Each piece fragmented and judged and compared, each flaw known and perceived as grotesquely magnified, each part greater than the sum. Practiced over many years, this becomes such a familiar way of experiencing the body a woman may come to take it for granted, may come to hear the internal harangue as perfectly natural, may come to view the constant knowledge of shape and heft—how the body feels, what’s wrong with it, what’s bloated or flabby or too big or unshapely, how it’s moving, what’s going into the mouth, what’s coming out of it—as a routine and predictable part of daily life, as ordinary as blinking. Small wonder so many women segue instinctively into eating disorders, small wonder anorexia felt like such a natural solution to me: Starving, I simply drew on what I already knew about the body, capitalized on my ability to externalize it, elevated that ability into a kind of cruel performance art. And today, many years post-starving, I’m still a little astonished by the durability of early lessons. Thirty years past seventh grade, I’ve never questioned the attractiveness of my hands; thirty years later, I’m still self-conscious about those nostril veins.
In contemporary feminist writing about female bodies, you read a lot about the notion of inscription, an idea frequently evoked to explain the shaping of a woman’s self-image. Culture is written on the body, in this view, encoded on it. Fat, thin, sculpted, adorned, starved, stuffed, the female body is a kind of text which, properly deconstructed, may tell us a lot about how women are seen in the culture, and what they grapple with.
I find this image useful to a point; the anorexic is, surely, a walking manifesto about constraints on appetite, the bulimic a living testimony to both the vastness of a woman’s hunger and the vastness of her compulsion to deny it. The statistics on plastic surgery deliver an even bolder statement. One hundred and forty-thousand North American women had breast-augmentation surgery in 1999, a 413 percent increase from the number in 1992. The numbers on breast lifts increased by 381 percent in the same period. Chemical peels increased by 171 percent, eyelid surgery by 139 percent, tummy tucks by 227 percent, liposuction by 389 percent. This is a perfect example of the body as text, despair literally scored on skin, dissatisfaction etched with a scalpel.
But as convincing as such readings may be, I also find the inscription metaphor a little static, as though women were uniform sheets of blank paper, written upon by a detached third party, this external thing we call culture. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz uses the slightly more elastic image of calligraphy, a process that takes into account not just the act of writing but also the specific materials used to write and the distinctive interactions that take place between them; the final product—a woman’s core sense of self—will vary depending on the kind of paper used, its texture and capacity to resist or absorb messages, the quality of inscriptive tools, the quality of the ink.
This feels closer to the heart of self-image, how it’s formed, twisted, encoded with pride or shame, love or hate. It’s so easy, and so tempting, to lay the blame for women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies squarely at the feet of society and Madison Avenue. But when I think hard about my own anorexic years, when I recall what felt so needful and seductive about inhabiting that curveless, bloodless, bolted-down body, and when I think about the broad spectrum of feeling other women express through and about their own bodies—healthy feelings and destructive ones, painful ones and joyful ones—the truth seems to reach way past culture, past even the most misogynistic ads and images and mandates, and down into less visible internal corridors in which much more complicated interactions take place.
We are all inscribed, Grosz suggests, from the beginning. Like individual sheets of paper, we may be naturally fragile or resilient, naturally heavy or thin, inherently beautiful and distinctive or inherently ordinary and plain. These qualities bump up against circumstance, family, temperament, transforming us over time, shaping either resistance to societal mandates or vulnerability. There is fantastic range in this paradigm; it helps explain why cultural messages about appetite can assume such varying degrees of etched durability and also why culture is only one ingredient in a much larger soup.
A woman in her forties—quite beautiful, large-boned, naturally voluptuous—describes a typically defining moment from her teenage years, her mother racing up to her at a bowling alley, apparently humiliated on her behalf, and hissing, “Get a bra with cotton straps! You’re bouncing and your nipples are hard!” She recounts this, years later, with tears in her eyes, and as she speaks I think about a fine elegant sheet of paper from thick stock, suddenly, then repeatedly, stained with inkblots of shame, messages scrawled in anger and fear: Don’t take pleasure in the body, don’t show it off, the body is bad, you are bad. Another woman, a recovering bulimic, recalls a Thanksgiving dinner when she was an exquisitely shy fourteen-year-old, an uncle poking at the flesh near her breasts as she reached for second helpings of mashed potatoes, making a lewd comment about her weight. This is a soft-spoken, sensitive woman with an uncertain, self-conscious air; as she talks, I think of a delicate sheet of rice paper, fragile and absorbent, easily marred by a blunt, insensitive instrument. At a twelve-step meeting for love and sex addicts, I hear an incest survivor sum up the way in which a woman’s sense of sexuality can be indelibly etched with violence: “For years,” she says, “the only way I could feel sexual was to be in a relationship that made me feel ashamed and violated.” Listening to her, I think about how profoundly multilayered a woman’s self-image is, its strength subject to so many variables. A good calligrapher—a loving parent, a supportive teacher, a nurturing community—can make something beautiful out of the most ordinary paper, using the finest inks, carefully inscribing early messages about value and respect and loveability. And a bad calligrapher—neglectful, abusive, cruel—can devastate the finest.
My own sense of the body seemed to coalesce out of an odd combination of well-meaning calligraphers and woefully awkward tools. There were certainly no intentionally negative inscriptions: There was no violence in my household, no abuse, no contempt or alarm about my developing body during puberty. And yet something about the corporeal form—the body’s sexual power, its stubborn insistence on pleasure—was cast early on in negative, fearful terms, its hungers, its vulnerability, its capacity to be provocative etched as somehow dangerous, uncontrollable, not to be trusted.
I suppose silence was the first teacher, messages written in invisible ink. I once asked my sister what she thought we’d learned about the body when we were kids and she answered in a word: “Secrecy.” I nodded. There was almost no talk about the body in our household, no ease or lightheartedness about bodily functions or urges or needs, certainly no sense of bodily pride. None of us ever saw our parents naked, or even nearly naked. No one ever heard a word about sex, or a sound. Just before my sister and I reached puberty, our mother took us aside, one at a time, and gave us the most awkward lectures about menstruation: She delivered mine one morning in the car just before dropping me off at school, framing it around a character from a Harriet the Spy novel who’d gotten her period. Did I know what had happened to this character? Did I have any questions? I was so embarrassed by her embarrassment I just muttered a few things (yup, nope) and fled.
I noticed tiny differences in other people’s homes, hints of more relaxed relationships to the body. A friend’s mother used to wake her up every morning with a backrub, which seemed astonishing to me, so tenderly tactile I could hardly imagine it. Another kept candles by her bathtub, and a whole array of bubble baths and scented soaps, which seemed the most lovely nod to luxury. And once, I saw a friend’s parents dancing to 1940s swing music in their living room, the father twirling the mother, then holding her close, the mother tipping her head back and laughing out loud: This was like watching a movie to me, a foreign film. I’d never seen such a display between my parents, never gotten a sense of play about the body, or a feeling that it had special powers: to touch, to soothe, to reassure, to arouse. Instead, I picked up an opposing set of sensations: a kin
d of don’t-ask, don’t-tell, don’t-touch embarrassment about physical matters; a suspicion—not confirmed for many years—that my parents’ unhappiness had a sexual component; and a related idea, faint but pressing, that the body had the power to incite not pleasure but trouble.
From my peers, I learned more complicated lessons, the edgy silence at home complicated in high school by a growing awareness that the body in fact had a great deal of power and influence, that it dictated standing in the social hierarchy, that it factored into one’s most basic value, its gain or its loss. As they had been in seventh grade, the sources of gain were clear—beauty, slenderness, rosy skin, and shiny hair as the fast tracks to cachet—but they seemed to grow more tenuous over time: Value and standing, and their attendant feelings of safety, could be lost in a heartbeat, and I can remember with Technicolor clarity what it felt like to walk the tightrope of adolescent self-consciousness, the body a vital commodity that might betray you at any moment; a zit might erupt overnight, a tampon might leak, a flaw might be revealed. Elizabeth Grosz writes, “There remains a common coding of the female body as a body which leaks, which bleeds, which is at the mercy of hormonal and reproductive functions. Women’s bodies are seen as uncontrolled, expansive, irrational . . . a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping, dirty thing.” This may be an ancient conception, too, a theme echoed repeatedly in Western philosophy, but I picked it up in high school; an aura of tittering embarrassment about the body seemed to hover in the air like a vapor, and so did a low-level worry about its unpredictability, its capacity to ooze, smell, shame. I can remember, too, the fear, which was grinding and perpetual, of being exposed as too much of anything in high school: too loud, too brainy, too large-breasted, too small-breasted, too sexual, too easy, regulations all based on the unstated but clearly understood assumption that there were lines to navigate, controls to be exercised, excesses not to be exposed. And, of course, punishments to be suffered if the navigational systems failed, jeers and eye rolling to be endured, the voice of castigation audible in whispers: She has terrible breath. I’d die if I had skin that bad. Can you believe she went to third with him? Are you sure these pants look okay? Are you sure? The body could grant standing and value, but only if maintained with the utmost vigilance and care.
Pride, which may be the antidote to body-loathing, is such a slippery sensation; if it’s not etched onto you at the core, it’s enormously hard to hold onto, and its impermanence leaves you with a wobbling uncertainty, grasping for ballast. Photographs of me in high school show a young girl with an expression of formlessness, no apparent center, a pretty but rather blank sheet of paper that I struggled awkwardly to self-inscribe: eye makeup applied with a self-consciously heavy hand; clothes chosen to model myself on other girls; eyebrows plucked into a look of chronic surprise. I’d become fairly adept by that time at finding ballast in the realms of academia and friendship—I knew what was expected of me from teachers and girlfriends, I responded accordingly—but the more concretely physical realms of attraction and sexuality eluded me entirely. I had no social confidence with boys, no sense that I had anything of innate value to offer. I had none of the personality traits they seemed to find attractive, there was not an ounce of anything chatty or outgoing or perky about me, and so the body—this mysterious, secretive, unpredictable thing that boys seemed to admire and respond to nonetheless—became a source of power and also a source of the most profound confusion. It could provoke a kind of interest I wanted but one that also felt unknown and tinged with embarrassment to me, off limits; it could confirm value, but only a particular kind, one that needed to be managed—seized and sexualized—in order to be brought into existence. This is a fearsome combination; power is scary when you don’t know what to do with it, scarier still when you’re not sure how deeply it runs, when you’re not convinced it even exists beneath the thin waist and the shiny hair, when it needs to be constantly reinforced by other people, whose judgment you may not even trust.
And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn’t exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop.
In the pre-starving days (and the post-starving ones, for that matter), I used alcohol to fend off the discomfort, to dilute inhibition and wash away anxiety, and the strategy worked quite well, at least in its limited, situational way. Drunk, I could inhabit the body instead of fearing it, or at least I could pretend to; drunk, I could sidetrack uncertainty, deaden it altogether. What I could not do, drunk, was learn much of anything. My fear and shame of fear, my body, hunger itself—all of these remained relatively unexplored, dots on some distant and foreboding landscape, and I did my best to keep them that way.
Periodically, though, I’d get a glimpse of the landscape, a peek at its complexity. I’d get drunk at a party and wake up in some guy’s bed, aware in only the haziest way of flirting the night before, of yielding to that power, hungry for that ballast, and humiliated by it in the crush of a hangover, knowing the validation it gave me was alcohol-fueled and false, its effects transient and tissue-thin. Or I’d realize that someone was attracted to me—usually someone inappropriate, an older man, or a figure of some authority or hero worship—and I’d sink into a kind of terrified ambivalence in the face of it, afraid to respond to his sexual interest but also afraid to reject it, loath to spurn something that seemed at once so tangible and so very precarious. What I lacked, in all such situations, was a gut-level sense of agency and integrity, one that could be expressed through the body because it existed within the soul; the body, my body, was not something I trusted and knew and cherished, because those very feelings so eluded me at the heart, they never felt fully inscribed.
The summer before I began to starve in earnest, my father confessed to a long-standing affair, causing a brief separation between my parents and, for the first time, an acknowledgment to my siblings and me about the depths of their troubles. This was confirming news in some respects—it certainly gave their unhappiness a name and a face—but it was also deeply unsettling. My father had seemed like the most powerful man to me, an idolized figure and also a rather fearsome one, with a brusque manner and a brilliant mind and a piercing gaze that made you feel he could see right through you. I’d always imagined his reserve and acuity and vast intellect to be evidence of the most exquisite control, as though he’d achieved a kind of mastery over ordinary human impulses, and while his confession didn’t entirely knock him off the pedestal, it did say something about the explosive power of bodily appetites, their inability to be transcended, their potential to wound.
At almost precisely this time, I had a brief, ultimately unconsummated but agonizing affair with my college thesis advisor, a man (married, many years older than I) whom I’d revered and considered a mentor, and who fell into that category of inappropriate authority figures: someone whose approval I’d coveted, and whose sexual interest in me I’d recognized, reciprocated, and denied all at once. He’d taken me to lunch a few days after graduation; we’d had martinis and wine, I’d been heady with his attention, aware of the sexual charge behind it, aware of enjoying it, courting it, and simultaneously fearing it, and when we got into his car after lunch and he lurched over and started to kiss me, I felt thrilled, horrified, and also completely complicit, understanding in some wordless way that I’d exercised a power I hadn’t quite been willing to acknowledge I possessed. He was the first professor I’d had at Brown
who made me feel special, a feeling I’d needed desperately, a hunger I’d acknowledged; I’d fueled his interest, and I’d participated in sexualizing it, for the alternative, I felt, was to lose it altogether. And so I just sat there in the car, stunned and paralyzed, feeling his hands on my breasts, his breath on my neck.
Until I worked up the courage to flee, we met half a dozen times over a series of weeks, boozy lunches followed by the most excruciating gropings, almost always in his car. My West Coast boyfriend, a man I honestly loved, was living with me in Providence at the time; I was trying to hide the betrayal from him as well as my sense of appalled complicity about it. My mother briefly left my father, moving out of the house in a rage. The simmering truths boiled over, messages once written in invisible ink became distinct, printed in boldface: Neediness is bad, hunger is bad, the body is bad, it all causes confusion, mayhem, heartbreak, anguish.
I danced around that feeling for a year, eating, starving, bingeing, dieting, all of it traceable to anxiety and guilt, certainly, but also to that deeper mistrust of body and self, a conviction that something terrible might erupt if the body wasn’t roped in and belted down, its hungers locked behind doors. I danced and danced and when I couldn’t bear it any longer, I shut the system down altogether.
Appetites Page 12
