Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (23 page)

The sense of security derived from the attainment of this goal appears, first of all, as the pleasure of control and independence.

"Nowadays," says Michael Sacks, associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College, "people no longer feel they can control events outside themselves— how well they do in their jobs or in their personal relationships, for example—but they can control the food they eat and how far they can run. Abstinence, tests of endurance, are ways of proving their selfsufficiency."
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In a culture, moreover, in which our continued survival is often at the mercy of "specialists," machines, and sophisticated technology, the body acquires a special sort of vulnerability and dependency. We may live longer, but the circumstances surrounding illness and death may often be perceived as more alien, inscrutable, and arbitrary than ever before.

Our contemporary bodyfetishism expresses more than a fantasy of selfmastery in an increasingly unmanageable culture, however. It also reflects our alliance
with
culture against all reminders of the inevitable decay and death of the body. "Everybody wants to live forever" is the refrain from the theme song of
Pumping Iron.
The most youthworshipping of popular television shows, "Fame," opens with a song that begins, "I want to live forever." And it is striking that although the anorectic may come very close to death (and 15 percent do indeed die), the dominant experience throughout the illness is of
invulnerability.

The dream of immortality is, of course, nothing new. But what is unique to modernity is that the defeat of death has become a scientific fantasy rather than a philosophical or religious mythology. We no longer dream of eternal union with the gods; instead, we build devices that can keep us alive indefinitely, and we work on keeping our bodies as smooth and muscular and elastic at forty as they were at eighteen. We even entertain dreams of halting the aging process completely: "Old age," according to Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, authors of the popular
Life Extension,
"is an unpleasant and unattractive affliction."
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The megavitamin regime they prescribe is able, they claim, to prevent and even to reverse the mechanisms of aging.

Finally, it may be that in cultures characterized by gross excesses in consumption, the "will to conquer and subdue the body" (as Chernin calls it) expresses an aesthetic or moral rebellion.
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Anorectics initially came from affluent families, and the current craze for longdistance running and fasting is largely a phenomenon of young, upwardly mobile professionals (Dinitia Smith calls it "Dep

rivation Chic").
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To those who are starving
against
their wills, of course, starvation cannot function as an expression of the power of the will. At the same time, we should caution against viewing anorexia as a trendy illness of the elite and privileged. Rather, its most outstanding feature is powerlessness.

Ninety percent of all anorectics are women. We do not, of course, need to know that particular statistic to realize that the contemporary "tyranny of slenderness" is far from genderneutral. Women are more obsessed with their bodies than men, less satisfied with them,
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and permitted less latitude with them by themselves, by men, and by the culture. In a 1984
Glamour
magazine poll of 33,000 women, 75 percent said they thought they were "too fat." Yet by Metropolitan Life Insurance Tables, themselves notoriously affected by cultural standards, only 25 percent of these women were heavier than their optimal weight, and a full 30 percent were
below
that weight.
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The anorectic's distorted image of her body—her inability to see it as anything but too fat—although more extreme, is not radically discontinuous, then, from fairly common female misperceptions.

Consider, too, actors like Nick Nolte and William Hurt, who are permitted a certain amount of softening, of thickening about the waist, while still retaining romantic lead status. Individual style, wit, the projection of intelligence, experience, and effectiveness still go a long way for men, even in our fitnessobsessed culture. But no female can achieve the status of romantic or sexual ideal without the appropriate
body.
That body, if we use television commercials as a gauge, has gotten steadily leaner since the mid 1970s.
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What used to be acknowledged as an extreme required only of high fashion models is now the dominant image that beckons to high school and college women. Over and over, extremely slender women students complain of hating their thighs or their stomachs (the anorectic's most dreaded danger spot); often, they express concern and anger over frequent teasing by their boyfriends. Janey, a former student, is 5 '0" and weighs 132 pounds. Yet her boyfriend Bill, also a student of mine, calls her "Fatso" and "Big Butt" and insists she should be 110 pounds because (as he explains in his journal for my class) "that's

what Brooke Shields weighs." He calls this "constructive criticism" and seems to experience extreme anxiety over the possibility of her gaining any weight: "I can tell it bothers her yet I still continue to badger her about it. I guess that I think that if I continue to remind her things will change faster."
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This sort of relationship, in which the woman's weight has become a focal issue, is not at all atypical, as I have discovered from student journals and papers.

Hilda Bruch reports that many anorectics talk of having a "ghost" inside them or surrounding them, "a dictator who dominates me," as one woman describes it; "a little man who objects when I eat" is the description given by another.
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The little ghost, the dictator, the "other self" (as he is often described) is always male, reports Bruch. The anorectic's
other
self—the self of the uncontrollable appetites, the impurities and taints, the flabby will and tendency to mental torpor—is the body, as we have seen. But it is also (and here the anorectic's associations are surely in the mainstream of Western culture)
the female
self. These two selves are perceived as at constant war. But it is clear that it is the male side—with its associated values of greater spirituality, higher intellectuality, strength of will—that is being expressed and developed in the anorexic syndrome.
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What is the meaning of these gender associations in the anorectic? I propose that there are two levels of meaning. One has to do with fear and disdain for traditional female roles and social limitations. The other has to do, more profoundly, with a deep fear of "the Female," with all its more nightmarish archetypal associations of voracious hungers and sexual insatiability.

Adolescent anorectics express a characteristic fear of growing up to be mature, sexually developed, and potentially reproductive women. "I have a deep fear," says one, "of having a womanly body, round and fully developed. I want to be tight and muscular and thin."
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Cherry Boone O'Neill speaks explicitly of her fear of womanhood.
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If only she could stay thin, says yet another, "I would never have to deal with having a woman's body; like Peter Pan I could stay a child forever."
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The choice of Peter Pan is telling here—what she means is, stay a
boy
forever. And indeed, as Bruch reports, many anorectics, when children, dreamt and fantasized about growing up to be boys.
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Some are quite conscious of playing out this fantasy through their anorexia; Adrienne, one of Levenkron's patients, was extremely proud of the growth of facial and

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body hair that often accompanies anorexia, and especially proud of her "skinny, hairy arms."
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Many patients report, too, that their father had wanted a boy, were disappointed to get "less than" that, or had emotionally rebuffed their daughter when she began to develop sexually.
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In a characteristic scenario, anorexia develops just at the outset of puberty. Normal body changes are experienced by the anorectic, not surprisingly, as the takeover of the body by disgusting, womanish fat. "I grab my breasts," says Aimee Liu, "pinching them until they hurt. If only I could eliminate them, cut them off if need be, to become as flatchested as a child again."
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The anorectic is exultant when her periods stop (as they do in all cases of anorexia
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and as they do in many female runners as well). Disgust with menstruation is typical: "I saw a picture at a feminist art gallery," says another woman. "There was a woman with long red yarn coming out of her, like she was menstruating I got that feeling—in that part of my body that I have trouble with . my stomach, my thighs, my pelvis. That revolted feeling."
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Some authors interpret these symptoms as a species of unconscious feminist protest, involving anger at the limitations of the traditional female role, rejection of values associated with it, and fierce rebellion against allowing their futures to develop in the same direction as their mothers' lives.
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In her portrait of the typical anorexic family configuration, Bruch describes nearly all of the mothers as submissive to their husbands but very controlling of their children.
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Practically all had had promising careers which they had given up to care for their husbands and families fulltime, a task they take very seriously, although often expressing frustration and dissatisfaction.

Certainly, many anorectics appear to experience anxiety about falling into the lifestyle they associate with their mothers. It is a prominent theme in Aimee Liu's
Solitaire.
Another woman describes her feeling that "[I am] full of my mother . . . she is in me even if she isn't there" in nearly the same breath as she complains of her continuous fear of being "not human . . . of ceasing to exist."
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And Ellen West, nearly a century earlier, had quite explicitly equated becoming fat with the inevitable (for an elite woman of her time) confinements of domestic life and the domestic stupor she associates with it:

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Dread is driving me mad . . . the consciousness that ultimately I will lose everything; all courage, all rebelliousness, all drive for doing; that it—my little world—will make me flabby, flabby and fainthearted and beggarly.
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Several of my students with eating disorders reported that their anorexia had developed after their families had dissuaded them from choosing or forbidden them to embark on a traditionally male career.

Here anorexia finds a true sisterphenomenon in the epidemic of female invalidism and "hysteria" that swept through the middle and uppermiddle classes in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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It was a time that, in many ways, was very like our own, especially in the conflicting demands women were confronting: the opening up of new possibilities versus the continuing grip of the old expectations. On the one hand, the old preindustrial order, with the father at the head of a selfcontained family production unit, had given way to the dictatorship of the market, opening up new, nondomestic opportunities for working women. On the other hand, it turned many of the most valued "female" skills—textile and garment manufacture, food processing—out of the home and over to the factory system.
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In the new machine economy, the lives of middleclass women were far emptier than they had been before.

It was an era, too, that had been witnessing the first major feminist wave. In 1840, the World AntiSlavery Conference had been held, at which the first feminists spoke loudly and long on the connections between the abolition of slavery and women's rights. The year 1848 saw the Seneca Falls Convention. In 1869, John Stuart

Mill published his landmark work "On the Subjection of Women." And in 1889 the Pankhursts formed the Women's Franchise League. But it was an era, too (and not unrelatedly, as I shall argue later), when the prevailing ideal of femininity was the delicate, affluent lady, unequipped for anything but the most sheltered domestic life, totally dependent on her prosperous husband, providing a peaceful and comfortable haven for him each day after his return from his labors in the public sphere.
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In a now famous letter, Freud, criticizing John Stuart Mill, writes:

It really is a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagine my gentle sweet

girl as a competitor it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home.
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This is exactly what male doctors did do when women began falling ill, complaining of acute depression, severe headaches, weakness, nervousness, and selfdoubt.
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Among these women were such noted feminists and social activists as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, British activist Josephine Butler, and German suffragist Hedwig Dohm. "I was weary myself and sick of asking what I am and what I ought to be," recalls Gilman,
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who later went on to write a fictional account of her mental breakdown in the chilling novella The Yellow Wallpaper. Her doctor, the famous female specialist S. Weir Mitchell, instructed her, as Gilman recalls, to "live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time Lie down an hour every day after each meal. Have but two hours intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live."
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Freud, who favorably reviewed Mitchell's 1887 book and who advised that psychotherapy for hysterical patients be combined with Mitchell's rest cure ("to avoid new psychical impressions"),
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was as blind as Mitchell to the contribution that isolation, boredom, and intellectual frustration made to the etiology of hysteria. Nearly all

of the subjects in
Studies in Hysteria
(as well as the later
Dora)
are acknowledged by Freud to be unusually intelligent, creative, energetic, independent, and, often,