Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (22 page)

While the body is experienced as alien and outside, the soul or will is described as being trapped or confined in this alien "jail," as one woman describes it.
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"I feel caught in my body," "I'm a prisoner in my body":
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the theme is repeated again and again. A typical fantasy, evocative of Plato, imagines total liberation from the bodily prison: "I wish I could get out of my body entirely and fly!"
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"Please dear God, help me. . . . I want to get out of my body, I want to get out!''
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Ellen West, astute as always, sees a central meaning of her selfstarvation in this "ideal of being too thin, of being
without a body."
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Anorexia is not a philosophical attitude; it is a debilitating affliction. Yet, quite often a highly conscious and articulate scheme of images and associations—virtually a metaphysics—is presented by these women. The scheme is strikingly Augustinian, with evocations of Plato. This does not indicate, of course, that anorectics are followers of Plato or Augustine, but that the anorectic's metaphysics makes explicit various elements, historically grounded in Plato and Augustine, that run deep in our culture.
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As Augustine often speaks of the "two wills" within him, "one the servant of the flesh, the other of the spirit," who "between them tore my soul apart," so the anorectic describes a "spiritual struggle," a "contest between good and evil," often conceived explicitly as a battle between mind or will and appetite or body.
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"I feel myself, quite passively," says West, "the stage on which two hostile forces are mangling each other."
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Sometimes there is a more aggressive alliance with mind against body: "When I fail to exercise as often as I prefer, I become guilty that I have let my body 'win' another day from my mind. I can't wait 'til this semester is over My body is going to pay the price for the lack of work it is currently getting. I can't wait!"
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In this battle, thinness represents a triumph of the will over the body, and the thin body (that is to say, the nonbody) is associated

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with "absolute purity, hyperintellectuality and transcendence of the flesh. My soul seemed to grow as my body waned; I felt like one of those early Christian saints who starved themselves in the desert sun. I felt invulnerable, clean and hard as the bones etched into my silhouette."
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Fat (that is to say, becoming
all
body) is associated with the taint of matter and flesh, "wantonness,"
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mental stupor and mental decay.
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One woman describes how after eating sugar she felt "polluted, disgusting, sticky through the arms, as if something bad had gotten inside."
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Very often, sexuality is brought into this scheme of associations, and hunger and sexuality are psychically connected. Cherry Boone O'Neill describes a latenight binge, eating scraps of leftovers from the dog's dish:

I started slowly, relishing the flavor and texture of each marvelous bite. Soon I was ripping the meager remains from the bones, stuffing the meat into my mouth as fast as I could detach it.

[Her boyfriend surprises her, with a look of "total disgust" on his face.]

I had been caught redhanded . . . in an animalistic orgy on the floor, in the dark, alone. Here was the horrid truth for Dan to see.

I felt so evil, tainted, pagan In Dan's mind that day, I had been whoring after food.
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A hundred pages earlier, she had described her first romantic involvement in much the same terms: "I felt secretive, deceptive, and . . . tainted by the ongoing relationship" (which never went beyond kisses).
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Sexuality, similarly, is "an abominable business" to Aimee Liu; for her, staying reedthin is seen as a way of avoiding sexuality, by becoming "androgynous," as she puts it.
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In the same way, Sarah, a patient of Levenkron's, connects her dread of gaining weight with "not wanting to be a 'temptation' to men."
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In Liu's case, and in Sarah's, the desire to appear unattractive to men is connected to anxiety and guilt over earlier sexual abuse. Whether or not such episodes are common to many cases of anorexia,
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''the avoidance of any sexual encounter, a shrinking from all bodily contact," is, according to Bruch, characteristic of anorectics.
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Having examined the axis of continuity from Plato to anorexia, we should feel cautioned against the impulse to regard anorexia as

expressing entirely modern attitudes and fears. Disdain for the body, the conception of it as an alien force and impediment to the soul, is very old in our Greco Christian traditions (although it has usually been expressed most forcefully by male philosophers and theologians rather than adolescent women!).

But although dualism is as old as Plato, in many ways contemporary culture appears
more
obsessed than previous eras with the control of the unruly body. Looking now at contemporary American life, a second axis of continuity emerges on which to locate anorexia. I call it the
control axis.

The young anorectic, typically, experiences her life as well as her hungers as being out of control. She is a perfectionist and can never carry out the tasks she sets herself in a way that meets her own rigorous standards. She is torn by conflicting and contradictory expectations and demands, wanting to shine in all areas of student life, confused about where to place most of her energies, what to focus on, as she develops into an adult. Characteristically, her parents expect a great deal of her in the way of individual achievement (as well as physical appearance), yet have made most of the important decisions for her.
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Usually, the anorexic syndrome emerges, not as a conscious decision to get as thin as possible, but as the result of her having begun a diet fairly casually, often at the suggestion of a parent, having succeeded splendidly in taking off five or ten pounds, and then having gotten hooked on the intoxicating feeling of accomplishment and control.

Recalling her anorexic days, Aimee Liu recreates her feelings:

The sense of accomplishment exhilarates me, spurs me to continue on and on. It provides a sense of purpose and shapes my life with distractions from insecurity I shall become an expert [at losing weight] The constant downward trend [of the scale] somehow comforts me, gives me visible proof that I can exert control.
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The diet, she realizes, "is the one sector of my life over which I and I alone wield total control."
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The frustrations of starvation, the rigors of the constant physical activity in which anorectics engage, the pain of the numerous physical complications of anorexia: these do not trouble the anorectic. Indeed, her ability to ignore them is further proof to her of her mastery of her body. "This was something I could control," says

one of Bruch's patients. "I still don't know what I look like or what size I am, but I know my body can take anything."
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"Energy, discipline, my own power will keep me going," says Liu. "Psychic fuel, I need nothing and no one else, and I will prove it Dropping to the floor, I roll. My tailbone crunches on the hard floor I feel no pain. I will be master of my own body, if nothing else, I vow.''
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And, finally, from one of Bruch's patients: "You make of your own body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator."
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Surely we must recognize in this last honest and explicit statement a central modus operandi for the control of contemporary bourgeois anxiety. Consider compulsive jogging and marathon running, often despite shin splints and other painful injuries, with intense agitation over missing a day or not meeting a goal for a particular run. Consider the increasing popularity of triathlon events such as the Iron Man, whose central purpose appears to be to allow people to find out how far they can push their bodies through longdistance swimming, cycling, and running—before they collapse. Consider lawyer Mike Frankfurt, who runs ten miles every morning:
"To run with pain is the essence of life."
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Or consider the following excerpts from student journals:

The best times I like to run are under the most unbearable conditions. I love to run in the hottest, most humid and steepest terrain I can find For me running and the pain associated with it aren't enough to make me stop. I am always trying to overcome it and the biggest failure I can make is to stop running because of pain. Once I ran five of a ten mile run with a severe leg cramp but wouldn't stopit would have meant failure.
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When I run I am free The pleasure is closing off my bodyas if the incessant pounding of my legs is so total that the pain ceases to exist. There is no grace, no beauty in the running—there is the jarring reality of sneaker and pavement. Bright pain that shivers and splinters sending its white hot arrows into my stomach, my lung, but it cannot pierce my mind. I am on automatic pilot—there is no remembrance of pain, there is freedom—I am losing myself, peeling out of this heavy flesh Power surges through me.
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None of this is to dispute that the contemporary concern with fitness has nonpathological, nondualist dimensions as well. Particularly for women, who have historically suffered from the ubiq

uity of rape and abuse, from the culturally instilled conviction of our own helplessness, and from lack of access to facilities and programs for rigorous physical training, the cultivation of strength, agility, and confidence clearly has a positive dimension. Nor are the objective benefits of daily exercise and concern for nutrition in question here. My focus, rather, is on a subjective stance, become increasingly prominent, which, although preoccupied with the body and deriving narcissistic enjoyment from its appearance, takes little pleasure in the
experience
of embodiment. Rather, the fundamental identification is with mind (or will), ideals of spiritual perfection, fantasies of absolute control.

Not everyone, of course, for whom physical training is a part of daily routine exhibits such a stance. Here, an examination of the language of female bodybuilders is illustrative. Bodybuilding is particularly interesting because on the surface it appears to have the opposite structure to anorexia: the bodybuilder is, after all, building the body
up,
not whittling it down. Bodybuilding develops strength. We imagine the bodybuilder as someone who is proud, confident, and perhaps most of all, conscious of and accepting of her physicality. This is, indeed, how some female bodybuilders experience themselves:

I feel tranquil and stronger [says Lydia Cheng]. Working out creates a high everywhere in my body. I feel the heat. I feel the muscles rise, I see them blow out, flushed with lots of blood My whole body is sweating and there's few things I love more than working up a good sweat. That's when I really feel like a woman.
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Yet a sense of joy in the body as active and alive is
not
the most prominent theme among the women interviewed by Trix Rosen. Many of them, rather, talk about their bodies in ways that resonate disquietingly with typical anorexic themes.

There is the same emphasis on will, purity, and perfection: "I've learned to be a stronger person with a more powerful will . . . pure concentration, energy and spirit." "I want to be as physically perfect as possible." "Bodybuilding suits the perfectionist in me." "My goal is to have muscular perfection."
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Compulsive exercisers whom Dinitia Smith, in an article for
New York
magazine calls ''The New Puritans"—speak in similar terms: Kathy Krauch, a New York art director who bikes twelve miles a day and swims two and a half,

says she is engaged in "a quest for perfection." Mike Frankfurt, in describing his motivation for marathon running, speaks of "the purity about it." These people, Smith emphasizes, care little about their health: "They pursue selfdenial as an end in itself, out of an almost mystical belief in the purity it confers."
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Many bodybuilders, like many anorectics, unnervingly conceptualize the body as alien, notself:

I'm constantly amazed by my muscles. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is look down at my "abs" and flex my legs to see if the "cuts" are there My legs have always been my most stubborn part, and I want them to develop so badly. Every day I can see things happening to them I don't flaunt my muscles as much as I thought I would. I feel differently about them; they are my product and I protect them by wearing sweaters to keep them warm.
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Most strikingly, bodybuilders put the same emphasis on
control:
on feeling their life to be fundamentally out of control, and on the feeling of accomplishment derived from total mastery of the body. That sense of mastery, like the anorectic's, appears to derive from two sources. First, there is the reassurance that one can overcome all physical obstacles, push oneself to any extremes in pursuit of one's goals (which, as we have seen, is a characteristic motivation of compulsive runners, as well).

Second, and most dramatic (it is spoken of time and again by female bodybuilders), is the thrill of being in total charge of the shape of one's body. "Create a masterpiece," says
Fit
magazine. "Sculpt your body contours into a work of art." As for the anorectic—who literally cannot
see
her body as other than her inner reality dictates and who is relentlessly driven by an ideal image of ascetic slenderness—so for the bodybuilder a purely mental conception comes to have dominance over

her life: "You visualize what you want to look like . . . and then create the form." "The challenge presents itself: to rearrange things." ''It's up to you to do the chiseling; you become the master sculptress." "What a fantasy, for your body to be changing! . . . I keep a picture in my mind as I work out of what I want to look like and what's happened to me already."
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Dictation to nature of one's own chosen design for the body is the central goal for the bodybuilder, as it is for the anorectic.