Unbearable Weight, 4
19 September 2008
by: Susan Bordo
Anorexia Nervosa
Susan Bordo writes, “the psychopathologies that develop within a culture… are characteristic expressions of that culture; are, indeed, the crystallization of much that is wrong with it.” Such is anorexia now, as hysteria was in the Victorian age; not a medical, biological problem, but something that goes down much deeper. Goes down and rises out of all the ills of our western society. The “rules” of culture are pushed daily, not only by advertisements and movies and internet sites, but also by those on the streets, all those who have internalized society’s “rules.”
Rule 1: Thou shalt be divided into men and women.
Rule 2: Of men and women, men will be stronger and women will be weaker.
Rule 3: Men will dominate because they are stronger and women will be dominated because they are weaker.
Rule 4: In any event that women may desire to change this “natural” scheme, their gender will be twisted under the cultural lime-light, so that all women will be viewed as objects, will be constantly self-conscious as to how they look, will debilitate themselves voluntarily. Men will be rest assured that women will never completely succeed. Women will become overly confounded by the definition of woman.
When I began starving myself I never had a reason; the patterns of thought fertile for such behavior developed over time. What stands out like white on black was my complete disgust with the female body, not only its softness, weakness as seen in the mirror, but what the female body translated as, in men’s eyes and in everyone’s eyes. How does simply having a female body preclude sexual openness? How do breasts have anything to do with it? How shallow and empty the parade of female bodies still seems to me. Why don’t women get more upset that they are being used? Why don’t they do anything about it?
All I could do was to stop eating, to become androgynous. That was my insurance that I would never be looked at, that I wouldn’t be judged for this thing on show. Susan Bordo writes the fear of the female body is a “deep fear of “the Female,” with all its more nightmarish archetypal associations of voracious hungers and sexual insatiabilities.”
“Hungering, voracious, all-needing, all-wanting.” How many women, men, even know what their “natural” sexuality is? How many people actually have their feet in the earth? Sexuality has been stolen from the private and used as a show for the public.
“Anxiety over women’s uncontrollable hungers appears to peak, as well, during periods when women are becoming independent and are asserting themselves politically and socially.”
We are obsessed with sexuality, especially female sexuality. The caricatures are mainstream; it is difficult to determine what a woman wants like (even what she really looks like.) How should I know? I’m so confused. And so a picture is drawn for us, what a woman should be.
Some pictures.
1) A woman only breasts and only ass; shaking ass and shoving breasts. Just body, out for the taking. (And this is supposed to be sexuality?)
2) A woman thin as a rail, without hips, without sex.
3) A woman willing to surgically change her own natural body, willing to waste vast amounts of time and money and effort on an unattainable perfection.
Women are either saturated with sex or without. But this doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t how I feel. As a young girl I knew I didn’t want the saturation. I decided to go completely without.
If our psychopathology of the last thirty years is a raging amount of anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders, isn’t it apparent that something is wrong? I don’t have a solution. I just know what it feels like to be body deep in the problem. Being afraid of one’s body to the point of starvation is not just one young girl trying to make sense of the world. It is the world devouring young girls. It is not women with the voracious, hungering sexuality, but in turn a world hungering and voracious, a world which denies women the right to their intelligence, denies women the luxury of not being judged by what is seen, denies women their right to a personhood, for it has been stated time and time again woman must first be woman.
Why can’t I just be me?
Bracciano Italy
September 2008
See Also:
Unbearable Weight, 1 Introduction
Unbearable Weight, 2
Unbearable Weight, 3, Hunger as Ideology
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