In the midst of the consumer din, feminism became something of an echo, a distant tick on another generation’s clock. By the time I moved to Boston, the word itself had lost its revolutionary sheen, acquiring instead the eye-rolling associations that still linger in some circles: extremism, humorlessness, a shrill, man-hating stridency. A Time/CNN poll conducted mid-decade found that only thirty-three percent of women called themselves feminists, only sixteen percent of college-age women. Membership in the League of Women Voters began its precipitous decline in the eighties (it’s now half of what it was in 1970). The number of women running for state legislatures began to level off, then decline; the handful of women who made it to Congress stalled at a handful. The earthquake, it seemed, had passed.
I certainly called myself a feminist in those years, but I did so in a rather reflexive, ill-considered way, and I can recall quite clearly the creeping feeling of irrelevance, the sense of something being over and done with. This was true of political activism in general, which began to give way to apathy and disenchantment in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, but it may have been particularly true on the feminist front, its urgency dampened not just by backlash but also by the movement’s very success. Women of my generation were no longer armed for battle; we’d never had to face the front lines. We hadn’t had to muscle our way onto athletic fields or into universities or job interviews. We paid our own rent and bills, we got abortions if we needed them, we had what felt like the ultimate freedom, which was the freedom to be oblivious about history, to take our rights for granted, to forget how hard-won and new they were, to look back at sixties-style feminism with a yawn and a shrug, as though it were all somewhat tedious and dramatic. Consciousness-raising groups? BYO-speculum parties? Please.
This, I think, was a powerful combination, and also a powerful loss, the explosion of an externalizing consumer mindset—buy, shop, spend—in lockstep somehow with the diminishment of feminist visibility and momentum. It made the air even heavier with false promise, it skewed definitions of desire in the most intractable ways. It also warped perspective, that thick fog of feminist forgetting obscuring the bitter fact that the struggle to feel entitled and whole was by no means over. Recalling that period, I’m reminded of how profoundly unsettling it was to try to give up the structure and control of starving, how unfamiliar my body began to feel, how daunting it was to re-enter the world, where questions about desire and need arose at every turn: employers to be negotiated with; men to be intimate with, or not; a lifetime of baggage about appetite to unpack. How to appear professional and serious in front of a boss instead of young or nervous or cute? How to tease out sexual desire from the desire for validation? How to tackle or even frame questions about female authority, size, agency, ambition? The world had so recently opened its doors to women, it seemed, and then so suddenly stopped talking about what that meant, how it felt, what challenges it presented, and when I paged through the lifestyle sections of the newspapers or the women’s magazines for guidance, I found only the thinnest dribs and drabs of advice, most of it summed up in that pat and deflecting and woefully inadequate bit of eighties-speak, dress for success. Forget about the tricky emotional landscape. Forget about the relationship between head and heart. Forget about the professional world, with its looming issues of power and compensation. Try this power suit with the forty-inch shoulder pads. Try control-top panty hose. Externalize the problem, go shopping.
Of course, this has been the solution to distress—particularly female distress—for centuries in Western culture, well-being linked to externals then gift-wrapped and tied with pretty bows. Karl Marx first wrote about the phenomenon of displacement 150 years ago, describing the ways in which commodities become substitutes for “real human and natural faculties,” such as power and talent and ambition. And as any good feminist economist will tell you, the deflecting power of consumerism has a long and well-earned reputation for serving men, and serving them quite effectively: They control the marketplace, and they permit women to be in charge of the goods, an activity that fills up lots of time, steers energy in limited and specific directions (toward decorating, adorning, pleasing the eye), and also has a marvelously mind-numbing effect. In the world of things, there’s not a problem—not a thwarted ambition or an itch of longing or a hot surge of rage—that can’t be renamed and soothed away with a product.
Second-wave feminism, very briefly, blew open that paradigm: It gave women an entire vocabulary of desire, their own linguistic take on the subject—broad constructions instead of narrow ones, social visions instead of material ones, words like “rights” and “entitlements” instead of “lipstick” and “floor polish”—and it gave them a megaphone with which to broadcast it. This is what seemed to go missing in the eighties, the power of that language, and the connective tissue of female indignation and focus that formed it, and the thick sense of community and sisterhood it produced. By the mid-eighties, the refrains of female strength and unity had become the cant of salesmanship, put through Madison Avenue’s mill and duly commoditized, diluted, and trivialized in so many Virginia Slims campaigns (“You’ve come a long way, baby”), maxipad commercials (“Get the power!”), and hairspray ads (“New Freedom”). This, too, is what I have in mind when I say I missed the boat on feminism: By the time I came out of my self-imposed exile, I associated the letters ERA with the laundry detergent, not equal rights.
I also developed, I think, a fairly flat and limited view of this new post-feminist terrain. The ad I remember most clearly from that period was for Enjoli perfume, a TV spot that featured a power-suited woman clutching a frying pan in one hand and a briefcase in the other, a voice-over of lusty confidence crooning, “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man.” This was the prototypical having-it-all superwoman, equally at home in the bedroom, the boardroom, and the kitchen, and while I didn’t take the ad particularly seriously, I can’t entirely say I rejected the ideal it held up, either. Ads tell us who we are supposed to be, and this one—ludicrously, perhaps but very efficiently—captured some coveted combination of beauty, power, and confidence, then wrapped it up as a done deal. Case closed, end of struggle, a woman’s triumvirate longing—for ambition, family connection, and sexual expression—available not through the grueling work of social change but through perfume, smart suits, leather accessories. I suppose this is why I remember it all these years later; on some level, the image must have seemed legitimate. At that point on the continuum of cultural history, several degrees removed from active or meaningful talk about what beauty and power and confidence actually meant, I thought I should know, intuitively, how to be that woman, how to combine sexuality and ambition, how to navigate all those fuzzy lines between femininity and authority, relationships and autonomy. And not knowing these things intuitively, I thought I was missing something, or had missed something, or (more hopefully) might acquire something if only I looked in the right places . . . if only, if only. This is what’s insidious about consumerism: It’s not that it encourages us to shop but that it encourages us to forget, not that it sparks need but that it dilutes it, shrink-wraps it and flings it into the handiest and most tangible containers.
Very gradually, almost seamlessly, I yielded to that press; the old hunt morphed into new hunts: If being thin didn’t give me beauty and power and confidence, maybe this would, maybe that would. This is fairly typical of recovery from eating disorders—modifying the behavior doesn’t necessarily end the hunt; the if onlys often change primarily in name—but it was typical of the times, too, each inchoate longing piloted toward something, someone, the next great elixir. I fell quite naturally into the consumer frenzy, racked up an obscene amount of credit card debt in the eighties, spent more time than I care to admit pawing through department store racks, shopping in that greedy, disconnected way that almost always speaks to a hunger for something more complicated than the objects at hand: for identity, confidence, a persona magically crafted ou
t of fabric and thread. Obsessions with men loomed large in those years, too, particularly with men who seemed to possess qualities I coveted but felt I lacked, men who might imbue me by association with power and competence, as if such attributes were contagious. These relationships were uniformly destructive (at least for me) and uniformly consuming, such an edge of desperation to them, such a compelling need to have someone fill in the blanks where anorexia used to be—tell me who I am, tell me who to be—and such a powerful if only behind each one: If only I could get this man to love me, then I’d be safe, then I’d be proven worthy, then I could land. And alcohol loomed large, an almost seamless segue from eating too little to drinking too much. This, of course, was the simplest of external fixes, a concept advertisers reinforce to the tune of $1.1 billion a year. Alcohol was golden and available and marvelously effective, the word proof on its very label, fear washed away in fluted glasses of Chardonnay and tumblers of Scotch, confidence bottled and bought, the object of the hunt—if only I felt more relaxed, more attractive, more self-assured—temporarily but very efficiently achieved. Consumerism thrives on emotional voids; that externalizing press is very seductive if you feel empty and ill-defined and wanting, and I was perfect bait for its lure: young, uncertain, desire an unsolvable riddle. I bit and bit and bit. A decade of displacement, hunger chasing its tail.
A sense of possibilities atrophies without outrage, vision withers without unity, the language of desire grows hollow when it’s not spoken from the heart.
Leafing through some women’s magazines not long ago, I found a number of stories that seemed to be heralding a revival of vision, the beginnings of a new, more accepting view of self. In Shape: a feature called “How 25 Women Got Over Their Bad Body Images.” In Oprah’s magazine, O: a piece called “Hey, Gorgeous! (Yes, We Mean You): The Art of Loving Your Looks.” In Glamour: a story called “Love Your Butt, Chest Size & Belly Bulges.”
I flipped through. I read. My heart sank. Shape’s story turned out to be a feature on a four-day “Body Positive” workshop held at the Canyon Ranch Spa, in Tucson, Arizona—quite nice for the twenty-five women who could afford the $1,650 price tag, but not exactly a ticket to self-esteem for the wider public. The subtext of O’s piece could be summed up in two words: new makeup. And Glamour’s prescription for body-love turned out to be a four-page spread exhorting women to act sexually enthusiastic no matter how they feel about their bodies, a piece that managed to be both ego-boosting and condemning in the same breath. “Before you start blaming your satisfactory-but-hardly-stellar sex life on a bad boyfriend, bad timing, or bad feng shui,” the author quipped, “consider that a more obvious culprit could be coming between you and the spectacular sex you deserve: you.”
I laughed out loud at that Glamour magazine, and then I hurled it across the room, but as absurd as I found it, the piece stirred something in me, some memory of the anorexic loneliness and isolation and self-centered fear, some awareness of its persistence as a female state, and some sense of the cost of our diminished outrage. I suppose it’s the circulation numbers that get to me—the image of 2.1 million young women, anxious about belly bulges and hunched over Glamour; 2.6 million with Cosmo, trying to figure out how to “Drive Him Loco with Lust”; 2.2 million with Redbook, wondering if there really is such a thing as a “Better-Orgasm Diet.” Perhaps many of those women are also hurling the material skyward in an offended snit, but I also know that this stuff can suck you in against all better judgment, that it can tap at a lingering suspicion that you’ve missed something along the way, or might miss something if you don’t pay close attention: some key information, some instruction in the art of femininity and self-improvement, some easy way to leapfrog into the land of beauty and sexual prowess, which can look so very much like the land of bliss.
I also know how numbing this mindset can be, how easily it can derail a woman’s anger, which is generally the most efficient catalyst for change, if not the only one. Several months ago, I spent some time talking to a forty-three-year old woman named Francine, a full-time secretary at a law firm, mother of two, and a textbook example of contemporary female burnout, the kind that by all accounts ought to foster outrage. Francine—exhausted, eyes hollow with dark circles—is the having-it-all Enjoli powerhouse mutated into the icon of doing-it-all isolation and fatigue. Despite the presence of an able-bodied husband, a commercial contractor, she does all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the grocery shopping and laundry, and the bulk of the child care, which remains, four decades of social change notwithstanding, par for the course. (Women today still spend on average about twenty-five hours a week doing unpaid household labor; although that is quite a bit less than the thirty-nine hours that women in 1968 logged on average, if you factor in the increased hours today’s women work at outside jobs, the figures show how burdensome having it all and doing it all has become.) Francine’s father died recently after a four-year battle with cancer; she bore the bulk of responsibility for caring for him and still maintains primary responsibility over her aging mother, who lives a forty-five-minute drive away. This is also standard: More than half of all women and nearly two thirds of women with children expect to be responsible for caring for an elderly parent or relative in the future. Because she has health insurance, Francine is on slightly safer ground than many working women (about one quarter have no employee-sponsored health coverage at all), but like a full third of women like her, she has almost no control or flexibility over her work hours, and no paid leave to care for a child or an ill family member. In response to an AFL-CIO survey of working women conducted in 2000, more than half of all mothers with children under six said they found it harder to balance family and work than they did four years earlier; thirty percent said they found it much harder. Francine puts herself in the latter camp without hesitation: “It gets harder every year.”
When Francine gets distressed and overwhelmed by all of this, which is often, she eats and she shops, and then she berates herself for eating and shopping. We sat in her kitchen, drinking tea, and she pointed to a heap of publications on a counter: beauty and fashion magazines, clothing catalogues, home and garden catalogues, catalogues with kitchen equipment and athletic gear, dozens of yellow Post-It notes sticking out from the pages. “I can be so bad,” she said. “I’ll stay up until one in the morning going, ‘Oooh, I want that; oooh, I want that.”’ This is not a superficial woman. She is acutely aware that the eating is about anxiety, the shopping about a need for solace, and that both are misguided approaches, or at least limited ones. She also understands the need for more comprehensive and complex solutions, ones that might tackle her brand of burnout and frustration head-on. We spent several minutes talking about subsidized child care, family-leave policies, changes that might make workplaces more compatible with family life, the wish for a more woman-driven and woman-friendly political and corporate climate; Francine nodded and nodded, but then she seemed to grow weary of the subject and shrugged the matter off, as if to say, Oh, well, nice pipe dream. She said she’s “just not much of a fighter” these days. She says she’s “lost faith” in feminism, and that she’s grown pretty apolitical over the years, disenchanted, cynical, frustrated by the sense that no one in Washington really has her best interests at heart. Asked if any of this makes her angry, she smiled a little wistfully and said, “I don’t really have the energy to get angry. I mean, what good would it do?” Then she added, rather brightly: “I guess that’s why we shop; it’s a whole lot quicker to get new curtains.”
Francine, of course, is quite correct—curtains can be had in a mouse-click or a phone call—and this is an understanding that consumer culture is all too willing to support. In its hands, a woman’s distress—her unhappiness, stress, unsatisfied hungers, fears—is presented as an individual problem, not a social one; its solution must be worked out in isolation, with assistance, of course, from MasterCard and Visa. Collapsing under the superhuman weight of caring for kids, spouse, parents, and self? Order this “s
tress-busting” exercise video, send away for those curtains. Carve out ten minutes for yourself at the end of the day and light an aromatherapy candle, take a bubble bath. Better yet, go buy yourself something pretty, which is still the assumed hunger, even when women themselves are doing the assuming. What do women really want? Log onto iVillage.com, one of the new breed of Web sites designed “by women, for women” and find out. In iVillage, they want “Three-Hundred-and-Sixty-Five Answers to Women’s Everyday Problems” (#123: ‘Lose Those Love Handles!’).” They want quizzes (“How Sexy Are You?”). They want shopping guides and shopping tips, and so they turn to “Della, the Gift Expert” and “Missy, the Shopping Expert.” Presumably, they want to keep their credit card numbers handy, too: The site offers links to sites like Nordstrom’s, Spiegel, and Origins.
This is a cut-and-paste approach to appetite, hungers and strivings not only displaced but also boxed up and segregated into distinct compartments, as though they’re self-enclosed entities that can be experienced and managed on an as-needed basis, one-appetite-at-a-time: For career advice, click here; for tidbits about food and diet, click there; for tips on how to feel sexy even after you’ve worked a twelve-hour day and taken the kids to soccer practice and grocery shopped for your ailing mother and mopped the kitchen floor, turn to page eighty-two. Sexy? How about brain-dead?
Or, alternately, how about mobilized? How about infuriated? This is what saddens me when I think about my own grasping reach for externals over the years, and about the fervor with which I rerouted so many longings—for connection, for validation, for identity, for relief—away from food and into the worlds of men and things and substances. I can’t say with any certainty that following a more politically enlightened or activist path would have made me a dramatically different person, that it would have guaranteed me a healthier relationship with my body or dampened the allure of false gods. But I can say that in leaving anorexia behind, I didn’t find much of a cultural nature to replace it, the if onlys were not naturally coaxed in non-material directions, either in toward the deeper emotional world or out toward the wider political one. If something was missing in the air back then, if something’s missing still, it was a sense of broad alternative vision, a language that might have encouraged women to talk not about new things to want but about new ways to want.
Appetites Page 17
