Women, appetite, and male fear — UPDATED

I know you’re all eager to know what I’m lecturing on this afternoon. Oh. You’re not? Here goes anyway…

We’re working this week on an interesting issue in body history: the relationship between the appetite, eating disorders, and female sexual desire. In her seminal (sorry) work “Fasting Girls“, Joan Brumberg traced the development in the 19th century of ideas about young women’s desire for food and their simultaneous sexual maturation:

The health of young women was definitely influenced by a general female fashion for sickness and debility… to the physician’s mind, a young woman caught up in the process of sexual maturation was subject to vagaries of appetite and peculiar cravings. Thoughout the medical and advice literature an active appetite or appetite for particular foods (especially meat or spicy items) was used as a trope for a dangerous sexuality. Mary Wood-Allen warned young readers that girls who masturbated ‘will manifest an unnatural appetite, sometimes desiring mustard, pepper, vinegar and spices, salt, etc.’ Because appetite was regarded as a barometer of sexuality, both mothers and daughters were concerned about its expression and control. A good mother was expected to manage this situation before it escalated into a medical or social problem.

With great understatement, Brumberg says that as a result of this Victorian conflation of sexuality and food,

Bourgeois society generated anxieties about food and eating — especially among women.

My students, initially, see little parallel between these notions and the contemporary American situation. But as Susan Bordo points out in Unbearable Weight (another instant classic in the field), that even in modern culture,

Eating is not really a metaphor for the sexual act; rather, the sexual act, when initiated and desired by a woman, is imagined itself as an act of eating, of incorporation and destruction of the object of desire. Thus women’s appetites must be curtailed and controlled, because they threaten to deplete and consume the body and soul of the male.

Bordo references the tiresome 1980s Hall and Oates song “Maneater“:

I wouldn’t if I were you
I know what she can do
She’s deadly man, she could really rip your world apart
Mind over matter
Ooh, the beauty is there but a beast is in the heart

(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater
(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater

What’s the point? I’m convinced that even as we teach young girls ever more extreme strategies to make themselves objects of desire, we remain decidedly fearful about women — of any age — as agents of desire. To eat is to satisfy one’s body’s demands. A woman who feeds herself in response to hunger, who eats to satiety, may well be a woman who might make similar demands upon men. In a world where men are increasingly anxious about their abilities to satisfy women sexually (witness the veritable explosion of drugs to treat impotence), one unconscious strategy to cope with that fear is to depress women’s appetites. Given the longstanding connection between sexuality and eating in women’s lives, it thus follows (according to Bordo, Brumberg, and others) that our cultural obsession with controlling what women put in their mouths is, at least in part, a manifestation of a fear about the power of women’s sexuality. In this analysis, our culture “reads” a slender woman as submissive and undemanding; she is “safe” for a man who doubts his own ability to satisfy her. Thinness is thus less about aesthetics and more about a twisted combination of morality and anxiety.

We’ll see where the discussion goes.

UPDATE: Had a great discussion this afternoon, focusing on the phrase “too much“. I asked how many of my female students had ever been told that they were “too much”. When applied to a man, it refers to his sense of humor: “Oh, that Hugo, he’s too much.” When applied to a woman, it has a far more condemnatory tone: “She’s too loud, too obnoxious, too aggressive, too sexual, too hungry, too demanding, too much like a man.” Virtually all of my students had stories about being warned — usually early in adolescence — about eating too much, showing too much, talking too much, asking for too much. A few also related deeper fears that they were too much: too intense, too filled with emotion, too complex and needy to ever be loved or understood. We talked at length about how what we often perceive a woman as being “too much” when she makes reasonable requests to be treated like a human being and to be allowed to have the same desires (and the opportunity to satisfy those desires) as her brothers.

I realized today, not for the first time, that when we men tell women that they are “too much”, we are really asking them to lower their expectations for us. Often, the demands that “uppity” women make on men are demands not so much for sexual performance (or a nice meal) as they are that we men simply show up emotionally and physically and engage them as fellow rational human beings. That’s a scary thing for many men, and it is far easier to label otherwise natural and reasonable requests as evidence that a woman is “too much.”