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dying to be thin
The article below was written by Joyce Stoller, and first appeared in the February 1992 issue of Socialist Action newspaper. It is a review of the film, “The Famine Within,” a documentary film produced and directed by Katherine Gilday. Though several years old, YSA believes the issues raised in this review are just as pertinent as the day they were written.
“I’d rather be dead than be fat,” asserts an emaciated young woman in “The Famine Within.” This new film examines a little-talked about side of female oppression – the expectation to look, if not act, in a preordained way.
Every day, people are bombarded by thousands of images of svelte, slim, 110-pound, beautiful women. On TV and in films, billboards, and magazines, the images purveyed of women are all based on what we look like, rather than what we do in the world. These models are the only role models offered to young women, and may become obsessed with a culturally imposed ideal that is unrealistic and unrealizable for the vast majority.
According to the film, the prevailing cultural misogyny is so virulent that millions of women are suffering and dying from eating disorders.
“The cult of the body is the only coherent philosophy of self that women are offered,” says a cultural historian in the film, and this amounts to a “brilliant form of political oppression.”
To be sure, female suppression of our appetites and needs, even as we provide for others, is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian culture, beginning with Eve eating the apple getting us kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Medieval women starved themselves as a gesture of piety.
And who can forget Scarlet O’Hara eating before she went to a party in “Gone With the Wind,” and then stuffing herself into a corset so that she wouldn’t eat anything when she was actually with other people? Girdles, brassiers, garter belts, and heels, besides restricting women’s movement, are all designed to make us look taller and thinner than we naturally are.
An explosion of eating disorders
For centuries, women have been socialized to think of ourselves first and foremost as a “sight” for others. But despite, and perhaps because of, women’s changing roles and aspirations, there has been a 30-year trend towards an ever-slimmer ideal. This has led to an explosion of eating disorders that are as common today as sexual repression was in its day.
The average five-feet, eight-inch Miss America contestant weighed 132 lbs. In 1954 and 117 lbs. in 1980. The average North American woman is five-feet, four-inches tall and weighs 144 lbs., while the average model is five-feet, ten-inches tall and weighs 111 lbs., or 23 percent less on average.
In Gilday’s film, a modeling agency executive describes a contest they held to turn up “new talent.” Forty thousand women applied, and only four were thought to have possibilities.
The film then considers the extent to which even young girls are subject to society’s mania for thinness. A recent study found that 80 percent of fourth-grade girls in California had already been on their first diets. Another survey found that 75 percent of young women thought themselves too fat, even though 45 percent of them were actually underweight. Over half of North American women are on a diet at any given time, and they are happier about losing weight than about success in their careers or in love.
This debilitating physical ideal has enriched the pushers of diets, weight reduction drugs, fitness centers, and liposuction. At the same time, it has engendered an epidemic of anorexia nervosa (self-starvation) and bulimia (eating, then throwing up or using laxatives). It is estimated that 25 percent of women suffer from one of these disorders, and that is only one end of a long continuum.
Chris Alt, the heavier sister of super-model Carol Alt (who has appeared in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue), described how she felt when she saw a picture of Karen Carpenter shortly before the singer died of anorexia: “I thought she was lucky to be that skinny when she died, and I wondered how I could get that skinny without dying.”
Any number of female role models have acknowledged that they too were anorexic or bulimic to fit into their assigned roles. They included actress Jane Fonda, gymnast Nadia Comaneci, and ballerina Suzanne Farrell – who reports in here autobiography that the dance world is a breeding ground for bulimia, and that North American ballerinas are on average 10 lbs. Lighter than their European counterparts.
“I’m always going to eat later, and later never comes,” says Linda, a 27-year-old anorexic interviewed in the film. Linda, like 15 percent of all anorexics, is dead now.
“The Famine Within” explores not just the pathology of eating disorders; it tries to put them in a cultural context. Like famine, millions of women starving themselves is a social phenomenon, not just an individual psychological aberration.
The film’s title describes the inner emptiness that women feel that can never be satisfied with food, and how, given the lack of viable role models and opportunities, women’s energy is absorbed by the one thing we think we can control – the size and shape of our bodies.
Taking the die out of diet
In the film, we learn that women are naturally predisposed to be fatter than men, and that a certain amount of body fat is necessary for both menstruation and childbirth. The trend towards an ever skinnier ideal is seen as a backlash against women’s power (if not their size). Roundness is identified with femininity and passivity, and leanness with competence and success.
The film goes on to explain that there isn’t a strong correlation between calories and body size, and that yo-yo dieting can actually cause you to gain weight because it slows down the rate of metabolism. (Witness the public examples of Elizabeth Taylor and Oprah Winfrey – who lost 67 lbs. on a liquid diet, only to gain it all back).
In polar opposition to thin (“you can never be too rich or too thin”) the social stigma attached to obesity has come to symbolize only negative characteristics – e.g. “fat and ugly,” “fat and stupid,” “fat and lazy.”
“We’ve created a morals of biology, as if fat were a moral characteristic instead of a physical one,” cultural anthropologist Margaret MacKensie says in the film.
The recent spate of interest in women’s complex relationship with food and the stereotypes that feed it have given new meaning to the old phrase “fat is a feminist issue.” As social and political barriers all for women, we are still imprisoned by a cultural ethos that enjoins us to change just ourselves, and not the society that has given rise to such misbegotten attempts.
When high-profile men like Gandhi and Bobby Sands starve themselves, it’s considered a political event. But when millions of women do it, they’re considered fashion casualties and die unnamed and unknown. That may be difficult to stomach, but it’s certainly food for thought.
