Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (10 page)

In a way, "anorexia" is a misnomer. Afflicted persons don't suffer from a loss of appetite. Instead, they have a
bizarre
preoccupation with eating—coupled with an obsessive desire to attain pencillike thinness through restricted food intake and rigorous exercise. Even more
bizarre
is their distorted selfimage; it's not unusual to hear a haggard, emaciated anorectic complain that she's still "too fat."
20

In 1984, however, a study conducted by
Glamour
magazine and analyzed by Susan Wooley and Wayne Wooley revealed that 75

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percent of the 33,000 women surveyed considered themselves "too fat," despite the fact that only onequarter were deemed overweight by standard weight tables, and 30 percent were actually
underweight.
21
Similar studies followed, some specifically attempting to measure perception of body size, all with the same extraordinary results. A study by Kevin Thompson, for example, found that out of 100 women "free of eatingdisorder symptoms" more than
95
percent overestimated their body size—on average onefourth larger than they really were.
22
Such findings, of course, made the postulation of strictly perceptual defect problematic—unless it was supposed that most American women were suffering from perceptual malfunction.

The clinical response to these studies was to transfer the site of "distortion" from perceptual mechanism to affective/cognitive coloration: the contribution to perception of the mind's eye.
23
According to this model, it is not that women actually
see
themselves as fat; rather, they evaluate what they see by painfully selfcritical standards. Lack of selfesteem now became the cause of women's body image problems: "The better people feel about themselves," as Thompson concluded, "the less they tend to overestimate their

size." But women, as study after study has shown, do
not
feel very good about their bodies.
24
Most women in our culture, then, are "disordered" when it comes to issues of selfworth, selfentitlement, selfnourishment, and comfort with their own bodies; eating disorders, far from being "bizarre" and anomalous, are utterly continuous with a dominant element of the experience of being female in this culture.

Attempts to reconceptualize BIDS as affective or cognitive rather than perceptual do not, of course, resolve the problem with the medical model; rather, they make it more apparent. For once such a symptom is reclassified as affective or cognitive the role of culture can no longer be easily effaced or mystified. Ultimately, that role is perceptual as well. Culture not only has taught women to be insecure bodies, constantly monitoring themselves for signs of imperfection, constantly engaged in physical "improvement"; it also is constantly teaching women (and, let us not forget, men as well) how to
see
bodies. As slenderness has consistently been visually glamorized, and as the ideal has grown thinner and thinner, bodies that a decade ago were considered slender have now come to seem fleshy. Consider, for example, the dramatic contrast between the "Maidenform woman" circa 1990 and circa 1960 (Figures 4 and 5). What was considered an ideal body in 1960 is currently defined as "full figure" (Figure 6), requiring special fashion accommodations! Moreover, as our bodily ideals have become firmer and more contained (we worship not merely slenderness but flablessness),
any
softness or bulge comes to be seen as unsightly—as disgusting, disorderly "fat," which must be "eliminated'' or "busted," as popular exerciseequipment ads put it. Of course, the only bodies that do not transgress in this way are those that are tightly muscled or virtually skeletal. Short of meeting these standards, the slimmer the body, the more obtrusive will any lumps and bulges seem. Given this analysis, the anorectic does not "misperceive" her body; rather, she has learned all too well the dominant cultural standards of
how
to perceive.
25

The case of BIDS is paradigmatic rather than exceptional. Consider, as another example, what have been termed the "disordered cognitions" or "distorted attitudes" proposed as distinctive to the psychopathology of anorexia and bulimia. These elements of "faulty thinking" or "flawed reasoning" standardly include: "magical thoughts" or "superstitious thinking" about the power of cer

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tain "forbidden" foods such as sweets to set off a binge, which perpetuate such "myths" as "If I have one cookie, I'll eat them all"; ''selective abstraction" of thinness,as "the sole frame of reference for inferring selfworth" and "essential to her happiness and wellbeing" (I am special if I am thin), a belief which persists "in defiance of examples to the contrary"; "dichotomous reasoning" concerning food, eating, and weight ("If I'm not in complete control, I lose all control" or "If I gain one pound, I'll go on and gain a hundred pounds"); and "personalization" and "egocentric" interpretations of "impersonal events" ("I am embarrassed when other people see me eat").
26

Each of these elements may indeed be characteristic of the sort of thinking that torments the lives of women with eating disorders. What I question here is the construction of such thinking as "faulty," "flawed," "distorted," "myths," the product of invalid logic, poor reasoning, or mythological thinking. These constructions portray the anorectic and bulimic as incorrectly processing "data"
27
from an external reality whose
actual
features are very different from her cognitions and perceptions. But in fact each of these "distorted attitudes" is a fairly accurate representation of

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social attitudes toward slenderness or the biological realities involved in dieting.

For example, many of the "faulty beliefs" associated with eating disorders are
accurate
descriptions of psychological and physiological dynamics that we now know are endemic to dieting itself, particularly to the extremes reached by anorectics and bulimics. It is now well known, for example, that the body has a powerful system of automatic compensations that respond to food deprivation as though to starvation, by setting off cravings, binge behavior, and obsessional thoughts about food.
28
It has been shown, moreover, that people are better able to stay on diets if they are permitted no solid food at all rather than limited amounts of food;
29
the bulimic is thus not so unreasonable in thinking that total control over food is required in order for
any
control to be maintained. But of course total control is ultimately unsustainable; most people on very low calorie diets eventually gain back all the weight they lose.
30
The general point here is that "the diet" is itself a precarious, unstable, selfdefeating state for a body to be ina reality that the "disordered cognitions" of bulimics and anorectics are confronting all too clearly and painfully.

To turn to the bulimic's "flawed reasoning" concerning the importance of slenderness in our culture: the absurdity of categorizing the belief that "I am special if I am thin" and women's embarrassment over being seen eating as "distorted" attitudes ought to be apparent. What reality do they distort? Our culture is one in which Oprah Winfrey, a dazzling role model for female success, has said that the most ''significant achievement of her life" was losing sixtyseven pounds on a liquid diet. (She

gained it all back within a year.) It is a culture in which commercial after commercial depicts female eating as a furtive activity, properly engaged in behind closed doors, and even under those circumstances requiring restriction and restraint (see "Hunger as Ideology" in this volume). It is a culture in which my "noneating disordered" female students write in their journals of being embarrassed to go to the ice cream counter for fear of being laughed at by the boys in the cafeteria; a culture in which Sylvester Stallone has said that he likes his women "anorexic" (his then girlfriend, Cornelia Guest, immediately lost twentyfour pounds);
31
a culture in which personal ads consistently list "slim," "lean," or "trim" as
required
of prospective dates. The anorectic thus appears, not as the victim of a unique and "bizarre" pathology, but as the bearer of very distressing tidings about our culture.

In this section I will attempt to answer some frequently raised concerns about and criticisms of feminist/cultural approaches to eating disorders. I hope thereby to clarify what is being claimed by the cultural argument.

At the 1983 meetings of the New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, Steven Levenkron charged feminism with sacrificing the care of "helpless, chaotic, and floundering" children in the interests of a "rational" political agenda. Is he right? Does maintaining a continuity between eating disorders and "normal" female behavior entail a denial of the fact that anorexia and bulimia are extreme and debilitating disorders? I think not. The feminist perspective has never questioned the reality of the anorectic's disorder or the severity of her suffering. Rather, what is at stake is the

conception of the pathological as the indicator of a special "profile" (psychological or biological) that distinguishes the eatingdisordered woman from the women who "escape" disorder. Feminist analysts see no firm boundary on one side of which a state of psychological comfort and stability may be said to exist. They see, rather, only varying degrees of disorder, some more "functional" than others, but all undermining women's full potential.

At one end of this continuum we find anorexia and bulimia, extremes which set into play physiological and psychological dynamics that lead the sufferer into addictive patterns and medical and emotional problems outside the "norms" of behavior and experience. But it is not only anorectics and bulimics whose lives are led into "disorder." This is a culture in which rigorous dieting and exercise are being engaged in by more and younger girls all the timegirls as young as seven or eight, according to some studies.
32
These little girls live in constant fear—a fear reinforced by the attitudes of the boys in their classes—of gaining a pound and thus ceasing to be "attractive." They jog daily, count their calories obsessively, and risk serious vitamin deficiencies and delayed reproductive maturation. We may be producing a generation of young, privileged women with severely impaired menstrual, nutritional, and intellectual functioning.

But how can a cultural analysis account for the fact that only
some
girls and women develop fullblown eating disorders, despite the fact that we are all subject to the same sociocultural pressures? Don't we require the postulation of a distinctive underlying pathology (familial or psychological) to explain why some individuals are more vulnerable than others? The first of these questions is frequently presented by medical professionals as though it dealt a decisive blow to the cultural argument, and it is extraordinary how often it is indeed accepted as a devastating critique. It is based, however, on an important and common misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of the feminist position as involving the positing of an
identical
cultural situation for all
women
rather than the description of ideological and institutional parameters governing the construction of
gender
in our culture. The difference is crucial, yet even such a sophisticated thinker as Joan Brumberg misses it completely. "Current cultural models," Brumberg argues, "fail to explain why so many individuals
do not
develop the disease, even though they have

been exposed to the same cultural environment."
33
But of course we are
not
all exposed to "the same cultural environment." What we
are
all exposed to, rather, are homogenizing and normalizing images and ideologies concerning "femininity" and female beauty. Those images and ideology press for conformity to dominant cultural norms. But people's identities are not formed
only
through interaction with such images, powerful as they are. The unique configurations (of ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, religion, genetics, education, family, age, and so forth) that make up each person's life will determine how each
actual
woman is affected by our culture.

The search for distinctive patterns, profiles, and abnormalities underlying anorexia nervosa and bulimia is thus not, as many researchers claim,
conceptually

demanded; a myriad of heterogeneous factors, "family resemblances" rather than essential features, unpredictable combinations of elements, may be at work in determining who turns out to be most susceptible. It may be, too, that patterns and profiles could once be assembled but are now breaking apart under the pressure of an increasingly coercive mass culture with its compelling, fabricated images of beauty and success.

For example, from its nineteenthcentury emergence as a cultural phenomenon, anorexia has been a classbiased disorder, appearing predominantly among the daughters of families of relative affluence.
34
The reasons for this are several. Slenderness and rejection of food have, of course, very different meanings in conditions of deprivation and scarcity than in those of plenty. Demonstrating an ability to "rise above" the need to eat imparts moral or aesthetic superiority only where others are prone to overindulgence. Where people are barely managing to put nutritious food on the table, the fleshless, "dematerialized" body suggests death, not superior detachment, selfcontrol, or resistance to parental expectations. Moreover, the possibility of success in attaining dominant ideals (for example, that of the glamorous superwoman so many anorectics emulate)
35
depends on certain material preconditions which economically struggling women lack; hence, they may be "protected" (so to speak) against eating disorders by their despair of ever embodying the images of feminine success that surround them. However, studies suggest that eating