This is particularly true on the man-pleasing front. Glamour magazine runs a feature called “43 ‘Don’t-Stop’s He’s Dying To Try Tonight.” Cosmo offers, “Be the Best Sex of His Life—How to Tease Him Mercilessly, Seduce Him Slowly, Then Rock His World in Ways He’s only Dreamed About!” Redbook, oddly obsessed with numbers as well as sex, provides, “Six Little Moves That Will Make Your Sex Life Hotter”; “Five Amazing Sex Tricks Every Woman Should Know”; “Ten Instant Tips for Better Sex”; and “Thirty-Five Sexy Places to Touch Your Man.” This is standard fare—stories about him, your man, what he’s dying to do—and I suspect they spring from the same river of silence and uncertainty that surrounded female sexual appetite when I was growing up. Certainly, they propose the same solution: If your own hunger is elusive—unknown, undiscussed, not quite permitted to exist on its own terms—focus on his: Look the right way and (more important) act the right way.
Lost in that solution, now as then, is any notion that sexual knowledge should be mutual, that female pleasure might depend on more than the ability to incite male pleasure. Lost, too, any sense of what it might be like to talk about female pleasure in more complicated or meaningful ways—let alone more helpful ones. In its 1999 report on sexual dysfunction, the Journal of the American Medical Association cited lack of interest in sex the most common problem among women: About a third of respondents in the JAMA study said they regularly didn’t want sex, twenty-six percent reported they regularly didn’t have orgasms, and twenty-three percent said sex wasn’t pleasurable. Right around the time that report came out, Glamour magazine’s cover featured a story called “Fifty Tricks for Outstanding Orgasms,” which turned out to be a rundown of directors’ cues, lighting tricks, and sexy soundtracks filched from Hollywood movies. For “raw, rip-off-my-clothes-and-take-me-now sex,” the magazine advised, simply pop in a tape of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” If you need a good “‘do-me’ costume,” try a skin-tight tanktop and pair of pants made from the same material used to make garden hoses (Carrie-Anne Moss wore one in The Matrix). And if you’re feeling shaky about your allure, just lie on your side; according to director Steven Soderbergh, women look better that way: “The S-shape curve of the body is the most erotic line.”
Whether such techniques do anything to advance a woman’s satisfaction is unaddressed, presumably because it’s beside the point. As Cosmo so aptly summed it up, the goal is to be the best sex of his life.
If sex, in my teens and early twenties, felt like an increasingly complicated game with daunting rules and no meaningful instructions, anorexia took me off the playing field altogether. Extremes of fat and thin have this effect: It is profoundly desexualizing to pare away curves or bury them under flesh, and this may help explain why eating disorders are showing up in girls at younger and younger ages—there’s something deeply self-protective about walking away from the sexual game, and no doubt something deeply tempting about doing so when the stakes feel so high and pressure-filled.
Fearful and disconnected from my body to begin with, I suspect a part of me welcomed this aspect of anorexia, needed and fueled the sense of cool metallic asexuality it offered. I used to run during those years, two- or three-mile stints that had the quality of forced marches, mandatory and punitive. I’d lace up my sneakers with dread, and I’d set out through the streets on the east side of Providence, and I’d push, each step a contest of will, the whole body tense and resisting, the matchstick legs wanting so badly to stop. The neighborhoods I ran through were lovely—serene and leafy and lined with elegant Victorians—but I didn’t really notice them, or take any pleasure in them. I focused on my feet, and on those skinny thighs, pumping pumping pumping, and I thought about calories: 100 burned per mile, the equivalent of half a container of yogurt; 200 for two miles, lunch. The body was a machine, or at least I wanted it to be: a system to be scrutinized and tinkered with, its input and output to be measured and controlled, its pain to be considered collateral, its capacity for pleasure irrelevant. The libido vanished along with flesh; sensuality became a distant memory, something other people experienced. I lived in my head, and only my head.
Very slowly, rowing began to alter that paradigm, which is why it seems radicalizing in retrospect, a first step toward a working relationship with my own body, instead of a battle. It changed me. Over time, I developed arms, strong and capable ones. My forearms grew firm and sinewy. My upper arms became toned, then defined, my shoulders round and strong. Rowing is actually considered a leg sport—a lot of the power of the stroke comes from the large muscles of thigh and butt—but the changes in my upper body were more visible to me, and in many ways more important, each sign of physical strength both correlating to and fueling a sensation of internal strength. That first summer, my own personal Summer of Love, I used to slip into the ladies’ room at work and secretly flex my biceps in front of the mirror, and the little thrill this gave me (muscles!) was utterly distinct from the thrill I’d once felt at my own emaciation, as different as self-care is from self-destruction, as giving is from withholding. The shift was indeed dramatic; since I’d begun obsessing about food, this was the first physical transformation I’d not undertaken in the service of slenderness.
Which is not to say that rowing single-handedly propelled me out of anorexia, or that it filled me with unconditional love for my own body, or that I burst forth from the river with strong arms and a newly feminized heart. Hardly. Recovery from eating disorders is an inherently murky and nonlinear process, motivation hard to assess, progress hard to quantify, and relapse hard to define. You can’t simply “stop” being anorexic or bulimic the way you quit drinking or give up drugs; you remain in constant and necessary contact with food, you have to make choices about it every day. Not atypically, there was nothing deliberate about my own path away from starving. I had no moment of sudden clarity or grace, no blinding transformation in which the wish to starve was replaced by the wish to change, I never woke up one day and said, Enough, nor did I outline or follow any specific post-anorexia program: Eat that amount of food, gain this amount of weight. Instead, the obsession with food loosened by slight degrees. I rowed. I went into therapy. I ate a tiny bit more, put on a pound, two pounds, five. Over time, the old system simply fell apart, eroded, became too stultifying and oppressive to maintain, and I recall the sensation of watching this happen, knowing I no longer had the will or energy to starve or the commitment to self-destruct but not really knowing how to live differently, how to make choices, how to define and respond to hunger.
This was deeply destabilizing, a gradual untethering of identity, like realizing your boat has come loose from its mooring and is drifting out to a dark sea. I spent a lot of time clinging to past behaviors and groping blindly for new ones, a puzzle in search of a grid. Who was I? What did I want? If starving didn’t fix me, what would? To an extent, this wild, grasping sensation goes with the addictive territory: Anorexics, like all addicts (and to some degree like most humans), are masters at seeking external solutions to internal sources of emptiness and distress, their lives dictated by a grand, encompassing hunt that revolves around a single phrase, if only. If only I lost another pound, and then another, and another. If only I ate a little less. If only I grew thinner. If only, if only, if only. This is useless thinking and I knew it—even mid-anorexia, I understood that the weight itself was essentially inconsequential, that I’d hideously inflated its importance, that the loss of a pound here or a pound there would not leave me with beauty or happiness, or protect me from anxiety or sorrow. But it is powerful thinking, too; the words beckoned with terrible force—if only, if only, as though this futile pursuit might actually take me somewhere I wanted to go, or yield a reward, a victory at the finish, a pot of gold at the end of that thin, thin rainbow.
What seems poignant to me today, and also deeply unfortunate, is the way in which that central addictive feeling—that sense of ravenous displaced need—not only lingered within me as I began to eat again, but also dovetailed wi
th the times. If only, if only: By the mid-1980s, this had become a cultural mantra, as well as a personal one, the deflection of hunger writ large and etched on plastic. Forget about the feminist sisterhood; by the time I began to re-enter the human social world, women were connecting not over politics and placards but over Prada and Evan Piccone, shared visions suddenly less cementing than shared aesthetics (“Love your shoes!”). Forget about activism: The impetus for social change began to vanish during those years in a haze of self-help workshops and how-to books, the long social view supplanted by the quick-fix tweaking of the inner child. And forget about such thorny issues as female sexuality and empowered desire: Bra burning, such as it was, gave way to binge shopping.
But isn’t this what Americans do best, the pursuit of happiness reconfigured as the pursuit of stuff, the diet, the toys, the boys, the magic bullet? And isn’t this what women, in particular, are encouraged to do? Find it, buy it, marry it, change it, hunt it down, wrap it in a pretty package and take it home: It may be a mirage, vast and ungraspable as mist, but the reach for easy solutions is in many respects the American way, our culture’s instinctive response to discomfort, and this form of displacement reached a stunning peak, and unprecedented intensity, in the eighties and nineties. In the last twenty years, Americans have become the most consumer-oriented population in modern history, spending three to four times as many hours shopping as Western Europeans, consuming more than $5 trillion worth of goods and services a year (more than double the consumption rate in the 1960s) and racking up a staggering amount of credit card debt (60 percent more than we incurred ten years ago). Behind such numbers, of course, is the very sense of wild need that so persistently drove me: a constant push to externalize, a clinging belief in the idea that every problem has an immediate solution, that every void can be filled with a product, a substance, something.
As a culture, we may have hit the wall on spending, or at least a wall: The fat, complacent America of the mid-1980s has vanished to an extent, the fantasy of instant millions as bankrupt as a dot.com start-up, the notion that every generation will fare better than the one before as battered as the Dow Jones on a bad day, our historic sense of invulnerability largely buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center. But we have not hit the wall on displacement, and perhaps never will. Whether we’re in the middle of a recession, a war, or a decade of Wall Street decadence, Americans have a long history of casting desire in the most tangible terms, well-being viewed as a commodity that can be bought, built, even medicated into existence, threats to well-being always (and in some respects increasingly) identified as starkly external. Depression is the problem; we have a drug for that. Fear is the problem; we can name the enemy (Soviet one day, Middle Eastern the next) and we can root him out.
As for murkier problems—emptiness, alienation, frustration, insecurity—we have a store for that, many stores, each one of them bursting with balm. This is the seduction, the velvety promise of consumer culture—fix what ails with a product; look outside the self—and if our spending power is somewhat diminished today, our tendency to transform emotional longings into material ones is not. We now live in a country in which four billion square feet of the total land area has been converted into shopping centers, about sixteen square feet for every man, woman, and child. We are awash in easy credit, eternally tempted by plastic apples: In 1995 alone, financial institutions sent out more than two and a half billion preapproved credit card applications, which means that if you’re an American between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four, you received seventeen of them in the mail. And we live and breathe information, consumer culture’s courier, its steady whispers of promise so integral to day-to-day living and so mercilessly reinforced it’s easy to forget where the word “consume” comes from (once upon a time, the verb meant “to waste, to eat up, to destroy”). It’s easy, too, to forget how efficiently a consumer mindset can imbue objects with meanings and capabilities far beyond their essence (Zest, in our world, can be lathered on with a bar of soap, empowerment swooshed on with a pair of Nikes), easier still to forget how much it can both feed and shape one’s baseline sense of hunger. I want becomes I want. And then I want becomes I want that.
In some critical respects, the very definition of satiety has changed in the last few decades, as well, I want gradually mutating into I need. The gap between the haves and the have-nots began to widen in the eighties (it’s a chasm today); middle-income workers like me suddenly found ourselves looking at a landscape populated by extremely high earners within more and more occupations (finance, real estate, sports, advertising, and media); the sudden visibility of the super-rich, paired with growing insecurity in the middle class, raised the bar on well-being, ratcheting up the collective sense of what it meant to be successful and satisfied and secure. Working at a business publication during those years gave me a close-up look at this shift: I both worked for such high earners and spent most of my time interviewing them—rich, middle-aged white guys who drove Porsche 911s and wore made-to-order Italian suits and drank $400 bottles of Chateau Latour—and I could almost feel the concept of keeping up with the Joneses begin to wither and die. People like me no longer measured ourselves against the folks next door. We looked at people at work, who often made two, three, or ten times as much as we did, and by portrayals, real and fictionalized, of people on TV and in magazine profiles.
I remember writing a profile of the president of a very hot little advertising agency on the North Shore of Boston in the mid-eighties. A proud member of the suddenly super-rich, he lived in a converted Japanese tea house by the ocean, perhaps the most exquisite home I’d ever seen, with a panoramic view of waves crashing on the rocks and a huge marble table that rose up from the middle of the dining area at the touch of a button. He had beautiful artwork, the most elegant furniture, the finest tailored suits. I felt so lacking, looking around at all his things, and so shabby and miniature by comparison, me, a speck of a person with a paltry $18,000-a-year salary and a ratty attic apartment and scuffed pumps. I developed a crush on him in about three seconds, which suggests just how seductive such pictures can be, how deeply the if onlys can grab you: If only I had that house, that artwork, that taste, that man, that would do it.
Things—identifiable objects, products, goals with clear labels and price tags, men you’ve known for five minutes—make such a handy repository for hungers, such an easy mask for other desires, and such a ready cure for the feelings of edgy discontent that emerge when other desires are either thwarted or unnamed. A woman I know—thirty-seven, independent, smart—is making herself crazy over real estate, wanting to buy a home, lusting after a home, driving to open houses at places way out of her price range, gawking at elegant vestibules, high ceilings, polished wood floors. She understands that this search is more metaphorical than real, she understands that moving from her perfectly fine apartment into a house would give her little more than a cosmetic upgrade and a monthly mortgage payment, and she understands that a geographic move would not fill the other holes in her life, which she admits are considerable: It would not fix her relationship or her career, both of which are stalled; it would not make her feel safer in the world or more optimistic about the future; she’d lug every ounce of her current dissatisfaction right into a new place. And yet the fantasy can render her powerless: If only she had those oak floors and those pretty bay windows, if only she had a sun-filled porch, and a fireplace with a marble mantle, and a kitchen with exposed brick, something fundamental about her life would be altered, improved, validated, massaged into the proper form. Identity bought and paid for; sense of belonging secured.
“Shopping,” a friend says, “is the five-pound bag into which we pour fifty pounds of insanity.” This is a woman who owns at least forty pairs of shoes, an entire rack of linen jackets, more makeup than an Avon sales rep. She is sick to death of shopping, sick of her own possessions, sick of how crazy-making the whole activity can be. And yet she acknowledges that in a very real way, shopp
ing is at least an option: It’s available, it’s there, it’s an outlet for the confusing range of hungers she often denies herself in the rest of her life. Eating too much is taboo. Sex is complicated. The body’s strange pairings of physical urges and psychic longings are mysterious and scary. But walk into a store, and suddenly nothing is forbidden or out of reach, the intangible is rendered clear and vivid and attainable. There is abundance in shopping instead of taboo, and so it’s no wonder a woman can go mad with acquisitiveness. The mathematics of desire is different in the world of things, the exchanges are direct: Take all those hidden, private longings related to food and sex and the body, bring them out into the marketplace to get them fed, bring them home in boxes and bags.
Fixing the outside, of course, rarely fixes the inside, but this was lost on me for many years. If anything, the consumer mindset that so powerfully took hold in the eighties merely mirrored and magnified what was for me an already potent sense of disconnection. I’d long ago learned, as a teenager, to see the body in external terms, to divorce its worth from the heart and mind; as an anorexic, I’d elevated that skill to an art form. And by the time I began to creep out of my anorexic cage, the ostensible merits of that skill were being preached from every mountaintop—or, at least, every billboard and TV screen. Steer the appetite away from the heart and out toward the world of products. Separate sexuality from warmth, passion, intimacy; fuse it even more thoroughly with appearance and desirability. The body—accessorized, well-dressed, beautified—is the ticket to well-being, sexuality, confidence, success; the soul is not.
Appetites Page 16
