The Beauty Myth (29 page)

“After losing approximately 25% of their original body weight, pervasive effects of semistarvation were seen.” The subjects “became increasingly preoccupied with food and eating, to the extent that they ruminated obsessively about meals and food, collected recipes and cookbooks, and showed abnormal food rituals, such as excessively slow eating and hoarding of food related objects.” Then, the majority “suffered some form of emotional disturbance as a result of semistarvation, including depression, hypochondriasis, hysteria, angry outbursts, and, in some cases, psychotic levels of disorganization.” Then, they “lost their ability to function in work and social contexts, due to apathy, reduced energy and alertness, social isolation, and decreased sexual interest.” Finally, “within weeks of reducing their food intake,” they “reported relentless hunger, as well as powerful urges to break dietary rules. Some succumbed to eating binges, followed by vomiting and feelings of self-reproach. Ravenous hunger persisted, even following large meals during refeeding.” Some of the subjects “found themselves eating continuously, while others engaged in uncontrollable cycles of gorging and vomiting.” The volunteers “became terrified of going outside the experiment environment where they would be tempted by the foods they had agreed not to eat . . . when they did succumb, they made hysterical, half-crazed confessions.” They became irritable, tense, fatigued, and full of vague complaints. “Like fugitives, [they] could not shed the feeling they were being shadowed by a sinister force.” For some, doctors eventually had to prescribe tranquilizers.

The subjects were a group of completely normal healthy college men.

During the great famine that began in May 1940 during the German occupation of the Netherlands, the Dutch authorities maintained rations at between 600 and 1,600 calories a day, or what they characterized as the level of semistarvation. The worst sufferers were defined as starving when they had lost 25 percent of their body weight, and were given precious supplements.
Photos taken of clothed starving Dutch women are striking for how preternaturally modern they look.

At 600–1,600 calories daily, the Dutch suffered semistarvation; the Diet Centers’ diet is fixed at 1,600 calories. When they had lost 25 percent of their body weight, the Dutch were given crisis food supplementation. The average healthy woman has to lose almost exactly as much to fit the Iron Maiden. In the Lodz Ghetto in 1941, besieged Jews were allotted starvation rations of 500–1200 calories a day. At Treblinka, 900 calories was scientifically determined to be the minimum necessary to sustain human functioning. At “the nation’s top weight-loss clinics,” where “patients” are treated for up to a year, the rations are the same.

The psychological effects of self-inflicted semistarvation are identical to those of involuntary semistarvation. By 1980 more and more researchers were acknowledging the considerable emotional and physical consequences of chronic dieting, including “symptoms such as irritability, poor concentration, anxiety, depression, apathy, lability of mood, fatigue and social isolation.” Magnus Pyke, describing the Dutch famine, writes that “starvation is known to affect people’s minds and these people in Holland became mentally listless, apathetic and constantly obsessed with thoughts of food.” Bruch notes that with involuntary progressive semistarvation, “there is a coarsening of emotions, sensitivity and other human traits.” Robert Jay Lifton found that World War II victims of starvation “experienced feelings of guilt over having done something bad for which they are now being punished, and dreams and fantasies of food of every kind in limitless amounts.” Starving destroys individuality; “anorexic patients,” like others who starve, asserts Hilde Bruch, “exhibited remarkably uniform behavior and emotional patterns until they gained some weight.” “Food deprivation,” Roberta Pollack Seid sums it up, “triggers food obsessions for both physical and psychological reasons. . . . undernourishment produces lassitude, depression and irritability. Body metabolism slows down. . . . And hunger drives the hungry person to obsess about food.” The psychological terror of hunger is cross-cultural: Orphans adopted from poor countries cannot control their compulsion to smuggle and hide food, sometimes even after living for years in a secure environment.

Authoritative evidence is mounting that eating diseases are
caused mainly by dieting. Ilana Attie and J. Brooks-Gunn quote investigators who found “chronic, restrained eating” to “constitute a cumulative stress of such magnitude that dieting itself may be ‘a sufficient condition for the development of anorexia nervosa or bulimia.’” Roberta Pollack Seid reaches the same conclusion. “Ironically, dieting . . . itself may provoke obsessive behaviour and binge-eating. It may indeed
cause
both eating disorders and obesity itself.” Sustained caloric deprivation appears to be a severe shock to the body that it remembers with destructive consequences. Seid writes that “women’s problems with food seem to stem . . . from their effort to get an ultra-lean body. . . . The only way 95% can get it is by putting themselves on deprivatory diets.” Attie and Brooks-Gunn concur: “Much of the behavior thought to cause anorexia nervosa and bulimia may actually be a consequence of starvation. . . . The normal weight dieter who diets to look and feel thin also is vulnerable to disturbed emotional, cognitive and behavioral patterns by virtue of the constant stress of trying to stay below the body’s ‘natural’ or biologically regulated weight.” Dieting and fashionable thinness make women seriously unwell.

Now, if female fat is sexuality and reproductive power; if food is honor; if dieting is semistarvation; if women have to lose 23 percent of their body weight to fit the Iron Maiden and chronic psychological disruption sets in at a body weight loss of 25 percent; if semistarvation is physically and psychologically debilitating, and female strength, sexuality, and self-respect pose the threats explored earlier against the vested interests of society; if women’s journalism is sponsored by a $33-billion industry whose capital is made out of the political fear of women; then we can understand why the Iron Maiden is so thin. The thin “ideal” is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.

The compulsion to imitate her is not something trivial that women choose freely to do to ourselves. It is something serious being done to us to safeguard political power. Seen in this light, it is inconceivable that women would not have to be compelled to grow thin at this point in our history.

The ideology of semistarvation undoes feminism; what happens to women’s bodies happens to our minds. If women’s bodies are and have always been wrong whereas men’s are right, then
women are wrong and men are right. Where feminism taught women to put a higher value on ourselves, hunger teaches us how to erode our self-esteem. If a woman can be made to say, “I hate my fat thighs,” it is a way she has been made to hate femaleness. The more financially independent, in control of events, educated and sexually autonomous women become in the world, the more impoverished, out of control, foolish, and sexually insecure we are asked to feel in our bodies.

Hunger makes women feel poor and think poor. A wealthy woman on a diet feels physically at the mercy of a scarcity economy; the rare woman who makes $100,000 a year has a bodily income of 1,000 calories a day. Hunger makes successful women feel like failures: An architect learns that her work crumbles; a politician who oversees a long-range vision is returned to the details, to add up every bite; a woman who can afford to travel can’t “afford” rich foreign foods. It undermines each experience of control, economic security, and leadership that women have had only a generation to learn to enjoy. Those who were so recently freed to think beyond the basics are driven, with this psychology, back to the feminine mental yoke of economic dependence: fixation on getting sustenance and safety. Virginia Woolf believed that “one cannot think well, sleep well, love well if one has not dined well.” “The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes,” she wrote, contrasting the dispiriting food of poverty, of the hard-pressed women’s colleges with that of the rich men’s colleges, the “soles sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook has spread a counterpane of the whitest cream.” Now that some women at last have achieved the equivalent of £500 a year and a room of their own, it is back once more to four ounces of boiled beef and three unsweetened prunes, and the unlit lamp.

The anorexic may begin her journey defiant, but from the point of view of a male-dominated society, she ends up as the perfect woman. She is weak, sexless, and voiceless, and can only with difficulty focus on a world beyond her plate. The woman has been killed off in her. She is almost not there. Seeing her like this, unwomaned, it makes crystalline sense that a half-conscious but virulent mass movement of the imagination created the vital lie of skeletal female beauty. A future in which industrialized nations are peopled with anorexia-driven women is one of few
conceivable that would save the current distribution of wealth and power from the claims made on it by women’s struggle for equality.

For theorists of anorexia to focus on the individual woman, even within her family, misses the tactical heart of this struggle. Economic and political retaliation against female appetite is far stronger at this point than family dynamics.

This can no longer be explained as a private issue. If suddenly 60 to 80 percent of college women can’t eat, it’s hard to believe that suddenly 60 to 80 percent of their families are dysfunctional in this particular way. There is a disease in the air; its cause was generated with intent; and young women are catching it.

Just as the thin Iron Maiden is not actually beautiful, anorexia, bulimia, even compulsive eating, symbolically understood, are not actually diseases. They
begin,
as Susie Orbach notes, as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation. The anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: By starving, she masters it. A bulimic may recognize the madness of the hunger cult, its built-in defeat, its denial of pleasure. A mentally healthy person will resist having to choose between food and sexuality—sexuality being bought, today, by maintenance of the official body. By vomiting, she gets around the masochistic choice. Eating diseases are often interpreted as symptomatic of a neurotic need for control. But surely it is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you, especially if you are a lone young woman and it is a massive industry fueled by the needs of an entire determined world order. Self-defense is the right plea when it comes to eating disasters; not insanity. Self-defense bears no stigma, whereas madness is a shame.

Victorian female hysteria, mysterious at the time, makes sense now that we see it in the light of the social pressures of sexual self-denial and incarceration in the home. Anorexia should be as simple to understand. What hysteria was to the nineteenth-century fetish of the asexual woman locked in the home, anorexia is to the late-twentieth-century fetish of the hungry woman.

Anorexia is spreading because it works. Not only does it solve the dilemma of the young woman faced with the hunger cult, it
also protects her from street harassment and sexual coercion; construction workers leave walking skeletons alone. Having no fat means having no breasts, thighs, hips, or ass, which for once means not having asked for it. Women’s magazines tell women they
can
control their bodies; but women’s experiences of sexual harassment make them feel they
cannot
control what their bodies are said to provoke. Our culture gives a young woman only two dreams in which to imagine her body, like a coin with two faces: one pornographic, the other anorexic; the first for nighttime, the second for day—the one, supposedly, for men and the other for other women. She does not have the choice to refuse to toss it—nor, yet, to demand a better dream. The anorexic body is sexually safer to inhabit than the pornographic.

At the same time, it works for male-dominated institutions by processing women smoothly, unwomaned, into positions closer to power. It is “trickling down” to women of all social classes from elitist schools and universities because that is where women are getting too close to authority. There, it is emblematic of how hunger checkmates power in any woman’s life: Hundreds of thousands of well-educated young women, living and studying at the fulcrum of cultural influence, are causing no trouble. The anorexic woman student, like the anti-Semitic Jew and the self-hating black, fits in. She is politically castrate, with exactly enough energy to do her schoolwork, neatly and completely, and to run around the indoor track in eternal circles. She has no energy to get angry or get organized, to chase sex, to yell through a bullhorn, asking for money for night buses or for women’s studies programs or to know where all the women professors are. Administering a coed class half full of mentally anorexic women is an experience distinct from that of administering a class half full of healthy, confident young women. The woman in these women canceled out, it is closer to the administration of young men only, which was how things were comfortably managed before.

For women to stay at the official extreme of the weight spectrum requires 95 percent of us to infantilize or rigidify to some degree our mental lives. The beauty of thinness lies not in what it does to the body but to the mind, since
it is not female thinness that is prized, but female hunger, with thinness merely symptomatic
. Hunger attractively narrows the focus of a mind that has “let itself go.”
Babies cannot feed themselves; invalids and the orthodox require special diets. Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies. Only this new mystique could prove strong and deep-reaching enough to take on the work given up by domestic isolation and enforced chastity. “Natural” is a word that is rightly challenged. But if there is a most natural urge, it is to satisfy hunger. If there is a natural female shape, it is the one in which women are sexual and fertile and
not always thinking about it
. To maintain hunger where food is available, as Western women are doing, is to submit to a life state as unnatural as anything with which the species has come up yet. It is more bizarre than cannibalism.