Eyes Wide Shut: The
Verbal Banality of
Eating Disorders and Its Damaging Effects
By
Kathryn Carvette DeVito, a
senior from Boston University, for TheWorldJournal.com
Thanks to women’s strict adherence to the supermodel
syndrome eating disorders are now but jargon to our lexicon. Originally a
disorder about reduction, anorexia, has been abased to a trifle adjective;
bulimia, excused as a habit, herded into that thing that women just do,
conveniently spitting on the diagnosis itself. From Virginia Woolf to
Naomi Wolf, Friedan’s Mystique to Greer’s Eunuch, woman’s lib to
Wurtzel’s bitch, women have certainly come a long way, baby. Yes, they’re
climbing stairmasters around the world right into nowhere, becoming more
obsessed with their weight as the years pass. But the nadir has been
reached: eating disorders have become tedious, as banal, and as prevalent,
as the common cold. Treating eating disorders is now tantamount to
treating our culture.
Society has come to valorize beauty and trivialize intelligence. Women,
liberated and educated, walk blindly, if not willingly, into illnesses
that are anything but liberating; bound by the assiduous focus placed of
the size and shape of our bodies and the food we consume, we are unable to
divert our attention. When 1-5% of the population is anorexic and 2-18%
bulimic, when a woman who has suffered from anorexia is 12 times more
likely to die than one who has not starved herself,1 eating
disorders have become all too easy to develop, too seductive, too
attentive a lover. Demoralizing and impoverishing the best females our
country has to offer, they have become quite deadly. They have become
anything but rare. And, it is generalizations to the contrary, it is our
casual reference to them, the woman who hisses about the stick “anorexic”
insect in front of her on the treadmill, it is our derogatory comments
about people who succumb to the seductive wiles of dysmorphia, that
perpetuate not only the surge in eating disorders but also their ability
to go unnoticed, uncared for, irrelevant.
Our perverted fascination with dieting is not a recent trend: “Reduction”
has been steadfast in the minds of women since the 1920s when the basic
institutions of beauty were formed -- fashion and cosmetics industries,
beauty contests and modeling professions, the motion picture industry and
its stars. In midst of a new quest for thinness, doctors and scientists
developed new diet regimens that guaranteed the dropping of pounds and the
reduction of size. As eras passed so did the sentiments behind being
overweight. At one time, curves and roundness stood for affluence; orotund
individuals were viewed as having sufficient energy to accomplish
household chores. Yet later, obesity began to signify listlessness and
laziness.
And now, with the yuppificaiton of society, the Generation Xers, the
myriad of wan and sickly models and their high-paying, revered jobs, our
obsession with thinness has deepened. In fact, it has reached a point of
no return: women, too many women, have begun abusing their bodies in order
to fit into a smaller size, to create the illusion of power and control.
Women have begun to believe that thinness signifies a needless self, and
in striving for as little extra flesh as possible, many women believe they
can make their way through a world without needs, believe they can become
impervious to pain, believe they can live their life without feeling in
excess in either emotions or appetites. In wanting nothing, the woman of
today risks no disappointment.2 In refusing to eat, however,
she becomes smaller, weaker; she literally become less, puking on the
efforts of so many feminists who have walked before her, who have worked
so diligently to make women be seen as more than just an accessory.
A woman’s obsession with food, our society’s notorious mockery and
promotion of eating disorders, with its “Ooooh! You look terrific, you’ve
lost so much weight!”, is merely a reflection of our culture. As a culture
we have become bulimic – we take in, we spit out; at once adoring, later
rejecting. As individuals we are anorexic -- we crave the finer things,
and yet, feeling we are taking more than our share, limit ourselves in
what we consume. It is a precarious split: we walk a tightrope between the
wire of consumption and the fall of reduction, after one mold that can
neither be defined nor described; we merely know what it is not. Entering
the world is predicated on notions of acceptability that are almost
impractical to fulfill. As time progresses, so do the notions of what is
or is not acceptable; in fact, the standards are getting higher, harsher.
Our fixation with thinness, with maintaining standards, says less about
beauty and much more about obedience.
We, are fallaciously encouraged to be a certain way, to follow the ideals
set for them by television, film, advice columns, the seemingly endless
stock of self-help books. We are carved up into little pieces and
scrutinized, making it impossible to think anything can be right the way
it is. We are advised that that we need to behave, that we cannot ask a
guy out, that we cannot be too emotional, that we must not let our
feelings get in the way – you know, never let them see you sweat, or cry,
or yell, or eat. We are told that we don’t need a second helping or
another slice of cheesecake; we did not even need the first because we
don’t have appetites, we ought be satiated on life itself.
Right.
Women permit, on some level or another, the looking glass to double for
the funhouse mirror. We compete with each other, with thinness, with
dieting. We talk ad nauseam about how we don’t like our bodies, about how
we wish we could only lose a few pounds; we chatter ceaselessly about fat
and calories and BMIs over the water cooler, over the lifecycle, over
coffee at PTA meetings; we see food as the enemy, pushing it around our
plates, scrutinizing the boxes it comes in; we attempt to ignore our
hungers. We sneak food when no one’s looking; we chew without tasting; we
swallow without thinking, just as long as we can get it in quick, before
the discerning eye catches on. Since when did we need to permission to
eat?
Yet it is not just that are standards as a society have changed, not
merely that our perspectives and opinions on weight have varied, rather
there is a larger change and that is our relationship with food. The idea
of a meal has been lost. College campuses are a haven for both the
anoretic and the bulimic: food is available 24 hours a day and usually can
be delivered right to your door. Although campuses still offer dinning
halls, many undergraduates find themselves at the student union where they
can get in and out quickly, taking their fast food to go. A student could
never eat, always giving her friends a myriad of excuses – she ate before,
she’s not hungry, she’ll order something later, she doesn’t feel well, and
will have no one looking over her shoulder. For the college student, what
one considers a wholesome, well-rounded meal is all too often a diet soda
and a bagel.
One cannot analyze eating disorders without taking a deep look at the
astonishing capitalist success of the diet industry: Founded on the
inevitable fact that those who diet will regain weight lost, the diet
industry is self-generating. Billions of dollars are spent a year on diet
products, regimens, health and fitness centers, pills and powders. Even
the treatment of eating disorders is now a growth industry, becoming not
only a hot topic among today’s youth, but also today’s psychiatrists and
psychologists. Clinics and training programs specializing in eating
disorders are rapidly emerging to serve the rise of reported cases of
anorexia and bulimia3.
With a culture that is now so obsessed with material goods as inflections
of status and worth, the refusal of food is only the most recent attempt
at self-assertion; the body has become the final hope. If a woman can
conquer the body, overrule nature in her attempt to control self, she will
finally make her way in the world. She will finally dominate the material
realm that says her body is a commodity and consumption a no-no. She must
view her body with a wary eye; she must live from the outside in. And
sadly, in reaching this view of success the woman who doesn’t stop, who
becomes addicted to her drug, finds that soon enough, the high is no
longer a high, the fix is no longer as good; the junkie will eventually
die. And what will society say? “Wow, She has so much will power.” The
woman who has perversely turned her body into a different kind of
consumption will go home, empty and pale eyed, and hiss, “I showed you.”
She’ll say it to the grave. And again we will be faced with words only.
It’s called an obituary.
People often forget, in either their abhorrence or envy over the eating
disordered, in their jokes about being a starver or a puker, that there is
nothing benevolent in starving oneself to death. There is nothing
picturesque about sticking your fingers down your throat, gagging, and
ripping a hole in your esophagus. There is nothing serene about anorexia,
nothing dainty about bulimia, nothing pretty about pushing your body to
the point of death. Those who suffer from eating disorders are more than
just a small portion of the population – we are the best and the brightest
our country has to offer and we are dying. We have become a slave to a
monolithic-and-impossible-to-attain ideal of beauty. It is laughable how
so many of us continue to believe that if we “just lose a few pounds”
everything will be all right, the gods will align the heavens, and we will
be loved.
But the question remains: What are we going to do now? How can we repair
all the damage we inherited? How can we change our culture? The answer is
not simple. The eating disorder has waged war on the body – hindering
intellectual curiosity, slaying social development, bankrupting life. The
eating disorder has waged war on women and society. It has waged war on
the body politic. Most experts explain eating disorders as a model of
cause and effect and while there may be a million good reasons for why
eating disorders arise, there is no smoking gun. There is, more than
likely, an uncomfortable childhood, an overwhelming confusion, a burdening
sense of loneliness. But there is no test that determines why eating
disorders strike. There is no single culprit. It is a killer with a
million different aliases. The only eye-witness testimony is the account
of the sufferer and even that evidence is circumstantial, tainted by the
bearer's own feelings and emotions. The sufferers are most often rendered
too unstable to be credible, even though it is that instability about
which she is testifying.
Eating disorders settle into a rebellion against femininity, against
feeling where the world says you are not allowed to feel. In many respects
eating disorders are the backward crawl from the fork in the road between
womanhood and girlhood. What it becomes is a hellish journey into the
netherworld, a slow journey into a mind come undone. And only one thing is
clear: until we welcome our bodies in any shape, until we stop seeing fat
as foul, eating disorders will continue to rise, women will continue to
hate their bodies, and little girls will continue to lift their swollen
faces from toilet bowls and scrutinize their reflection in the mirror,
eyes wide shut.
1
Sullivan, P.F., Mortality in Anorexia Nervosa. American Journal of
Psychiatry, 152(7), 1073-1074. 1995.
2 Orbach, Susie, Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty, 91.
3 Orbach, xi-xv.
Works Cited
Bruch, Hilde. The Golden Cage: The
Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. New
York: Vintage Books, 2000. Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating
and Identity. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. The Obsession: Reflections
on the Tyranny of Slenderness. New York: Harper Perennial, 1982. Nichter,
Mimi. Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say About Dieting. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000. Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: Starving
Amidst Plenty. New York: Other Press, 2001. Sullivan, P.F., Mortality in
Anorexia Nervosa. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152(7), 1073-1074. 1995.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1991. Wurtzel,
Elizabeth. Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. New York: Random House,
1999. Yager, Joel. Special Problems in Managing Eating Disorders.
Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Press, 1992. Zerbe, Kathryn. The
Body Betrayed: A Deeper Understanding of Women, Eating Disorders, and
Treatment. Carlsbad, CA: Gurze Books, 1995.
© May 9, 2003
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