Sometimes my body disgusts me, sometimes I despise it, sometimes I am so repulsed by it I want to run razors across it, to burn it, to deny it food, to overload with food and then throw it up again, but you know these feelings cant be real they must just be a front, I can’t really feel guilty or negative about my body and food (link)
The attitude in this article really angers me, it is both ignorant and dismissive of women with eating disorders/disordered eating.
In the second to last paragraph of the post Samara writes We’ll only stop this madness if we refuse to join in. I can’t refuse to join in, I can’t suddenly not have issues with food just because I want to. I would love to not have issues with food, but I can’t magic them away and nor can other women. It’s good that Samara doesn’t have issues with food, that she has a healthy attitude to food, that’s excellent but its not okay for her to belittle other women, other feminists who have issues with food.
Also food issues are not by and large about food, they are about control, power, space, unacknowledged emotions. From piecing together my own personal narrative my food issues come predominantly from three places
1)Severe physical neglect in infancy. Studies on this show that people neglected during infancy have a much higher rate of eating disorders than others because the brain doesn’t lay down the right pathways that regulate your food intake, (for me this means, I don’t get hungry till I’m about to faint, and I don’t know when I’m full so I eat too much.)
2)My main care givers through most of my childhood were power freaks over food and removed food as a punishment
3)Severe sexual abuse during my adolescence
My issues with food are complicated, and unless I say, I don’t think its immediately obvious that i have food issues, but I was borderline anorexic for a really long time with a bit of bulimia thrown in there, and now I tend to binge eat and eat things that I know are really bad for me as a kind of self sabotage.
Now I need to loose weight, not want to, need to, I am edging up to a size eighteen and that’s not comfortable for me. I have a history of heart disease and diabetes in my family and I need to take some pressure of my joints, but I find this really difficult to talk about in feminist spaces, because of attitudes like the one in this post and some of its comments. If i talk about healthy ways of trying to lose weight will I get told that its somehow anti feminist to want to loose weight even though I have good reason for it?
Then we come down to, actually we do live in a society that expects women to be a certain size and shape, and penalises bigger women. Maybe we should be critiquing why there weren’t any women at that press conference who were over a size twelve, are women over size twelve incapable of being journalists?
I also find the thought of someone making “observations” on someone else’s eating really disturbing, If I know people are watching me eat and making judgments on my food intake I either stop eating or finish what I’m eating and then go and throw it up.
yes we do live in a society where almost all women (weather they are technically eating disordered or not) have an unhealthy relationship with food but I don’t think essentially telling them to buck up and get over it is particularly helpful.
Women will stop having issues with food when we are allowed to take up the psychological and physical space we are entitled to, when we are allowed to display negative emotions rather than repressing them, when we stop having our body boundaries breached, when we stop being told both overtly and subtly that our bodies are out messy and out of control and need disciplining.
Working towards these things is much more radical and useful than dismissing women with food issues as being involved in “madness.”
June 4th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I think one problem is the perception that a lot of feminists seem to have, that disordered eating is all about trying to please men, which it hardly ever is. I think that’s one reason why feminists are often so quick to say “I have no eating problems” because it’s thought tantamount to saying “I don’t care what men think of me!” I think this was really underlying that piece in the Guardian by Bidisha where she was saying that women with eating disorders are stupid. The implication seemed to be that, as a lesbian, she was beyond such madness, which is interesting because I think I’ve only ever met one lesbian (under 40) who didn’t have eating/body image issues.
This is why I think we need to get back to structural analysis of oppression and away from this “I’m a feminist so I’m sensible” thing.
June 4th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I also find the thought of someone making “observations” on someone else’s eating really disturbing, If I know people are watching me eat and making judgments on my food intake I either stop eating or finish what I’m eating and then go and throw it up.
Well yeah, and especially as it’s often women who police each others’ eating through observation!
I cannot stand anyone commenting on my eating. One of my friends, who is quite a hardcore feminist, can hardly bear people commenting negatively on their own food. If someone says something like, “Oh, I can’t possibly eat this huge portion!” or even just picks at their food, she can’t eat hers because she experience it as a comment on her own eating.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Well yeah, and especially as it’s often women who police each others’ eating through observation!
Good point, plus it’s incredibly patronising for the enlightened feminist to be astutely observing human nature. It’s like being feminist suddenly makes you smarter than everyone and removes all your problems (I sound like a broken record but whatever).
I can’t stand anyone commenting on my food either, particularly if it’s a feminist who’s going to think I’m unlenlightened if I’m eating salad instead of chocolate. I’ve grown up being ‘the one who likes cakes’ in my family, anything covered in chocolate and dripping with cream that came along was instantly dubbed ‘Zenobia food’ (well, not Zenobia obviously, but you can substitue my name), which was true when I was eight, I did like my cake and sweets, but I was eight after all. Also, to me a plate of shiitake mushrooms and spinach leaves is every bit as exciting as cake, if not considerably more so, I’d just love it if I thought a feminist was watching thinking I was picking veg over sweets and cake because I was trying to please a man. Which is the other thing, the assumption that if you worry about food it’s because you’re still addicted to men and in effect have no self-control - which is exactly the same argument as for policing food.
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:21 pm
That article struck a nerve.
Despite having been bulimic for 5 years, and still concerned with my weight now, I often start internally eye-rolling when other women talk about watching their weight. I’m sure it is internalised misogyny (silly vain women who I’m absolutely nothing like, etc.) and denial that as women we really don’t have a choice not to care because we are all viewed as public property. As things are, we cannot be truly free from it, and that’s hard to face.