One of my women’s studies students this semester, Julie, has a blog, and wrote a short but powerful piece today on women, judgment, and the moral language of food. She’s been open about fighting a very familiar battle. Check it out.
UPDATE: A video Julie did last year.
UPDATE: This is now also posted at Jezebel, where the comments section is much more active.
In last Friday’s Guardian piece on sexualized rebellion, I briefly touched on the media-driven discourse of “compulsory individuality”. As contradictory — and as familiar — as it sounds, compulsory individuality requires women (and teen girls in particular) to navigate the paradoxical demands to “fit in” while “standing out”. This isn’t novel — but as I wrote last week (following Marjorie Jolles), the ever-more-sexualized nature of compulsory individuality is transforming young women’s self-image, not necessarily in helpful ways.
A related point can be made, of course, about skinniness. It is not new to point out that “thin is in.” The longing to be slender and the obsession with dieting goes back to the 1920s, and is due in part to radical changes in fashion and culture brought on both by World War One and pre-war innovations in style. In the USA, five generations of young women have now come of age surrounded by diet books, and what were once considered problems for middle-class white girls only (poor body-image and eating disorders) are now found in every racial and class demographic.
The key change in the past decade around skinniness is the explicit recognition of thinness as a marker not only of status, but of proud isolation from other women. Adolescent girls whose bodies come close to the fashion ideal have long been aware that they are, at least at times, the object of other young women’s resentment. “You’re so thin… I hate you!” is a phrase that many slender women have heard, with the only variation being the degree to which the second part of the statement is said with genuine loathing as opposed to mild, teasing envy. Lots of thin girls grow up being called “anorexic”, regardless of the presence or absence of an eating disorder. The mix of jealousy and resentment and pity often includes the refusal to believe tha a “skinny girl” has any problems about which to complain. (Think about what often happens when the most slender young woman in a room remarks that she “feels fat”.)
In the past decade, we’ve seen the appearance of what we might call the “mean girl narrative”. In addition to the now canonical (for millenials, anyway) Lindsay Lohan film, books like Queen Bees and Wannabees, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and the newest media darling, Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships all make the popular case that girls are, well, mean — meaner, certainly, in ways that boys simply could never be. It seems likely that this “discourse of female cruelty” works in tandem with the narrative of compulsory individuality to suggest to young women that theirs is a hyper-competitive world where success is a solitary and sexualized pursuit. Whether it’s chasing grades or getting guys, even your sisters are nothing more than “frenemies” at best.
The positing of thinness as a competitive tactic shows up in books like Rory Freedman’s Skinny Bitch. Freedman’s title reflects (or, one suspects, subtly reinforces) the reality that achieving the ideal body will invariably invite animosity from other women. It is taken for granted that it is better to be envied than to be liked. One imagines that the subtitle could have been this brutal but unmistakably powerful false dichotomy: “Would you rather be fat and liked or skinny and hated? Is that even a question?” Freedman uses this discourse of inter-female hostility to market a plan for success in this brutal, mean-girl world. (I like Freedman’s emphasis on a plant-based diet. But as a vegan, I’m not interested in using women’s fear of fat in order to transition people away from animal protein.)
The latest manifestation of the marriage of women’s enforced competitiveness and the cruel dictates of fashion comes from Bethenny Frankel, like Freedman a chef and animal-rights advocate and now a reality-tv sensation. Frankel, whose marketing term is “Skinny Girl” (slightly less confrontational than Freedman’s) just introduced a onesie for infants with the slogan “Future Skinny Girl” emblazoned across it. Frankel wanted it for her own daughter, and in a statement, insisted that she was motivated by concern for her little Bryn’s health. The pushback has been obvious and expected, and all of it drives attention to Frankel’s books and merchandise. Continue reading
On Monday, Marie Claire posted this short piece from Maura Kelly: Should “Fatties” Get a Room? (Even on TV?) Superficially a review of the new CBS sitcom Mike and Molly (which features two overweight actors in the title roles), the article was a festival of fat-loathing and body-shaming. Because it may well be triggering for someone to read, the rest of this post is all below the fold. Continue reading
Fat Talk Free Week kicks off today on college campuses around the country. From the Time Magazine story:
Starting Oct. 18, thousands of young adults on at least 35 campuses will participate in Fat Talk Free Week, a national campaign to eliminate language that is damaging to students’ body image. The initiative’s motto: “Friends don’t let friends fat-talk.” Participants learn, for example, that when a gal pal asks if those jeans make her butt look big, the best answer may be to persuade her not to ask the question at all.
The anti-fat-talk campaign is designed first to help people identify the “thin ideal” — essentially a pre-pubescent girl’s body, plus boobs — that is perpetuated by the media and pop culture, and then learn how to reject it in favor of a healthier, more realistic attitude.
But this is an uphill battle, coming at a time not only when more than one college is giving academic credit for weight-loss classes, but also when an alumna of Stephens College is offering to donate $1 million to the Missouri women’s school if its faculty and staff drop a total of 250 lb. by Jan. 1. “Body image right now is down the flusher for so many young people,” says Lynn Grefe, president of the National Eating Disorders Association, which estimates that nearly 10 million women in the U.S. suffer from anorexia or bulimia.
Bold emphasis mine.
It is important to remind folks, as I do with my classes every semester, that poor body image is neither a natural nor an inevitable part of female adolescence. As Joan Brumberg has shown, anxiety about losing weight in order to meet an impossible ideal is less than a century old, first hitting American shores immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s in the roaring Twenties that we see the first mention in girls’ diaries of an obsession with weight loss, and it’s in that same decade that diet books first hit the bestseller lists. (There’s some evidence that the weight-loss craze among the very affluent began a few decades earlier, at the turn of the century. Anorectic behavior, like access to the automobile, gradually trickled down to the middle and working-classes over the three decades between the Gay Nineties and the beginning of the interwar years.) Prior to the late 19th century at the earliest, what little dieting behavior was seen was generally connected to religious enthusiasm rather than either health or the attempt to meet a standard set by the media.
I teach the “history of eating disorders” in order to remind people that body dysmorphia and anxiety about fat is a cultural rather than biological phenomenon. What didn’t exist in the past, in other words, need not exist in the future. Sometimes the most important task we have as educators around food and self-image is reminding young people that the fear of fat is not coded into their genes. Continue reading
From March 2008.
One of my students came to me yesterday with a question. “Carine” is twenty, and has already taken four of my classes here. She’s getting ready to transfer on to a four-year school, and she’s doing so — to my considerable delight — as a women’s studies major.
Carine is an independent student, and has lived on her own for several years. She’s entirely self-supporting, and her parents have contributed nothing towards her college education. (This is a very common story here.) She is taking a full load of classes, and working a great many shifts as a server in a West Los Angeles restaurant. Though the tips are good, she’s barely scraping by. Her twelve year-old Camry is on the verge of complete collapse. Something’s gotta give.
Since she was in high school, Carine has done a little bit of modeling here and there; it’s provided a little extra pocket money from time to time, nothing too significant. But now, with transfer looming and the economy hitting the restaurant business, she’s decided to investigate making her modeling more serious. She has the right look, and earlier this week, she met with one of the better-known agencies in town. They loved her face and her portfolio, and were quite willing to sign Carine to a “conditional†contract. The “conditionsâ€: lose three inches off her hips and drop fifteen pounds off her already lanky frame. The agency would check in her with regularly to assess her “progressâ€; if she did as she was asked, she could be assured of steady work. There’s no question that taking this contract would make a huge difference to Carine. It will enable her to transfer, to stay on course for her degree (in women’s studies, heaven be praised), to remain independent.
Carine is a self-described “staunch feministâ€. She took my women’s studies class and was hooked; she regularly e-mails me for “more books, please!†I send her reading suggestions at a staggering rate, and she ploughs through them just as fast. And Carine, like so many young feminists I’ve known, was worried about whether taking this contract would compromise those infamous “feminist credentials.†She said something like: “I know the fashion industry sends a lot of destructive messages to women. If I lose this weight, do I become part of that destructive message? Am I hurting other women as well as myself?†Continue reading
For the first time since Spring 2008, I’m teaching my “Beauty and the Body in the Euro-American Tradition” course. For the past decade or so, I’ve had a fairly predictable schedule. Each semester, I teach at least one section of Western Civ, Modern Europe, and Women in American Society. Those three classes are my “bread and butter”, as it were. I teach a fourth class each semester as well, and rotate among Gay and Lesbian American History, Men and Masculinity in American Society, The Dysfunctional Family in the Western Tradition, and the Beauty and Body course. I sometimes play with or alter the sequence. I’ve taught other courses in my nearly eighteen years here (such as the two-semester sequence of British History) and I’ve got a few other courses I’ve got in mind to develop (A History of Pornography class, and a course on American Religious History.)
Some of my women’s history lectures were recorded and put online last semester by my wonderful student Mon-Shane Chou. At some point, I’d like to get all my lectures up online, both so that my students could review them and interested outsiders could hear them as well. Since I (and the college) make attendance mandatory, I’m not worried about a sudden drop off in the number of folks in my classes as a consequence. In my nearly seven years of blogging, I’ve also written posts that recapitulate some of my lectures, as long-time readers may know.
In yesterday’s Beauty and the Body course, we talked about Christian conceptions of female appetite. In a broad interdisciplinary course like this, it’s hard to spend too much time on any one topic, but I’m introducing them to Western theories of the body and desire as quickly and accessibly as I can. The previous lecture had been on Plato’s mind/body dualism, and the problems that his views pose for us down to the present day. I want my students to see that suspicion of the body and its needs has a history, and that their own struggles for self-acceptance are rooted as much in an ancient tradition as in the effort to conform to a standard set by contemporary culture.
I can’t remember who I was reading in grad school (it might have been Joan Brumberg, or Caroline Walke Bynum) or somebody else when I first realized that the original sin of Adam and Eve revolved around food. Though the serpent tempts Eve with fruit from the tree of knowledge (rather than merely telling her that the apple, or whatever it was, will taste yummy), the means by which she commits the first sin is through eating. Adam eats too, but subsequently. Put plainly, one of the many ways to read the story of what happened in the Garden is that pain and suffering entered the world because a woman couldn’t control what she put in her mouth. That has tremendous implications for women’s relationship with spirituality and food down to the present day.
I’ve written often about the “moral language of food” (the habit of describing being on a diet as “being good” or eating something fattening as being “bad”). We first see this emerging in American vernacular in the 1920s, but of course it’s much, much older than that. The fasting behavior of medieval women that Bynum documents predates, obviously, a modern media culture obsessed with women’s thinness. But the constant throughout history, as I suggest to my students, is that thinness has had a moral dimension.
Thinness is radical self-denial made manifest for all to see. Whether one is virginal or promiscuous, whether one masturbates or lives sadly ignorant of self-pleasure, one’s private sexual behavior rarely leaves enduring marks on the body. Neither sexual virtue or vice shows up the way that extreme dieting or overeating will. (Though the most common consequence of one kind of sex, pregnancy, does leave a mark — but only on women’s bodies.) Food is public in a way that sex isn’t; eating is the most pleasurable thing most of us will ever do in groups. So food has a moral implication that no other source of bodily delight does. Not even sex carries the same, um, heft. Continue reading
This first appeared in June 2007.
I’ve been teaching women’s history here at Pasadena City College for more than a dozen years now, and throughout that time, have made journals a critical part of the course. It’s a lot of reading for me, but I remain convinced that my own teachers were right when they told me that putting my words down on paper is the single best way to figure out what it really is I think, feel, and believe.
Over these twelve years or so of teaching gender studies, of meeting with countless students in office hours, of listening, of reading student journals and reflecting on what I find there, I’ve noticed some fairly clear patterns. And the pattern that’s in my head this morning is the ubiquitousness of self-doubt and self-criticism that I see in so many of my female students (and youth group kids).
As my students will confirm, I’m fond of insisting that there are “three key points” to be made about virtually anything. (Too much Trinitarian Christianity; too much of the “three-column system” in Kabbalah; too much Hegel… or three divorces. Take your pick.) And if I were to try and sum up all of the negative self-talk I encounter from my students in just three words, it would be easy:
Fat, Slut, Selfish.
Let me be very clear that I’m not claiming that most women regularly beat themselves up with all three of these. For most of my students and youth group kids, one or two of these three words is particularly haunting. The fear of fat is much commented upon, and in looking back over the last twelve years of journals, the best that I can say is that that crushing anxiety about the body has, at least, not gotten significantly worse. Of course, it couldn’t get much worse. (I do notice more of my male students admitting to body dysmorphia and a desire to lose weight or change their shape.)
If the label “fat” still has tremendous power to wound, there are signs that at least among some young women, “slut” is losing at least a little of its force. From what I can tell (and to generalize enormously), we’ve done a marginally better job of helping young women claim ownership of their sexuality. Compared to what I was seeing, hearing, and reading in the mid-1990s, I see slightly more acceptance among young women (and their male peers) of the notion that women have the right to be sexual subjects rather than objects. Of course, as many feminists worry, when it comes to “sex talk” it’s often difficult to distinguish between false bravado and a genuine embrace of erotic agency. One role of feminist mentors (and youth group leaders) is to provide a safe environment where students can get honest about sexuality. It’s in these safe environments that those who are merely “talking big” about their comfort with their sexuality can begin to acknowledge that some of that apparent confidence is a facade; it’s also in these environments that those who are anxious or confused about their own sexuality can begin to unburden themselves. Continue reading
After a few days back in Los Angeles following a dozen on the East Coast — and after a few months of living in West Los Angeles again after thirteen years in Pasadena — I’m feeling once again twinges of discomfort about spending so much of my life in a place that, for all its merits, is so famously focused on looks.
Yesterday, I chatted with Meredith, who cuts my hair. Meredith is from Mississippi, and herself recently back from a trip to her hometown on the Gulf Coast. She asked me about my trip to the East, and I remarked “Everytime I leave Los Angeles, I feel as if I get better looking.” Meredith laughed loudly, and agreed; the stylist next to her and her client chimed in with their assents. What started was a four-way conversation among the two stylists and their clients (all non-natives) about the toll that living in L.A., particularly on the Westside, takes on one’s self-image.
I’ve always struggled with vanity and body issues; in previous posts, I’ve talked about my struggle with a serious eating disorder and exercise addiction. I’m much more content and self-accepting in my forties than I was in my twenties, and that is a blessing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t, with disappointing regularity, find myself studying my figure in a mirror or assessing the fit of my clothes, wishing that I were as lean as I was when I was at my thinnest. (Never mind that my thinnest years, though they corresponded with very fast running times, were also in most respects my unhappiest.) Becoming a father has been a huge help; focusing on a child is an excellent distraction and an effective palliative for narcissism. (How awful would it be if it weren’t!) Yet there’s no denying that my desire to be thin has not yet left me. I’ve said it before: I’ve been blessed, thanks to therapy and hard work and grace, with great success in overcoming so many of my addictions. My body dysmorphia and my anxieties about weight, however, remain with me to a far greater degree than I would like to admit.
Here’s the thing: I don’t realize until I leave Los Angeles how much more comfortable in my own skin I feel in other places. In New York, I invariably feel less self-conscious, even on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, than I do here in Southern California. And when I’m in Europe — even in fashion-conscious places like Paris or Florence or Mayfair — I don’t feel that sense that I’m too old. To put it another way, I feel more visible virtually everywhere else. I’ve written before, and many other feminists have as well, about the ways in which aging women are made invisible. There’s no question that we erase “older” women from our gaze in a way that we don’t with men; I’m keenly conscious that my authority as a teacher, for example, only grows with age. But though middle-aged men (I am certainly middle-aged now) are far less often rendered invisible than their female peers, I’ve felt — perhaps because of my unfortunate character defect of vanity — the way in which I too am more likely to “disappear” as I grow older. At least, I feel this keenly when I’m in West L.A.
I’m not writing this post to fish for compliments. I’m certainly not writing to complain about how tough it is to be me. I’m a damned lucky man in virtually every imaginable respect. But this character defect that leads me to be unduly concerned with my own appearance, this anxiety about my weight and my attractiveness that, while blessedly diminished lingers with me still, this puerile self-absorption — this , this, this is exacerbated by place. I wouldn’t go back to my younger, presumably “hotter” days for all the tea in China; the anxiety was crippling and the narcissism repellant. But I will say, as I move more deeply into that long and ill-defined period known as mid-life, that there are many other places I would rather live than here.
Oprah Winfrey announced this week that she’s deeply “embarrassed” at having put on more than forty pounds in the past two years. Our nation’s most public and beloved yo-yo dieter, Oprah has been gaining and losing, gaining and losing, in front of hundreds of millions of people for more than two decades. She’s tried liquid diets, she’s worked with some of the world’s best trainers, she’s made the spiritual and psychological connection between eating and emotional needs. She’s done it over and over again, and — at least in her eyes — she’s “failed” at the task of overcoming what she sees as her addiction to food.
There’s a lot to unpack about Oprah in general, as well as her very public quest to be trim and fit. She deserves tremendous credit for her willingness to risk humiliation and to admit embarrassment; whether the issue is recovery from sexual abuse or overeating, Oprah has always been brave about connecting her private story to her public work. As someone who does the same thing (on a much smaller scale, with a blog and a classroom instead of a massive global franchise), I am repeatedly inspired by Oprah’s blend of raw ambition and near-naked transparency. That’s a rare combination, and it’s an enviable one.
From the standpoint of those of us interested in fighting “body fascism”, we could wish that Oprah could demonstrate greater self-acceptance. While on the one hand, it is perhaps comforting to some that even the powerful and the wealthy can suffer from low-esteem, to others Oprah’s plight makes their own struggle seem all the more hopeless. If Oprah, with all the vast resources at her disposal, cannot permanently overcome what she sees as a shameful addiction to food, who can? If Oprah, whose achievements have made her an icon (and, in the case of Barack Obama, perhaps something of a king-maker), still suffers from the pressure to live up to an unattainable ideal, doesn’t that make clear how utterly absurd and destructive it is for any of us to be chasing that ideal so relentlessly? These are questions worth asking. Continue reading
I’ll admit that it isn’t easy to be a vegan and an animal rights activist on one hand, and an advocate against eating disorders on the other. Obviously, these commitments should be compatible, as the issues aren’t necessarily linked. Yet in a culture where repressive images of female beauty are used to make veganism alluring (say what you will about the generally excellent content of the book, the title “Skinny Bitch” for a text designed to encourage vegan eating is at best problematic), and in a culture where more than a few young women with body dysmorphia “hide” their eating disorders behind the more socially-acceptable facade of veganism, it’s clear that there are some problems to work out.
I’m not going to post about animal rights for a while yet. But I did want to respond to this piece from columnist Paul Campos in the Rocky Mountain News: Fight food fascists’ effrontery. (Let’s leave aside the asinine reference to fascism.)
Campos makes the case, popular with the fat acceptance movement and with at least some feminists, that the “war on obesity” is misplaced. Campos gives talks:
My talk involved points I’ve made hundreds times over the past few years, to audiences ranging in size from a dozen high school students to a few million TV viewers.
I spoke about how the definition of “overweight” used by our public health authorities is a bunch of completely unscientific garbage, created by pharmaceutical companies eager to push the next generation of diet drugs through the regulatory pipeline.
I described the absurdity of various widely held ideas about weight: that we know how to make people thinner (we don’t); that haranguing people about their weight is doing them a favor (it isn’t); and that the reason there are fat kids in America is that fat kids haven’t been informed that it’s considered desirable in this culture to be thin.
This last bit of rampant insanity, which is at the center of the government’s current response to the panic over “childhood obesity,” makes about as much sense as arguing that poor people are poor because they haven’t been informed it’s considered desirable in this culture to be rich.
Fair enough. But there’s one teensy-weensy problem with Campos’ argument. He presents the dynamic as innocent (and hungry) consumers being browbeaten by haughty fashionistas and hysterical policy wonks. The public, apparently, is shamed out of the pleasure of eating by Vogue magazine and state assembly members. And while there’s much to be said that is critical of both government food policy and the fashion industry, Campos ignores the biggest and baddest villain of them all: the agriculture industry. Continue reading