"A woman can never be too thin, too rich or have too many silk blouses." So goes the old saying. Every day women get told that being thin is the secret to being desirable.
Don't buy it.
Sexual attractiveness is in the eye of the beholder, but I
know from personal experience that our cultural obsession with
thinness can be deadly.
In
high school, I was what might be called pleasingly plump. Zaftig, as
my Jewish grandmother would say, with more than ample curves for a
teenager. Like many teens, I thought that I was fat. I always wanted
to be thinner, but somehow, I could never manage it. I enjoyed my
mom’s cooking too much.
Then,
in my senior year, faced with all the stress of applying to colleges
and the uncertainties of moving into the adult world, I began to lose
weight. First I stopped eating bread and potatoes. Then I stopped
adding milk to my coffee, drinking it black with artificial
sweeteners. I ate all the salad I could put away, leaving the meat on
my plate – cut into small pieces and spread around so that my
mother wouldn’t notice. I’d check the scales every day, feeling
pride whenever the numbers dropped, guilt and self-disgust when they
didn’t. I still recall my intense flush of pleasure when I went for
my annual checkup and weighed in at ninety-nine pounds. I’m just a
bit over five feet tall, so my doctor was not alarmed. I was
thrilled.
During
my senior summer, I worked as a clerk in a grocery store, ate raw
cucumbers and drank diet soda for lunch, and dropped more weight. By
the time September rolled around, I was in the mid-eighties. My
parents refused to let me enter university unless I gained weight. I
got back up to ninety-two pounds, started school, but dropped out in
a month, unable to muster the physical and emotional energy required.
My
life for the next year and a half was spent in a limbo of medical and
psychiatric institutions. At one point, I dropped below eighty
pounds. I stopped menstruating. My limbs were grotesque sticks. My
face was gaunt as a skull. My hair started to fall out. I was weak,
constipated, subject to palpitations and anxiety attacks. I read
voraciously during that period – that was about all that I could
do. I don’t recall anything now. Zilch. My brain didn’t have
enough nutrients to register new memories. In retrospect, the whole
period is shrouded in a fog.
Anorexia
had not yet become fashionable. I spent three months on the crisis
ward of a state psychiatric hospital with suicidal housewives and
drug addicts. I had to learn to trust my therapist when he told me
that it was okay to eat. I had to suppress my feelings of disgust
when I saw my weight climb back into a healthy range, and to deny the
supposed evidence of my distorted self-image when I viewed my “fat”
body in the mirror.
I
was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t die. I didn’t suffer any
permanent damage, other than my loss of memory. I have personally
known anorexics who were not so fortunate. Without treatment,
anorexia is fatal 20% of the time. Even with treatment, the mortality
rate is 3%. With treatment, only about 60% of anorexics fully
recover. (http://www.mirror-mirror.org). It took more than a decade
for my body image and my eating habits to return to “normal”.
Can
I blame my anorexia on the pervasive myth that “a woman can’t be
too thin”? Not directly, of course. Research has shown that
anorexia is as much about control and fear as it is about food.
Still, if I hadn’t felt fat, I wouldn’t have started to diet,
giving the obsession a chance to take hold. And I don’t think that
I would have thought I was fat if I had not been continually
bombarded by images of skinny women who were hailed as the ideal of
beauty.
As
the average weight of super models and movie stars has dropped, the
prevalence of anorexia has risen dramatically. Is there a
relationship? I think so. I was seventeen when I was diagnosed. Now
ten year old anorexics are becoming increasingly common. One study
found that 81% percent of ten year old girls and 46% of nine year
olds dieted. The
fear
of being fat is so overwhelming that young girls have indicated in
surveys that they are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of
cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents. (National Eating
Disorder Information Center, Canada http://www.nedic.ca/)
So
what, if anything, does this have to do with sex? I personally find
skinny women far less sexy than ones who are more well-endowed. It
occurs to me that the glorification of being thin in our culture
could be an unconscious repudiation of sex. Today’s models and
movie stars, with their narrow hips, flat stomachs, and A-cup
breasts, look more like children or young boys than adult women. They
are cool, graceful, elegant – but asexual.
They
are safe. They offer no ample flesh to tempt the mind and raise the
temperature, no perilous curves that lead you down the road to sin
and perdition.
You
may laugh, finding my thesis absurd. I have to tell you, as I watched
the pounds drop off, I felt pure and clean. Virtuous. My adolescent
sexual fantasies disappeared at the same time, melting away with my
fat and muscle. Eating became the cardinal sin, because it nurtured
the flesh, the evil blubber that threatened to consume me. Whenever
the attendants in the hospital made me eat, I felt dirty, disgusting,
smothered by my own body.
I’m
intensely grateful that that I escaped from that madness. Even now,
it’s all too vivid when I bring back the memories.
Now
when I see a woman walking down the street or on the subway with the
tell-tale bony knees, wasted arms and protruding cheekbones, a chill
runs through me. I want to shake her, show her a mirror, strip away
the hallucinations that make her believe she is still obese. When my
eleven year old niece complains about how fat she is, I choke back my
scream of frustration. You’re beautiful, Allie, I tell her,
absolutely perfect, not fat at all.
With
a sinking heart, I know that she doesn’t believe me.
