What Does It Mean to Be Fat, Thin, and Female?

1. What Does It Mean to Be Fat, Thin, and Female? A Review Essay

2. The Books… • This review essay is based off the works of 5 authors, who address what it means to be fat and thin in contemporary North America: • Marlene Boskind-White and William C White: Bulimarexia: The Binge/Purge Cycle. • Marcia Millman: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa • Kim Chernin: The Obsession: The Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. • Hilde Bruch: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa. • Susie Orbach: Fat Is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. • All five provide social-psychological analyses of women’s obsession with fat and express a humanistic sensitivity to women tormented by obsessive thoughts of food. • They discuss in its extreme form women’s obsession with food. From the compulsive eating of obesity to the self starvation of anorexia and the oscillating binging and purging of bulimarexia.

3. The Books Continue… • The authors are all feminist in that they link women’s obsession with eating to broader social political and economic forces affecting women of the 20th century. • They concur the problematic relationship between women and food is linked to women’s difficulty in being women although they stress different forces in accounting for that difficulty. • The forces these authors propose: • The contradictory expectation of families for girls • The objectification of women • The degradation of their sexuality • The institutionalized cultural, political and economic powerlessness of women • The cultural slighting of female experience and female values. • They reject the explanation of eating disorders as individual character failures. Eating disorders, rather, express conflict in the social process of becoming an American Women.

4. Chernin: • Her insights come from her own vanquished food fixation and from observations of contemporary fashion and advertising as well as from western literature and philosophy. • She argues that the “tyranny of slenderness” is a production of the mind/body dichotomy fundamental to western culture. • Her feminism is strong, argues that women's obsession with fat is “an effort to control or eliminate the passionate aspect of the self in order to gain the approval and prerogative of masculine culture” and this effort explains “all those particular sensations of emptiness…”

5. Millman: • Although all of the authors view obesity and skeletal anorexia as two version of the same obsession, Millman is a sociologist and deals primarily with overweight women. • Her data comes principally from interviews with fat women and from participant observation at helping organizations for fat people: NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) • Obesity is a sadly misdirected personal response to the grievous difficulty of being a women in our society.

6. Orbach and Boskind-White & White: • Both Therapist, with similar approaches. • Orbach focus on overeaters • Whites’ focus on bulimarexia, compulsive eaters who gorge and then purge by self induced vomiting etc.. • Both use group therapy and attempt to help their patients deal with the problem of womanhood by building positive female identity. • Orbach takes a strongly feminist approach and bases her inquiry and therapy on the question of “What is it about the social position of women that leads them to respond to it by getting fat?” • Both attested the explanation of obsession which blames the mother daughter relationship and eating disorders. • Orbach goes even farther to show a link between the socially oppressed mother raising a daughter into inevitable oppression.

7. Bruch: • Physician and psychotherapist who has been working with eating disorders for 40 years. • Focused primarily on Anorexia. Voluntary starvation that most often affects adolescent females of privileged backgrounds. • Bruch is the most overtly feminist and yet her findings contain an implicit indictment of US society. • Bruch locates the cause of this pathetic condition not in the victim but in forces around her, principally in familial and cultural expectations that women be unreasonably compliant and thin.

8. Characteristics of the Obsession: • Four principle themes emerge from the books as explanation of eating disorders: • Confusion over sexual Identity and sexuality • Struggle with issues of power, control and release • Solitude and deceit • Family strife • Female subjects of these books whether obese, starving or gorging and vomiting all share an extreme obsession with food and the characteristics of this obsession strikes a chord with all women.

9. Sexuality and Sexual Identity: • “It is often this critical question of how women can define and manage their own sexuality that is being grappled with in the fat/thin dilemma.” • Bulimics, Anorexics and Obese “typically loathe their bodies”. • This hatred normally comes with adolescence when women's bodies begin to change. • Anorexics retreat from female sexuality by becoming childlike and asexual, overweight women accomplish the same end by becoming fat. They become sexually neuter by violating cultural standards of ideal femininity. • Characteristic of women’s troubled relationship to their bodies is a conscious opposition of mind and body…mind body dualism linking men with the exalted mind and women with the denigrated body- the heart of both patriarchal power and of women’s particular problem with food.

10. Sexuality Continues… • According to Chernin women’s antipathy towards their own sensuality reflects Western Culture’s repression of appetite. • “Sexuality is a great wasteland of unfulfilled pleasure, confusion, guilt, fear and disgust!” • In North American female sexuality is not venerated but rather degraded and objectified. • Women are repeatedly presented with idealized, objectified and sexualized images of themselves. While patriarchal US media and advertising idealized as beautiful a standard of thinness that for most adults women is inaccessible. • Chernin suggest that men fear and envy women’s sexuality and fertility and they cope with these feelings by devaluing sex and procreation this serves as a buffer for men’s lack of power.

11. Power, Control and Release: • All five books share the perspective of popular feminism that the denigration of woman’s physically parallels the cultural subordination of their values and ways of being… “men both act for them and describe their experience.” • The raise in feminist movement and raise in numbers of working women has increased the contradiction of the female role. Women have not surrendered their role as wife and mother they have only added new goals. • They want to be seen as producers but society is continually casting women as consumers and loading the role of women with more conflicts: Eat Junk food but don’t get fat…etc. • The tension that women face in fulfilling their new roles have become unbearable for some women especially ones already lacking a strong sense of self.

12. Power, Control and Release Continues…. • Food has become a women can exert control in the world in which they feel powerless. • Food can also be used as a channel for losing control a form of release or response. • Women are trained to be nonaggressive, pacifying and self- sacrificing. “I’m taking care of everyone else and food takes care of me.” • Food has become the channel of control in a world where women suffer from institutional powerlessness.

13. Solitude, Withdrawal, Deceit, Competition: • One of the strongest characteristics of the food obsession that emerges in the five books is individualism. • Women gorge, purge, or starve in secret. Their attitude toward their obsession serves to isolate them further. • Their need to hide their behavior from others and to lie about eating habits leads to withdrawal and deceit becomes a fundamental part of their lifestyle. • The solitude of women with eating disorders is often characterized by competition and mistrust of others. For example Anorexics take pride in being superior to – that is thinner than- other women. • Women are socialized for cooperation and women who strive for competitive achievement may find themselves on foreign terrain…one way of coping with these feelings of competition is hiding the feelings behind a wall of fat. Women are using there bodies as an excuse for failure.

14. Solitude, Withdrawal, Deceit, Competition continues… • Women’s isolated, competitive individualism in their struggle with food, the books suggest, is an internalization of the competitive values and practices fundamental to western society. • Our society tends to define all problems as individual ones and suggest that they can all be over come with individual effort aimed at raising oneself above others, individual rage is focused not against society but against the self; permits the continuance of the systematic oppression of women.

15. Family Strife: • The problem of eating disorders is not only do to the social condition but also to the familial organization. • Food is a central, readily available battle ground for issues of “autonomy, control and love” in the growing girls relationship with her parents. • Women use food to escape from horrific family problems including sexual, physical and emotional abuse and interfamilial as well as societal racism. • Food acts as a drug to soothe both emotional and physical pain. • Refusal to eat can be a act of defiance towards parents that they feel are depriving them from the right to live their own life.

16. Family Strife Continues… • Mothers living in a society that lack approval for their achievements often push their daughters to go farther then they did. • They may simultaneously be seething with resentment and attempt to validate their own lives by limiting their daughters. • Overeating and self-starvation are ways of asserting control, demanding attention and expressing anger. They are ultimately self-destructive ways which do nothing to alter social conditions. • “As long as patriarchal culture demands that women bring up their daughters to accept an inferior social position the mother’s job will be fraught with tension and confusion manifested in the way mothers and daughters interact over food.”

17. Why Now? • Reported case of anorexia and bulimia have increased alarmingly in the last 20 to 30 years and concern with obesity also appear to be rising. • First explanation of this in cultural North America is commodity capitalism, food is plentiful and consumption is pushed. • Voluntary starvation is a powerful symbolic act and at the same time societal influences also means that women can allow themselves the luxury of overeating. • Junk food means women can overeat and yet never satisfy the body’s craving for nutrition… “some Americans are now starving to death even as they gain weight.”

18. Why Now? Continues… • The US food industry contributes to the problem, it must grow to remain viable, advertising must create markets for new foods. Once women have converted these foods into fat, they are exhorted to buy diet food to shed fat. • Buy as much as possible…the urge to eat and the need to diet. • Current standards of fashion and beauty contribute to women’s obsession with food by projecting a particularly thin ideal. Female beauty has fluctuated over the years and USA has demanded the greatest thinness at times when women have demanded the greatest rights. • “ In this age of feminist assertion, men are drawn to women of childish body and mind because there is something less disturbing about the vulnerability and helplessness of a small child- and something truly disturbing about the body and mind of a mature women.” • There is also an argument that with great sexual freedom causes greater anxiety about the transition from adolescents to womanhood.

19. Alternatives to the Obsession: • All five books propose an alternative to eating or starving. The alternative is based essentially on developing a strong, positive sense of female identity. • This involves teaching women to make their personal problems part of a broader social analysis. • To do this the books suggest using a techniques come to popular feminist pedagogy: intellectual liberation through discussion of oppression. • The therapy should aim at penetrating the web of dishonesty, self-deception and over compliance characteristics. • The White’s and Orbach believe that for women to recognizing that other women share the obsession and of linking the obsession to women’s oppression so their therapy aims to help women realize they are not alone.

20. Alternative To The Obsession: • African women the exception? • Over 70 percent of black girls were satisfied or very satisfied with their weight whereas in sharp contrast, 90 percent of white girls are unsatisfied. • Black girls saw beauty as deriving from “having the right kind of attitude” rather then the right kind of body. • They link beauty to dress, style and movement, emphasizing that beauty was within reach of any women who had pride in herself and her culture. • This study indicates that to challenge bodily oppression all women will have to work together to affirm diverse definitions of female beauty and productive values.

21. Further Questions: • Why do men suffer from eating disorders? • If the food obsession is connected closely with girl’s troubled transition to womanhood, why do preadolescents children experience it as well? • Are there women who are fat and happy in the United State?

22. “All authors imply that women need to learn that they have the right to eat and that contrary to what society tells them, their identity consists of more then how they look.”