The Beauty Myth (48 page)

182
Bulimic: Cited in Roberta Pollack Seid,
Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their Bodies
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 21.

182
Death rate: L.K.G. Hsu, “Outcome of Anorexia Nervosa: A Review of the Literature,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
, vol. 37 (1980), pp. 1041–1042. For a thorough overview of the literature, see L. K. George Hsu, M. D.,
Eating Disorders
(New York: The Guildford Press, 1990).

182
Never recover completely: Brumberg, op. cit., p. 24.

183
Medical effects: Brumberg, op. cit., p. 26. According to
The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Nutrition
(New York: Viking, 1985): “The patient’s teeth are eroded by acidity of ejected gastric contents. Imbalance of blood chemistry can lead to serious irregularities of the heartbeat, and to kidney failure. Epileptic seizures are not uncommon. Irregular menstrual pattern [leads to infertility],” op. cit.

183
Failure to thrive: Seid, op. cit., p. 26, citing Michael Pugliese et al., “Fear of Obesity: A Cause of Short Stature and Delayed Puberty,”
New England Journal of Medicine
, September 1, 1983, pp. 513–518. See also Rose Dosti, “Nutritionists Express Worries About Children Following Adult Diets,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 29, 1986.

180
50 percent of British women suffer: Julia Buckroyd, “Why Women Still Can’t Cope with Food,” British
Cosmopolitan
, September 1989.

183
Spreading to Europe: Hilde Bruch,
The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa
(New York: Random House, 1979), cited in Kim Chernin,
The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness
(New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 101.

183
Sweden: Cecilia Bergh Rosen, “An Explorative Study of Bulimia and Other Excessive Behaviours,” King Gustav V Research Institute, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, and the Department of Sociology and the School of Social Work, University of Stockholm, Sweden (Stockholm, 1988). “Social seclusion and economic problems were seen as the two most negative effects of bulimia. Although physical consequences were severe, the probands were not deterred by this. . . . In all cases bulimia was said to have caused social withdrawal and isolation” [p. 77].

183
Italian teenagers: Professor N. Frighi, “Le Sepienze,” Institute for Mental Health, University of Rome, 1989; study of over 4,435 secondary-school students.

183
Middle-class: Brumberg,
Fasting Girls
, p. 9. Ninety to 95 percent of anorexics are young, white, female, and disproportionately middle- and upper-class. The “contagion” is confined to the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and areas experiencing “rapid Westernization” [Ibid., pp. 12–13]. Recent studies show that the higher the man’s income, the lower his wife’s weight [Seid, op. cit., p. 16].

184
The look of sickness: Ann Hollander,
Seeing Through Clothes
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), p. 151.

184
The average model . . . 23 percent: Reported in Verne Palmer, “Where’s the Fat?,”
The Outlook
, May 13, 1987, quoting Dr. C. Wayne Callaway, director of the Center for Clinical Nutrition at George Washington University; cited in Seid, op. cit., p. 15.

184
Twiggy: Quoted in Nicholas Drake, ed.,
The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1988).

185
Playboy Playmates: See David Garner et al., “Cultural Expectations of Thinness in Women,”
Psychological Reports
, vol. 47 (1980), pp. 483–491.

185
25 percent on diets: Seid, op. cit., p. 3.

185
Glamour
survey: Survey by Drs. Wayne and Susan Wooley, of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, 1984: “33,000 Women Tell How They Really Feel About Their Bodies,”
Glamour
, February 1984.

187
Obesity . . . heart disease: See “Bills to Improve Health Studies of Women,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, August 1, 1990: According to Rep. Barbara Mikulski (Democrat, Maryland), nearly all heart disease research is done on male subjects; the National Institutes of Health spends only 13 percent of its funds on women’s health research.

187
J. Polivy and C. P. Herman: “Clinical Depression and Weight Change: A Complex Relation,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
, vol. 85 (1976), pp. 338–340. Cited in Ilana Attie and J. Brooks-Gunn, “Weight Concerns as Chronic Stressors in Women,” in Rosalind C. Barnett, Lois Biener, and Grace K. Baruch, eds.,
Gender and Stress
(New York: The Free Press, 1987), p. 237.

188
Other theories: Rudolph M. Bell,
Holy Anorexia
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985); Kim Chernin,
The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity
(London: Virago Press, 1986); Marilyn Lawrence,
The Anorexic Experience
(London: The Women’s Press, 1984); Susie Orbach,
Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age
(London: Faber and Faber, 1986); Eva Szekeley,
Never Too Thin
(Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1988); Susie Orbach,
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
(London: Arrow Books, 1989).

190
Rome: Sarah Pomeroy,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
(New York: Shocken Books, 1975), p. 203. Under Trajan, the allowance for boys was sixteen sesterces, twelve for girls; in a second-century foundation, boys were given twenty sesterces to girls’ sixteen [Ibid.].

190
Infanticide: M. Piers,
Infanticide
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); and Marvin Harris,
Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
(New York: Vintage, 1975).

190
Botswana: See Jalna Hammer and Pat Allen, “Reproductive Engineering: The Final Solution?,” in Lynda Birke et al.,
Alice Through the Microscope: The Power of Science Over Women’s Lives
(London: Virago Press, 1980), p. 224.

190
Less nutritious: See L. Leghorn and M. Roodkowsky, “Who Really Starves?,”
Women and World Hunger
(New York, n.a., 1977).

190
Turkey: Debbie Taylor et al.,
Women: A World Report
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 47.

190
Not hungry: While both Kim Chernin and Susie Orbach describe this pattern, they do not conclude that it directly serves to maintain a political objective.

190
Anemic: Taylor et al., op. cit., p. 8, citing E. Royston, “Morbidity of Women: The Prevalence of Nutritional Anemias in Developing Countries,” World Health Organization Division of Family Health (Geneva: 1978).

191
In a sample of babies: Susie Orbach, op. cit., pp. 40–41.

192
Healthy twenty-year-old female: Seid, op. cit., p. 175.

192
38 percent body fat: Anne Scott Beller,
Fat and Thin
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); for discussion of set-point theory (the weight which the body defends), see Seid, op. cit., p. 182. See also Gina Kolata, “Where Fat Is Problem, Heredity Is the Answer, Studies Find,”
The New York Times
, May 24, 1990.

192
Caloric needs: Derek Cooper, “Good Health or Bad Food? 20 Ways to Find Out,”
Scotland on Sunday
, December 24, 1989; Sarah Bosely, “The Fat of the Land,”
The Guardian
, January 12, 1990.

192
Women who exercise: Seid, op. cit., p. 40.

192
Ovarian cancer: Ibid., p. 29.

192
Inactive ovaries, Saffron Davies, “Fat: A Fertility Issue,” “Health Watch,”
The Guardian
, June 30, 1988.

192
Frisch: Rose E. Frisch, “Fatness and Fertility,”
Scientific American
, March 1988.

192
Low-birthweight babies:
British Medical Journal
, cited in British
Cosmopolitan
, July 1988.

192
But desire: Seid, op. cit., pp. 290–291.

193
Develop breasts: Magnus Pyke,
Man and Food
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 140–145.

193
Loyola University: Seid, op. cit., p. 360, quoting Phyllis Mensing, “Eating Disorders Have Severe Effect on Sexual Function,”
Evening Outlook
, April 6, 1987.

193
Exercisers lose interest in sex: Seid, op. cit., p. 296, citing Alayne Yatres et al., “Running—An Analogue of Anorexia?,”
New England Journal of Medicine
,” February 3, 1983, pp. 251–255.

193
Sexless anorexics: Brumberg, op, cit., p. 267.

193
Sexless bulimics: Mette Bergstrom, “Sweets and Sour,”
The Guardian
, October 3, 1989.

193
In India: Taylor et al., op. cit., p. 86.

193
Self-inflicted semi-starvation: Seid, op. cit., p. 31.

193
University of Minnesota: See ibid., p. 266; excerpts from Attie and Brooks-Gunn,
Gender and Stress
, op. cit.

194
Social Isolation: See Rosen, op. cit. See also Daniota Czyzewski and Melanie A. Suhz, eds., Hilda Bruch,
Conversations with Anorexics
(New York: Basic Books, 1988). See also Garner et al., op. cit, pp. 483–491.

194
Half-crazed confessions: Seid, op. cit., pp. 266–267.

195
[Dutch] great famine: Pyke, op. cit., pp. 129–130.

195
Lodz ghetto: See Lucian Dobrischitski, ed.,
The Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Jean-Francis Steiner,
Treblinka
(New York: New American Library, 1968).

195
Starvation rations: Paula Dranov, “Where to Go to Lose Weight,”
New Woman
, June 1988.

195
Food deprivation: Seid, op. cit., p. 266.

196
Eating diseases caused by dieting: Attie and Brooks-Gunn, op. cit., p. 243: “According to this perspective, dieting becomes an addiction, maintained by (1) feelings of euphoria associated with successful weight loss, requiring further caloric restriction to maintain the pleasurable, tension-relieving effects; (2) physiologic changes by which the body adapts to food deprivation; and (3) the threat of “withdrawal” symptoms associated with food consumption, including rapid weight gain, physical discomfort, and dysphoria.”

197
Woolf, op. cit., p. 10.

200
Austin Stress Clinic: Raymond C. Hawkins, Susan Turell, Linda H. Jackson, Austin Stress Clinic, 1983: “Desirable and Undesirable Masculine and Feminine Traits in Relation to Students’ Dieting Tendencies and Body Image Dissatisfaction,”
Sex Roles
, vol. 9 (1983), p. 705–718.

210
An indifferent eye: The Intercollegiate Eating Disorders Conference, mentioned by Brumberg [op. cit.], did draw many colleges’ representatives. But according to women’s centers in several Ivy League universities, eating diseases are not dealt with beyond self-help groups, and certainly not at an administrative level. The entire term’s budget for the Yale University Women’s Center is $600, up from $400 in 1984. “Diet-conscious female students report that fasting, weight control and binge eating are a normal part of life on American college campuses.” [Brumberg, op. cit., p. 264, citing K. A. Halmi, J. R. Falk, and E. Schwartz, “Binge-Eating and Vomiting: A Survey of a College Population,”
Psychological Medicine
11 (1981), pp. 697–706.]

213
Disgust: Quoted in Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr,
Face Value: The Politics of Beauty
(London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 141–142, 168–169.

213
Friedan: Betty Friedan,
Lear’s
, “Friedan, Sadat,” May/June 1988.

215
Meehan: Quoted in Jean Seligman, “The Littlest Dieters,”
Newsweek
, July 27, 1987.

215
Little girls’ cosmetics: Linda Wells, “Babes in Makeup Land,”
The New York Times Magazine
, August 13, 1989.

Page

218
Throughout the 1980s: The figure of more than 2 million Americans was up from 590,550 in 1986 (a rise of 24 percent from 1984). See
Standard and Poor’s Industry Surveys
(New York: Standard and Poor’s Corp., 1988) and Martin Walker, “Beauty World Goes Peanuts,”
The Guardian
(London), September 20, 1989. But since over 80 percent of eyelifts, facelifts, and nose operations are on female patients, as are virtually all breast surgery and liposuction operations, the true female-male ratio must be higher than 87 percent—meaning that cosmetic surgery is only properly understood as a
processing of femaleness
. See, for figures, Joanna Gibbon, “A Nose by Any Other Shape,”
The Independent
(London), January 19, 1989.

218
Violence, once begun: Angela Browne,
When Battered Women Kill
(New York: Free Press, 1987) p. 106.

220
The Emperor Constantine: Sarah Pomeroy,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
(New York: Shocken Books, 1975), p. 160.

220
Sontag: Susan Sontag,
Illness as Metaphor
(New York: Schocken Books, 1988).

221
Misbegotten man: Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English,
Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
(Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1973); “Repulsive and useless hybrid,” ibid., p. 28.

221
Michelet: Quoted in Peter Gay,
The Bourgeois Experience, Volume II: The Tender Passion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 82.

221
Separate sphere: See Sarah Stage,
Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 68.

222
1870–1920: Elaine Showalter,
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 18. See also Mary Livermore’s “Recommendatory Letter” and “On Female Invalidism” by Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in Nancy F. Cott, ed.,
Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women
(New York: Dutton, 1972), pp. 292, 304.