The Beauty Myth (30 page)

Dieting is the essence of contemporary femininity. Denying oneself food is seen as good in a woman, bad in a man. For women, the Austin (Texas) Stress Clinic found, “dieting concern” was strongly related to “positive feminine traits”; for men, food restraint was related to “socially undesirable femininity.” Where the feminine woman of the Feminine Mystique denied herself gratification in the world, the current successful and “mature” model of femininity submits to a life of self-denial in her body.

But this hallmark of enviable adjustment has as little innate validity as the earlier one. It too is based upon a vital lie. Where “immature” women in the 1950s wanted clitoral orgasms while “mature” ones passively yielded, today oral desire is interpreted in a similar sexual code. It is considered immature for women to eat heartily, since they’re told they risk their sexuality; they are seen as mature if they starve, promised to win sexuality that way. In the 1970s, when clitoral pleasure was reclaimed, many women must have wondered how they had lived in an atmosphere that denied it. In the 1980s women were forced to deny their tongues and mouths and lips and bellies. In the 1990s, if women can reclaim the pleasure of appetite, we may wonder what possessed us during the long, mean, pointless years of hunger. Women’s self-denial where food is concerned is represented today as good for her mate and even better for herself. Beyond the beauty myth, feminine hunger will look as obviously destructive to the well-being of women and their loved ones as their earlier enforced suffocation in the home looks to us from here.

Sex, food, and flesh; it is only political ideology—not health, not men’s desires, not any law of loveliness—that keeps women from believing we can have all three. Young women believe what they have no memory to question, that they may not have sex, food, and flesh in any abundance; that those three terms cancel each other out.

It is dead easy to become an anorexic. When I was twelve I went to visit an older, voluptuous cousin. “I try,” she said, to explain the deep-breathing exercises she did before bedtime, “to visualize my belly as something I can love and accept and live with.” Still compact in a one-piece kid’s body, I was alarmed to think that womanhood involved breaking apart into pieces that floated around, since my cousin seemed to be trying to hold herself together by a feat of concentration. It was not a comforting thought. The buds of my breasts hurt already. As she did her exercises, I leafed through a copy of
Cosmopolitan,
which had an article demonstrating to women how to undress and pose and move in bed with their partners so as to disguise their fatness.

My cousin looked me over. “Do you know how much you weigh?” No, I told her. “Why don’t you just hop on the scale?” I could feel how much my cousin wished to inhabit a simple, slight twelve-year-old body. That could only mean, I thought, that when I was a woman, I would want to get out of my own body into some little kid’s.

A year later, while bent over the drinking fountain in the hall of my junior high school, Bobby Werner, whom I hardly knew, gave me a hard poke in the soft part of my stomach, just below the navel. It would be a decade before I would remember that he was the class fat boy.

That evening I let the juice of the lamb chop congeal on my plate. I could see viscous nodules of fat, a charred outer edge of yellow matter, cooling from liquid to solid, marked
USDA CHOICE
in edible blue dye. The center bone, serrated, had been cloven with a powerful rotary blade. I felt a new feeling, a nausea wicked
with the pleasure of loathing. Rising hungry from the table, a jet of self-righteousness lit up under my esophagus, intoxicating me. All night long I inhaled it.

The next day I passed the small notepad kept by the dishwasher. I knew what it said, though it was my mother’s and private: “½ grpfruit. Blk. coff. 4 Wheat Thins. 1 Popsicle.” A black scrawl: “
binge
.” I wanted to tear it up. Some memoir.

I had no more patience for the trivial confessions of women. I could taste from my mouth that my body had entered ketosis, imbalanced electrolytes—good. The girl stood on the burning deck. I put the dishes in the sink with a crash of declaration.

At thirteen, I was taking in the caloric equivalent of the food energy available to the famine victims of the siege of Paris. I did my schoolwork diligently and kept quiet in the classroom. I was a wind-up obedience toy. Not a teacher or principal or guidance counselor confronted me with an objection to my evident deportation in stages from the land of the living.

There were many starving girls in my junior high school, and every one was a teacher’s paragon. We were allowed to come and go, racking up gold stars, as our hair fell out in fistfuls and the pads flattened behind the sockets of our eyes. When our eyeballs moved, we felt the resistance. They allowed us to haul our bones around the swinging rope in gym class, where nothing but the force of an exhausted will stood between the ceiling, to which we clung with hands so wasted the jute seemed to abrade the cartilage itself, and the polished wooden floor thirty-five feet below.

An alien voice took mine over. I have never been so soft-spoken. It lost expression and timbre and sank to a monotone, a dull murmur the opposite of strident. My teachers approved of me. They saw nothing wrong with what I was doing, and I could swear they looked straight at me. My school had stopped dissecting alleycats, since it was considered inhumane. There was no interference in my self-directed science experiment: to find out just how little food could keep a human body alive.

The dreams I could muster were none of the adolescent visions that boys have, or free and healthy girls; no fantasies of sex or escape, rebellion or future success. All the space I had for dreaming was taken up by food. When I lay on my bed, in that posture of adolescent reverie, I could find no comfort. My bones
pressed sharply into the mattress. My ribs were hooks and my spine a dull blade and my hunger a heavy shield, all I had to stave off the trivialities that would attach themselves like parasites to my body the minute it made a misstep into the world of women. My doctor put his hand on my stomach and said he could feel my spine. I turned an eye cold with loathing on women who evidently lacked the mettle to suffer as I was suffering.

I made a drawing: myself, small, small, curled in a sort of burrow, surrounded by nesting materials, with a store of nuts and raisins, protected. This smallness and hiddenness was what I craved at the time of life when Stephen Dedalus longed to burst like a meteor on the world. What did that drawing mean? It was not a longing to return to the womb, but to return to my body. I was not longing to be safe from the choices of the world, but from the obligation to enter into a combat in which I could only believe if I forgot all about myself, and submitted to starting again dumber, like someone hit hard on the back of the head.

I’d have to forget they were my friends and believe they were really my enemies: the other playground gamblers of jacks, my fellow thieves of Pepsi-flavored lip gloss: Gemma and Stacey and Kim, who used to stand beside me in a row in the dark master bedroom, staring into the mirror. Our chins lit up from below by a candle, we chanted, scared rigid,
We’re not afraid of Bloody Mary
. I knew that if I let myself fall forward into time, I would never be able to stand like that again: shoulder to shoulder before the one mirror, with the ghoul on the far side of the glass; nothing in ourselves, nothing in each other.

Adolescent starvation was, for me, a prolonged reluctance to be born into woman if that meant assuming a station of beauty. Children resist being baffled with convention, and often see social madness in full dimensions. In seventh grade, we knew what was coming, and we all went berserk with cogent fear; not a normal craziness of adolescence, but panic at what unnaturally loomed. Like a life-sized game of Mother May I, we knew that beauty was going to say, “Freeze,” and wherever we were, that would be it.

“We learned the truth at seventeen,” mourned a song that was popular that year, “that love was meant for beauty queens.” We traded new bathing suits, and ruined them, and swore we wouldn’t forgive the borrower. When Gemma and Kim mooned at
Stacey’s Polaroid, Kim said, “Oh, don’t worry about the picture, you were closer to the camera.” Gemma twisted her neck in front of the mirror, looking for the horrible truth, while Kim wondered how her mother’s words came out of her own brain.

Confiding Julie, the first to get breasts, was cynical by Thanksgiving. Since no one else looked like the class slut, she was given the position, and she soon capitulated. She bleached her hair with Sun In, and started to mess around with boys who played in garage rock bands. Marianne, because she had long legs and a stem neck, rushed from school to her plies at the barre, her hair in a bun, her head held high, to arch and sweep and bow toward the mirror until night fell. Cara delivered her audition piece flat, but since she had a wheat-colored rope of braid that brushed her waist, she would be Titania in the school play. Emily, blunt-nosed and loud, could outact Cara in her sleep; when she saw the cast list she turned silently to her best friend, who handed her a box of milk chocolate creams. Tall, strong, bony Evvy watched Elise try out her maddening dimple. She cornered her outside class to ask her if she thought she was cute. Elise said yes, and Evvy threw a pipette of acid, stolen from the biology lab, in her face. Dodie hated her tight black hair that wouldn’t grow. She crept up behind blond Karen in home ec class and hacked out a fistful with pinking shears. Even Karen understood that it wasn’t personal.

The things we saw women doing for beauty looked crazy. I wanted to travel, but I saw that beauty led women in circles. My mother, a beautiful woman, got too little of the pleasures that I could understand. I saw that her beauty hurt her: teeth-gritting abstinence at celebration dinners, fury on the scale, angry rubdowns, self-accusing photographs posted over the refrigerator. She’d won—why wasn’t that enough? It would be nice to be beautiful like her, I figured, sure; but nothing about it seemed nice enough to make up for that endless degradation.

Anorexia was the only way I could see to keep the dignity in my body that I had had as a kid, and that I would lose as a woman. It was the only choice that really looked like one: By refusing to put on a woman’s body and receive a rating, I chose not to have all my future choices confined to little things, and not to have the choices made for me, on the basis of something
meaningless to me, in the larger things. But as time went on, my choices grew smaller and smaller. Beef bouillion or hot water with lemon? The bouillion had twenty calories—I’d take the water. The lemon had four; I could live without it. Just.

Now, when I can bring myself to think of that time at all—another blackout, by beauty, of the cities of memory—my sadness can’t shake off the rage that follows it close behind. To whom do I petition for that lost year? How many inches in height did I lose from having calcium withheld from my bones, their osteoblasts struggling without nourishment to multiply? How many years sooner will a brittle spine bend my neck down? In the Kafkaesque departments of this bureau of hunger, which charged me guilty for a crime no more specific than inhabiting a female body, what door do I knock upon? Who is obliged to make reparations to me for the thought abandoned, the energy never found, the explorations never considered? Who owes me for the year-long occupation of a mind at the time of its most urgent growth?

In our interpretation of the damages done by the beauty myth, it is not yet possible to lay blame anywhere but on oneself. I can say finally, for myself at least: at thirteen, to starve half to death? Not guilty. Not that child. There is certainly a charge of guilt to be made, long overdue. But it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs somewhere, and to something, else.

The youngest victims, from earliest childhood, learn to starve and vomit from the overwhelmingly powerful message of our culture, which I found no amount of parental love and support strong enough to override. I knew my parents wanted me not to starve because they loved me; but their love contradicted the message of the larger world, which wanted me to starve in order to love me. It is the larger world’s messages, young women know, to which they will have to listen if they are to leave their parents’ protection. I kept a wetted finger up to the winds of that larger world: Too thin yet? I was asking it. What about now? No? Now?

The larger world never gives girls the message that their bodies are valuable simply because they are inside them. Until our culture tells young girls that they are welcome in any shape—that women are valuable to it with or without the excuse of “beauty”—girls will continue to starve. And institutional messages then reward young women’s education in hunger. But when
the lesson has been taken too dangerously to heart, they ignore the consequences, reinforcing the disease. Anorexics want to be saved; but they cannot trust individual counselors, family members, or friends; that is too uncertain. They are walking question marks challenging—pleading—with schools, universities, and the other mouthpieces that transmit what is culturally acceptable in women, to tell them unequivocally: This is intolerable. This is unacceptable. We don’t starve women here. We value women. By turning an indifferent eye to the ravages of the backlash among their young women, schools and universities are killing off America’s daughters; and Europe is learning to do the same to its own. You don’t need to die to count as a casualty. An anorexic cannot properly be called alive. To be anorexic is to keep a close daily tally of a slow death; to be a member of the walking undead.

Since institutions are treating this epidemic as one of those embarrassing feminine things imported into the cloister like tampon dispensers or commoner’s gowns worn over skirts, there is no formal mourning. Women students are kept from openly recognizing what they privately know is going on around them. They are not permitted to claim this epidemic as real, and deadly, and taking place beside and inside them. So they have to repress horrifying knowledge, or trivialize it, or blame the sufferer. Another one sickens. Another disappears. Another one bites the dust.