The great weight shift must be understood as one of the major historical developments of the century, a direct solution to the dangers posed by the women’s movement and economic and reproductive freedom. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. Researchers S. C. Wooley and O. W. Wooley confirmed what most women know too well—that concern with weight leads to “a virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness.” Researchers J. Polivy and C. P. Herman found that “prolonged and periodic caloric restriction” resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are “passivity, anxiety and emotionality.”
It is those traits, and not thinness for its own sake, that the dominant culture wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated women in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation.
Women’s advances had begun to give them the opposite traits—high self-esteem, a sense of effectiveness, activity, courage, and clarity of mind. “Prolonged and periodic caloric restriction” is a means to take the teeth out of this revolution. The great weight shift and its One Stone Solution followed the rebirth of feminism so that women just reaching for power would become weak, preoccupied, and, as it evolved, mentally ill in useful ways and in astonishing proportions. To understand how the gaunt toughness of the Iron Maiden has managed spectacularly to roll back women’s advances toward equality, we have to see that what is really at stake is not fashion or beauty or sex, but a struggle over political hegemony that has become—for women, who are often unaware of the real issues behind our predicament—one of life and death.
Theories abound to explain anorexia, bulimia, and the modern thinning of the feminine. Ann Hollander proposes that the shift from portraiture to moving images made thinness suggestive of motion and speed. Susie Orbach in Fat Is a Feminist Issue “reads” women’s fat as a statement to the mother about separation and dependence; she sees in the mother “a terrible ambivalence about feeding and nurturing” her daughter. Kim Chernin in the The Obsession gives a psychoanalytic reading of fear of fat as based on infantile rage against the all-powerful mother, and sees food as the primordial breast, the “lost world” of female abundance that we must recover “if we are to understand the heartland of our obsession with the female body. . . . We can understand how,” Chernin writes, “in a frenzy of terror and dread, [a man] might be tempted to spin out fashionable images of [a woman] that tell her implicitly that she is unacceptable . . . when she is large.” In The Hungry Self, Chernin interprets bulimia as a religious rite of passage. Joan Jacobs Brumberg sees food as a symbolic language, anorexia as a cry of confusion in a world of too many choices, and “the appetite as voice”: “young women searching for an idiom in which to say things about themselves focused on food and styles of eating.” Rudolph Bell in Holy Anorexia relates the disease to the religious impulses of medieval nuns, seeing starvation as purification.
Theories such as these are enlightening within a private context; but they do not go far enough. Women do not eat or starve only in a succession of private relationships, but within a public social order that has a material vested interest in their troubles with eating. Individual men don’t “spin out fashionable images” (indeed, research keeps proving that they are warm to women’s real shapes and unmoved by the Iron Maiden); multinational corporations do that. The many theories about women’s food crises have stressed private psychology to the neglect of public policy, looking at women’s shapes to see how they express a conflict about their society rather than looking at how their society makes use of a manufactured conflict with women’s shapes. Many other theories have focused on women’s reaction to the thin ideal, but have not asserted that the thin ideal is proactive, a preemptive strike.
We need to reexamine all the terms again, then, in the light of a public agenda. What, first, is food? Certainly, within the context of the intimate family, food is love, and memory, and language. But in the public realm, food is status and honor.
Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well. The piled plate, the choicest cut, say: We think you’re worth this much of the tribe’s resources. Samoan women, who are held in high esteem, exaggerate how much they eat on feast days. Publicly apportioning food is about determining power relations, and sharing it is about cementing social equality: When men break bread together, or toast the queen, or slaughter for one another the fatted calf, they’ve become equals and then allies. The word companion comes from the Latin for “with” and “bread”—those who break bread together.
But under the beauty myth, now that all women’s eating is a public issue, our portions testify to and reinforce our sense of social inferiority. If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.
In the current epidemic of rich Western women who cannot “choose” to eat, we see the continuation of an older, poorer tradition of women’s relation to food. Modern Western female dieting descends from a long history. Women have always had to eat differently from men: less and worse. In Hellenistic Rome, reports classicist Sarah B. Pomeroy, boys were rationed sixteen measures of meal to twelve measures allotted to girls. In medieval France, according to historian John Boswell, women received two thirds of the grain allocated to men. Throughout history, when there is only so much to eat, women get little, or none: A common explanation among anthropologists for female infanticide is that food shortage provokes it. According to UN publications, where hunger goes, women meet it first: In Bangladesh and Botswana, female infants die more frequently than male, and girls are more often malnourished, because they are given smaller portions. In Turkey, India, Pakistan, North Africa, and the Middle East, men get the lion’s share of what food there is, regardless of women’s caloric needs. “It is not the caloric value of work which is represented in the patterns of food consumption” of men in relation to women in North Africa, “nor is it a question of physiological needs. . . . Rather these patterns tend to guarantee priority rights to the ‘important’ members of society, that is, adult men.” In Morocco, if women are guests, “they will swear they have eaten already” or that they are not hungry. “Small girls soon learn to offer their share to visitors, to refuse meat and deny hunger.” A North African woman described by anthropologist Vanessa Mahler assured her fellow diners that “she preferred bones to meat.” Men, however, Mahler reports, “are supposed to be exempt from facing scarcity which is shared out among women and children.”
“Third World countries provide examples of undernourished female and well-nourished male children, where what food there is goes to the boys of the family,” a UN report testifies. Two thirds of women in Asia, half of all women in Africa, and a sixth of Latin American women are anemic—through lack of food. Fifty percent more Nepali women than men go blind from lack of food. Cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use deceit and cunning to get enough to eat. “Moreover, what food they do receive is consistently less nutritious.”
This pattern is not restricted to the Third World: Most Western women alive today can recall versions of it at their mothers’ or grandmothers’ table: British miners’ wives eating the grease-soaked bread left over after their husbands had eaten the meat; Italian and Jewish wives taking the part of the bird no one else would want.
These patterns of behavior are standard in the affluent West today, perpetuated by the culture of female caloric self-deprivation. A generation ago, the justification for this traditional apportioning shifted: Women still went without, ate leftovers, hoarded food, used deceit to get it—but blamed themselves. Our mothers still exiled themselves from the family circle that was eating cake with silver cutlery off Wed
gwood china, and we would come upon them in the kitchen, furtively devouring the remains. The traditional pattern was cloaked in modern shame, but otherwise changed little. Weight control became its rationale once natural inferiority went out of fashion.
The affluent West is merely carrying on this traditional apportioning. Researchers found that parents in the United States urged boys to eat, regardless of their weight, while they did so with daughters only if they were relatively thin. In a sample of babies of both sexes, 99 percent of the boys were breast-fed, but only 66 percent of the girls, who were given 50 percent less time to feed. “Thus,” writes Susie Orbach, “daughters are often fed less well, less attentively and less sensitively than they need.” Women do not feel entitled to enough food because they have been taught to go with less than they need since birth, in a tradition passed down through an endless line of mothers; the public role of “honored guest” is new to us, and the culture is telling us through the ideology of caloric restriction that we are not welcome finally to occupy it.
What, then, is fat? Fat is portrayed in the literature of the myth as expendable female filth; virtually cancerous matter, an inert or treacherous infiltration into the body of nauseating bulk waste. The demonic characterizations of a simple body substance do not arise from its physical properties but from old-fashioned misogyny, for above all fat is female; it is the medium and regulator of female sexual characteristics.
Cross-culturally, from birth, girls have 10–15 percent more fat than boys. At puberty, male fat-to-muscle ratio decreases as the female ratio increases. The increased fat ratio in adolescent girls is the medium for sexual maturation and fertility. The average healthy twenty-year-old female is made of 28.7 percent body fat. By middle age, women cross-culturally are 38 percent body fat: This is, contrary to the rhetoric of the myth, “not unique to the industrialized advanced Western nations. They are norms characteristic of the female of the species.” A moderately active woman’s caloric needs, again in contradiction to a central tenet of the myth, are only 250 calories less than a moderately active man’s (2,250 to 2,500), or two ounces of cheese. Weight gain with age is also normal cross-culturally for both sexes. The body is evidently programmed to weigh a certain amount, which weight the body defends.
Fat is sexual in women; Victorians called it affectionately their “silken layer.” The leanness of the Iron Maiden impairs female sexuality. One fifth of women who exercise to shape their bodies have menstrual irregularities and diminished fertility. The body of the model, remember, is 22 to 23 percent leaner than that of the average woman; the average woman wants to be as lean as the model; infertility and hormone imbalance are common among women whose fat-to-lean ratio falls below 22 percent. Hormonal imbalances promote ovarian and endometrial cancer and osteoporosis. Fat tissues store sex hormones, so low fat reserves are linked with weak estrogens and low levels of all the other important sex hormones, as well as with inactive ovaries. Rose E. Frisch in Scientific American refers to the fatness of Stone Age fertility figures, saying that “this historical linking of fatness and fertility actually makes biological sense” since fat regulates reproduction. Underweight women double their risk of low-birth-weight babies.
Fat is not just fertility in women, but desire. Researchers at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago found that plumper women desired sex more often than thinner women. On scales of erotic excitability and readiness, they outscored thin women by a factor of almost two to one. To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality: “Studies consistently show that with dietary deprivation, sexual interests dissipate.” Subjects of one experiment stopped masturbating or having sexual fantasies at 1,700 calories a day, 500 more than the Beverly Hills Diet. Starvation affects the endocrine glands; amenorrhea and delayed puberty are common features in starving women and girls; starved men lose their libido and become impotent, sometimes developing breasts. Loyola University’s Sexual Dysfunction Clinic reports that weight-loss disorders have a far worse effect on female sexuality than do weight-gaining disorders; the heavier women were eager for courtship and sex, while anorexics “were so concerned with their bodies that they had fewer sexual fantasies, fewer dates, and less desire for sex.” The New England Journal of Medicine reports that intense exercisers lose interest in sex. Joan Jacobs Brumberg agrees that “clinical materials suggest an absence of sexual activity on the part of anorexics.” Pleasure in sex, Mette Bergstrom writes, “is rare for a bulimic because of a strong body hatred.” “The evidence seems to suggest,” writes Roberta Pollack Seid, “and common sense would confirm, that a hungry, undernourished animal is less, not more, interested in the pleasures of the flesh.”
What, finally, is dieting? “Dieting,” and, in Great Britain, “slimming,” are trivializing words for what is in fact self-inflicted semistarvation. In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, the very poorest women eat 1,400 calories a day, or 600 more than a Western woman on the Hilton Head Diet. “Quite simply,” writes Seid, dieters “are reacting the way victims of semi-starvation react . . . semi-starvation, even if caused by self-imposed diets, produces startlingly similar effects on all human beings.”
The range of repulsive and pathetic behaviors exhibited by women touched by food diseases is portrayed as quintessentially feminine, proof positive of women’s irrationality (replacing the conviction of menstrual irrationality that had to be abandoned when women were needed for the full-time work force). In a classic study done at the University of Minnesota, thirty-six volunteers were placed on an extended low-calorie diet and “the psychological, behavioral and physical effects were carefully documented.” The subjects were young and healthy, showing “high levels of ego strength, emotional stability, and good intellectual ability.” They “began a six-month period . . . in which their food intake was reduced by half—a typical weight reduction technique for women.
“After losing approximately 25% of their original body weight, pervasive effects of semistarvation were seen.” The subjects “became increasingly preoccupied with food and eating, to the extent that they ruminated obsessively about meals and food, collected recipes and cookbooks, and showed abnormal food rituals, such as excessively slow eating and hoarding of food related objects.” Then, the majority “suffered some form of emotional disturbance as a result of semistarvation, including depression, hypochondriasis, hysteria, angry outbursts, and, in some cases, psychotic levels of disorganization.” Then, they “lost their ability to function in work and social contexts, due to apathy, reduced energy and alertness, social isolation, and decreased sexual interest.” Finally, “within weeks of reducing their food intake,” they “reported relentless hunger, as well as powerful urges to break dietary rules. Some succumbed to eating binges, followed by vomiting and feelings of self-reproach. Ravenous hunger persisted, even following large meals during refeeding.” Some of the subjects “found themselves eating continuously, while others engaged in uncontrollable cycles of gorging and vomiting.” The volunteers “became terrified of going outside the experiment environment where they would be tempted by the foods they had agreed not to eat . . . when they did succumb, they made hysterical, half-crazed confessions.” They became irritable, tense, fatigued, and full of vague complaints. “Like fugitives, [they] could not shed the feeling they were being shadowed by a sinister force.” For some, doctors eventually had to prescribe tranquilizers.
The subjects were a group of completely normal healthy college men.
During the great famine that began in May 1940 during the German occupation of the Netherlands, the Dutch authorities maintained rations at between 600 and 1,600 calories a day, or what they characterized as the level of semistarvation. The worst sufferers were defined as starving when they had lost 25 percent of their body weight, and were given precious supplements. Photos taken of clothed starving Dutch women are striking for how preternaturally modern they look.
At 600–1,600 calories daily, the Dutch suffered semistarvation; the
Diet Centers’ diet is fixed at 1,600 calories. When they had lost 25 percent of their body weight, the Dutch were given crisis food supplementation. The average healthy woman has to lose almost exactly as much to fit the Iron Maiden. In the Lodz Ghetto in 1941, besieged Jews were allotted starvation rations of 500–1200 calories a day. At Treblinka, 900 calories was scientifically determined to be the minimum necessary to sustain human functioning. At “the nation’s top weight-loss clinics,” where “patients” are treated for up to a year, the rations are the same.
The psychological effects of self-inflicted semistarvation are identical to those of involuntary semistarvation. By 1980 more and more researchers were acknowledging the considerable emotional and physical consequences of chronic dieting, including “symptoms such as irritability, poor concentration, anxiety, depression, apathy, lability of mood, fatigue and social isolation.” Magnus Pyke, describing the Dutch famine, writes that “starvation is known to affect people’s minds and these people in Holland became mentally listless, apathetic and constantly obsessed with thoughts of food.” Bruch notes that with involuntary progressive semistarvation, “there is a coarsening of emotions, sensitivity and other human traits.” Robert Jay Lifton found that World War II victims of starvation “experienced feelings of guilt over having done something bad for which they are now being punished, and dreams and fantasies of food of every kind in limitless amounts.” Starving destroys individuality; “anorexic patients,” like others who starve, asserts Hilde Bruch, “exhibited remarkably uniform behavior and emotional patterns until they gained some weight.” “Food deprivation,” Roberta Pollack Seid sums it up, “triggers food obsessions for both physical and psychological reasons. . . . undernourishment produces lassitude, depression and irritability. Body metabolism slows down. . . . And hunger drives the hungry person to obsess about food.” The psychological terror of hunger is cross-cultural: Orphans adopted from poor countries cannot control their compulsion to smuggle and hide food, sometimes even after living for years in a secure environment.