surgeon General's warning to render them as ineffective as possible, mitigating the purpose of the warning by often using the warning they presume the reader is most likely to ignore.

Whenever I reread this précis for a poli sci paper Laurie wrote eons ago, I never fail to be moved by her belief/hope that the actions human beings take might be based to any degree whatsoever on rational thought. All the evidence points to the fact that they're not (cf. anorexia). My father being, of course, the exception: he took up pipe smoking in the early '50s (in photo-album pictures from that period he looks improbably dignified), but he gave it up immediately after realizing, during a tennis match, that it was cutting down on his wind.