Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (20 page)

Then, too, there is the unusual representation of the male cooking for and serving the females. True, it only required a touch of the

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microwave panel. But this is, after all, only a little boy. One message this commercial may be delivering is that males can engage in traditionally "feminine" activities without threat to their manhood. Cooking for a woman does not mean that she won't respect you in the morning. She will still recognize your authority to fix her bike (indeed, she may become further convinced of it precisely by your mastery of "her" domain). The expansion of possibilities for boys thus extracts from girls the price of continued ineptitude in certain areas (or at least the show of it) and dependence on males. Yet, in an era in which most working women find themselves with two full time jobs—their second shift beginning at five o'clock, when they return from work to meet their husband's expectations of dinner, a clean and comfortable home, a sympathetic ear—the message that cooking and serving others is not "sissy," though it may be problematic and nonprogressive in many ways, is perhaps the single

most
practically
beneficial (to women) message we can convey to little boys. In its provision of ambiguous and destabilizing imagery, the in

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flux of women into the professional arena has had a significant effect on the representation of gender. Seeking to appeal to a population that wishes to be regarded (at least while on the job) as equal in power and ability to the men with whom they work, advertisers have tried to establish gender symmetry in those representations that depict or evoke the lives of professional couples. Minute Rice thus has two versions of its "I wonder what 'Minute' is cookin' up for dinner tonight?" commercial. In one, father and children come home from work and school to find mother "cookin' up" an elaborate chicken stirfry to serve over Minute Rice. In the other, a working woman returns to find her male partner "cookin' up" the dinner. The configuration is indeed destabilizing, if only because it makes us aware of how very rare it is to

see. But, significantly, there are no children in this commercial, as there are in the more traditional version; the absence of children codes the fact that this is a yuppie couple, the group to which this version is designed to appeal.

And now HäagenDazs, the original yuppie ice cream, has designed an ad series for this market (Figures 21 and 22). These ads

perfectly illustrate the unstable location of contemporary gender advertisements: they attempt to satisfy representational conventions that still have a deep psychic grip on Western culture, while at the same time registering every new rhythm of the social heartbeat. "Enter the State of HäagenDazs"—a clear invocation of the public world rather than the domestic domain. The man and woman are dressed virtually identically (making small allowances for gendertailoring) in equally nononsense, dark business suits, styled for power. Their hairstyles are equivalent, brushed back from the face, clipped short but not punky. They have similar expressions: slightly playful, caught in the act but certainly not feeling guilty. They appear to be indulging in their icecream break in the middle of a workday; this sets up both the fetching representational incongruity of the ad and its realism. Ice cream has always been represented as relaxation food, to be
indulged
in; it belongs to a different universe than the work ethic, performance principle, or spirit of competition. To eat it in a business suit is like having "quickie" sex in the office, irregular and naughty. Yet everyone knows that people
do
eat ice cream on their breaks and during their lunch hours. The ad thus appears both realistic and
representationally
odd; we realize that we are seeing images we have not seen before
except
in real life. And, of course, in real life, women
do
eat HäagenDazs, as much as, if not more than, men.

And yet, intruding into this world of gender equality and eating realism that is designed to appeal to the sensibilities of "progressive" young men and women is the inescapable disparity in how much and how the man and woman are eating. He: an entire pint of vanilla fudge, with sufficient abandon to topple the carton, and greedy enough to suck the spoon. She: a restrained Evebite (already taken; no licks or sucks in process here), out of a single brittle bar (aestheticized as "artfully" nutty, in contrast to his bold, unaccessorized "Vanilla Fudge." Whether unconsciously reproduced or deliberately crafted to appeal to the psychic contradictions and ambivalence of its intended audience, the disparity comes from the recesses of our most sedimented, unquestioned notions about gender.

In 1983, preparing to teach an interdisciplinary course in "Gender, Culture, and Experience," I felt the need for a topic that would enable me to bring feminist theory alive for a generation of students that seemed increasingly suspicious of feminism. My sister, Binnie Klein, who is a therapist, suggested that I have my class read Kim Chernin's
The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness.
I did, and I found my Reaganera students suddenly sounding like the women in the consciousnessraising sessions that had first made me aware of the fact that my problems as a woman were not mine alone. While delighted to have happened on a topic that was so intensely meaningful to them, I was also disturbed by what I was reading in their journals and hearing in the privacy of my office. I had identified deeply with the general themes of Chernin's book. But my own disordered relations with food had never reached the point of anorexia or bulimia, and I was not prepared for the discovery that large numbers of my students were starving, binging, purging, and filled with selfhatred and desperation. I began to read everything I could find on eating disorders. I found that while the words and diaries of patients were enormously illuminating, most of the clinical theory was not very helpful. The absence of cultural perspective—particularly relating to the situation of women—was striking.

As a philosopher, I was also intrigued by the classically dualistic language my students often used to describe their feelings, and I decided to incorporate a section on contemporary attitudes toward the body in my metaphysics course. There, I discovered that although it was predominantly my female students who experienced their lives as a perpetual battle with their bodies, quite a few of my male students expressed similar ideas when writing about running. I found myself fascinated by what seemed to me to be the cultural emergence of a set of attitudes about the body which, while not new as
ideas,
were finding a special kind of embodiment in contemporary culture, and I began to see all sorts of evidence for this cultural hypothesis. So began a project that has since occupied a good deal of my attention and that has, I believe, progressively been validated.

In 1983, the body practices and attitudes that I viewed as supporting my tentative intuitions were a mere ripple on the cultural scene compared to the place I have watched them assume since then.

"Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture," first published in 1985, was the result of my initial exploration of the various cultural axes to which my students' experiences guided me in my "Gender, Culture, and Experience" and metaphysics courses. "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity" and "Reading the Slender Body," both first published in 1989, are in a sense an extension of that earlier piece, in that they explore the dynamics of further axes on which eating disorders are located: the historically female psychological disorders, changes in historical attitudes toward what constitutes "fat'' and "thin," and the structural tensions of consumer society. These axes are not, however, meant make up an exhaustive list. Ultimately, these essays do not so much explain eating disorders
as follow
them through a series of cultural interconnections and intersections.

Since the "Anorexia Nervosa" essay first appeared, in 1985, there has, of course, been an explosion of written material, media attention, and clinical study devoted to eating disorders. I have not attempted to incorporate new studies or statistics into these previously published pieces, although much of the new information strongly bears out my observations and interpretations. Nor have I tried to bring my original formulations into line with developments in my thinking. I have chosen instead to let the evolution of my ideasand in some cases the evolution of the phenomena themselvesmanifest themselves through the essays. Some sections of the original essays have been deleted to avoid redundancy, a few formulations clarified, a number of new illustrations added, and endnotes revised when accuracy demanded it.

Otherwise, the essays in this section of the book appear substantially as they did in their original versions.

Historians long ago began to write the history of the body. They have studied the body in the field of historical demography or pathology; they have considered it as the seat of needs and appetites, as the locus of physiological processes and metabolisms, as a target for the attacks of germs or viruses; they have shown to what extent historical processes were involved in what might seem to be the purely biological "events" such as the circulation of bacilli, or the extension of the lifespan. But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs

Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish

I believe in being the best I can be, I believe in watching every calorie .

Crystal Light television commercial

Psychopathology, as Jules Henry has said, "is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture."
1
In no case is this more strikingly true than in that of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, barely known a century ago, yet reaching epidemic proportions today. Far from being the result of a superficial fashion phenomenon, these disorders, I will argue, reflect and call our attention to some of the central ills of our culture—from our historical heritage of disdain for the body, to our modern fear of loss of control over our future, to the

disquieting meaning of contemporary beauty ideals in an era of greater female presence and power than ever before.

Changes in the incidence of anorexia
2
have been dramatic.
3
In 1945, when Ludwig Binswanger chronicled the now famous case of Ellen West, he was able to say that "from a psychiatric point of view we are dealing here with something new, with a new symptom."
4
In 1973, Hilde Bruch, one of the pioneers in understanding and treating eating disorders, could still say that anorexia was "rare indeed."
5
Today, in 1984, it is estimated that as many as one in every 200250 women between the ages of thirteen and twentytwo suffer from anorexia, and that anywhere from 12 to 33 percent of college women control their weight through vomiting, diuretics, and laxatives.
6
The New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia reports that in the first five months of 1984 it received 252 requests for treatment, as compared to the 30 requests received in all of 1980.
7
Even correcting for increased social awareness of eating disorders and a greater willingness of sufferers to report their illnesses, these statistics are startling and provocative. So, too, is the fact that 90 percent of all anorectics are women, and that of the 5,000 people each year who have part of their intestines removed as an aid in losing weight 80 percent are women.
8

Anorexia nervosa is clearly, as Paul Garfinkel and David Garner have called it, a "multidimensional disorder," with familial, perceptual, cognitive, and, possibly, biological factors interacting in varying combinations in different individuals to produce a "final common pathway."
9
In the early 1980s, with growing evidence, not only of an overall increase in frequency of the disease, but of its higher incidence in certain populations, attention has begun to turn, too, to cultural factors as significant in the pathogenesis of eating disorders.
10
Until very recently, however, the most that could be expected in the way of cultural or social analysis, with very few

exceptions, was the (unavoidable) recognition that anorexia is related to the increasing emphasis that fashion has placed on slenderness over the past fifteen years.
11
This, unfortunately, is only to replace one mystery with another, more profound than the first.

What we need to ask is
why
our culture is so obsessed with keeping our bodies slim, tight, and young that when 500 people were asked what they feared most in the world, 190 replied, "Getting fat."
12
In an age when our children regularly have nightmares

of nuclear holocaust, that as adults we should give
this
answer—that we most fear "getting fat"—is far more bizarre than the anorectic's misperceptions of her body image, or the bulimic's compulsive vomiting. The nightmares of nuclear holocaust and our desperate fixation on our bodies as arenas of control—perhaps one of the few available arenas of control we have left in the twentieth century—are not unconnected, of course. The connection, if explored, could be significant, demystifying, instructive.

So, too, we need to explore the fact that it is women who are most oppressed by what Kim Chernin calls "the tyranny of slenderness," and that this particular oppression is a post1960s, postfeminist phenomenon. In the fifties, by contrast, with middleclass women once again out of the factories and safely immured in the home, the dominant ideal of female beauty was exemplified by Marilyn Monroe—hardly your androgynous, athletic, adolescent body type. At the peak of her popularity, Monroe was often described as "femininity incarnate," "femaleness embodied"; last term, a student of mine described her as ''a cow." Is this merely a change in what size hips, breasts, and waist are considered attractive, or has the very idea of incarnate femaleness come to have a different meaning, different associations, the capacity to stir up different fantasies and images, for the culture of the eighties? These are the sorts of questions that need to be addressed if we are to achieve a deep understanding of the current epidemic of eating disorders.