Unbearable Weight, 3
10 September 2008
by: Susan Bordo
Hunger as Ideology
Mythological, artistic, polemical, and scientific discourses from many cultures and eras certainly suggest the symbolic potency of female hunger as a cultural metaphor for unleashed female power and desire…
Hunger is not just what you feel before dinner. It’s not just a book by Knut Hamsun. I’ve known Hunger as a deep destructive force, like a dark secret; I’ve felt Hunger through cautioned receptors and have seen it through eyes that have insisted that Hunger is right and good because if I satisfied it, Oh! if I satisfied it, there would follow more Hunger, more Hunger, more. Hunger is illimitable. Hunger can not be satisfied. Hunger gnaws and is blown out of proportion by such scrutinized focus. But when you’re deep in Hunger, there is only Hunger.
In the essay, Hunger as Ideology, Susan Bordo strips down Hunger to its bare ideology; she takes advertisements and sees through them, giving new vision so that I too can see. When women are depicted as sensuously voracious about food, their hunger for food is employed solely as a metaphor for their sexual appetite. The new Magnum ice cream campaign is a great example. The metaphoric situation is virtually inverted in the representation of male eaters… we frequently find sexual appetite operating as a metaphor for eating pleasure.
Women can not take pleasure eating food, just food for food’s sake, instead it all has to be twisted-up and perverted. Hunger is something women have to control or something to be satisfied in little bits, like the one bite of ice cream Eva Longoria takes. One bite or none at all. …Female hunger as successfully contained within the bounds of appropriate feminine behavior. Eva says: “Life is to be enjoyed and I believe that a little indulgence goes a long way.” A little goes a long way!
The representation of unrestrained appetite as inappropriate for women, the depiction of female eating as a private, transgressive act, make restriction and denial of hunger central features of the construction of femininity and set up the compensatory binge as a virtual inevitability. Such restrictions on appetite, moreover, are not merely about food intake. Rather, the social control of female hunger operates as a practical “discipline” (to use Foucaults’ term) that trains female bodies in the knowledge of their limits and possibilities. Denying oneself food becomes the central micro-practice in the education of feminine self-restraint and containment of impulse.
“Feminine self-restraint,” my god, I’m so guilty. But I’ll get into that next time. But to think that it wasn’t my idea. The image of a sexually satisfied woman has been (somewhat still is) repulsive to me, even if she is myself. Why? Because of my ideas of femininity? But I know that she is more feminine than I am; so, it’s some kind of signal coming to me from the outside? Somewhat, but not totally. It’s a difficulty with the whole thing: Woman. Woman wants and woman needs, she’ll devour what she can; her Hunger is insatiable.
To fear Hunger is to fear the best part of ourselves. To continually attempt to control it misses the development of other, and more beneficent, strengths. Strength not of the masculine world but of the feminine, of which is continually put to shame by our obsessions (male and female) with body and appearance. Femininity is a game at which we play but I believe that what it corresponds to within me, the woman who I am, is beyond all that.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about Hunger. Years in fact. How to avoid it and what to do with it when it falls down around me and stifles me, like a plastic bag, like a deep dark black cloak, like an end. For years my Hunger was my worst part, it was my most dreaded fear. I don’t think about Hunger very much anymore; but maybe I should. Maybe I should think about Hunger, toss it around and hold it out in front of me and make myself stare at it, and realize it. Realize it fully, as fully as men are allowed, more fully because I am a woman. Because I am still Hungry.
Bracciano Italy
September 2008
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