Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (47 page)

1. Entry in student journal, 1983.
   

2. Woods, "I Was Starving Myself to Death," p. 242.
   

3. Liu,
   Solitaire,
   p. 109.
   

4. "I equated gaining weight with happiness, contentment, then slothfulness, then atrophy, then death." (From case notes of Binnie Klein, M.S.W., to whom I am grateful for having provided parts of a transcript of her work with an anorexic patient.) See also Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," p. 343.
   

5. Klein, case notes.
   

6. Cherry Boone O'Neill,
   Starving for Attention
   (New York: Dell, 1982), p. 131.
   

7. O'Neill,
   Starving for Attention,
   p. 49.
   

8. Liu,
   Solitaire, p. 101
   .
   

9. Levenkron,
   Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa,
   p. 122.
   

10. Since the writing of this piece, evidence has accrued suggesting that sexual abuse may be an element in the histories of many eating disordered women (see note 2 in "Whose Body Is This?").
    

11. Bruch,
    The Golden Cage,
    p. 73. The same is not true of bulimic anorectics, who tend to be sexually active (Garfinkel and Garner,
    Anorexia Nervosa,
    p. 41). Bulimic anorectics, as seems symbolized by the bingepurge cycle itself, stand in a somewhat more ambivalent relationship to their hungers than do abstinent anorectics. See "Reading the Slender Body," in this volume, for a discussion of the cultural dynamics of the bingepurge cycle.
    

12. Bruch,
    The Golden Cage,
    p. 33.
    

13. Liu,
    Solitaire,
    p. 36.
    

14. Liu,
    Solitaire,
    p. 46. In one study of female anorectics, 88 percent of the subjects questioned reported that they lost weight because they "liked the feeling of will power and selfcontrol" (G. R. Leon, "Anorexia Nervosa: The Question of Treatment Emphasis," in M. Rosenbaum, C. M. Franks, and Y. Jaffe, eds.,
    Perspectives on Behavior Therapy in the Eighties [
    New York: Springer, 1983], pp. 36377).
    

15. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 95.
    

16. Liu,
    Solitaire,
    p. 123.
    

17. Bruch,
    The Golden Cage,
    p. 65 (emphasis added).
    

18. Smith, "The New Puritans," p. 24 (emphasis added).
    

19. Entry in student journal, 1984.
    

20. Entry in student journal, 1984.
    

21. Trix Rosen,
    Strong and Sexy
    (New York: Putnam, 1983), p. 108.
    

22. Rosen,
    Strong and Sexy,
    pp. 62, 14, 47, 48.
    

23. Smith, "The New Puritans," pp.
    27,
    26.
    

24. Rosen,
    Strong and Sexy,
    pp. 6162.
    

25. Rosen,
    Strong and Sexy,
    pp. 72, 61. This fantasy is not limited to female bodybuilders. John Travolta describes his experience training for
    Staying Alive:
    "[It] taught me incredible things about the body . . . how it can be reshaped so you can make yourself over entirely, creating an entirely
    

new you. I now look at bodies almost like pieces of clay that can be molded." ("Travolta: 'You Really Can Make Yourself Over,'"
Syracuse Herald American,

Jan. 13, 1985.)

1. Smith, "The New Puritans," p. 29.
   

2. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw,
   Life Extension
   (New York: Warner, 1982), p. 15.
   

3. Chernin,
   The Obsession,
   p. 47.
   

4. Smith, "The New Puritans," p. 24.
   

5. Sidney Journard and Paul Secord, "Body Cathexis and the Ideal Female Figure,"
   Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
   50: 24346; Orland Wooley, Susan Wooley, and Sue Dyrenforth, "Obesity and Women—A Neglected Feminist Topic,"
   Women's Studies Institute Quarterly
   2 (1979): 8192. Student journals and informal conversations with women students have certainly borne this out.
   

6. "Feeling Fat in a Thin Society,"
   Glamour
   (Feb. 1984): 198.
   

7. The same trend is obvious when the measurements of Miss America winners are compared over the past fifty years (see Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   p. 107). Some evidence has indicated that this tide is turning and that a more solid, muscular, athletic style is emerging as the latest fashion tyranny.
   

8. Entry in student journal, 1984.
   

9. Bruch,
   The Golden Cage,
   p. 58.
   

10. This is one striking difference between the abstinent anorectic and the bulimic anorectic: in the bingeandvomit cycle, the hungering female self refuses to be annihilated, is in constant protest. And, in general, the rejection of femininity discussed here is
    not
    typical of bulimics, who tend to strive for a more "female"looking body as well.
    

11. Entry in student journal, 1983.
    

12. O'Neill,
    Starving for Attention,
    p. 53.
    

13. Entry in student journal, 1983.
    

14. Bruch,
    The Golden Cage,
    p. 72; Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 277. Others have fantasies of androgyny: "I want to go to a party and for everyone to look at me and for no one to know whether I was the most beautiful slender woman or handsome young man" (as reported by therapist April Benson, panel discussion, "New Perspectives on Female Development," third annual conference of the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, New York, 1984).
    

15. Levenkron,
    Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa,
    p. 28.
    

16. See, for example, Levenkron's case studies in
    Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa,
    esp. pp. 45, 103; O'Neill,
    Starving for Attention, p.
    107; Susie Orbach,
    Fat Is a Feminist Issue
    (New York: Berkley, 1978), pp. 17475.
    

17. Liu,
    Solitaire,
    p. 79.
    

18. Bruch,
    The Golden Cage,
    p. 65.
    

1. Klein, case study.
   

2. Chernin,
   The Obsession,
   pp. 1023; Robert Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow,
   Women Who Marry Houses: Panic and Protest in Agoraphobia
   (New York: McGrawHill, 1983), pp. 8897; Bruch,
   The Golden Cage,
   p. 58; Orbach,
   Fat Is a Feminist Issue,
   pp. 16970. See also my discussions of the protest thesis in "Whose Body Is This?" and "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity" in this volume.
   

3. Bruch,
   The Golden Cage,
   pp. 2728.
   

4. Bruch,
   The Golden Cage, p.
   12.
   

5. Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," p. 243.
   

6. At the time I wrote this essay, I was unaware of the fact that eating disorders were frequently an element of the symptomatology of nineteenth century "hysteria"— a fact that strongly supports my interpretation here.
   

7. See, among many other works on this subject, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English,
   For Her Own Good
   (Garden City: Doubleday, 1979), pp. 129
   .
   

8. See Martha Vicinus, "Introduction: The Perfect Victorian Woman," in Martha Vicinus, ed.,
   Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age
   (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. xxi.
   

9. Ernest Jones,
   Sigmund Freud: Life and Work
   (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), vol. 1, p. 193.
   

10. On the nineteenthcentury epidemic of female invalidism and hysteria, see Ehrenreich and English,
    For Her Own Good;
    Carroll Smith Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Conflict in Nineteenth Century America,"
    Social Research
    39, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 65278; Ann Douglas Wood, "The 'Fashionable Diseases': Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth Century America,"
    Journal of Interdisciplinary History
    4 (Summer 1973).
    

11. Ehrenreich and English,
    For Her Own Good, p.
    2.
    

12. Ehrenreich and English,
    For Her Own Good,
    p. 102.
    

13. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer,
    Studies on Hysteria
    (New York: Avon, 1966), p. 311.
    

14. Freud and Breuer,
    Studies on Hysteria,
    p. 141; see also p. 202.
    

15. See especially pp. 76 ("Anna O."), 277, 284.
    

16. Marjorie Rosen,
    Popcorn Venus
    (New York: Avon, 1973); Lois Banner,
    American Beauty
    (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 28385. Christian Dior's enormously popular full skirts and cinchwaists, as Banner points out, are strikingly reminiscent of Victorian modes of dress.
    

17. Liu,
    Solitaire,
    p. 141.
    

18. Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," p. 257.
    

19. This is one of the central themes I develop in "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity," the next essay in this volume.
    

20. Dorothy Parker,
    Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker
    (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1939), p. 48.
    

1. D. H. Lawrence,
   Sons and Lovers
   (New York: Viking, 1958), p. 257.
   

2. This experience of oneself as "too much" may be more or less emphatic, depending on such variables as race, religion, socioeconomic class, and sexual orientation. Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach (Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach [New York: Basic Books, 1983]) emphasize, however, how frequently their clinic patients, nonanorexic as well as anorexic, "talk about their needs with contempt, humiliation, and shame. They feel exposed and childish, greedy and insatiable" (p. 49). Eichenbaum and Orbach trace such feelings, moreover, to infantile experiences that are characteristic of all female development, given a division of labor within which women are the emotional nurturers and physical caretakers of family life. Briefly (and this sketch cannot begin to do justice to their rich and complex analysis): mothers unwittingly communicate to their daughters that feminine needs are excessive and bad and that they must be contained. The mother does this out of a sense that her daughter will have to learn the lesson in order to become properly socialized into the traditional female role of caring for others—of feeding others, rather than feeding the self—and also because of an unconscious identification with her daughter, who reminds the mother of the "hungry, needy little girl" in herself, denied and repressed through the mother's own "education" in being female: ''Mother comes to be frightened by her daughter's free expression of her needs, and unconsciously acts toward her infant daughter in the same way she acts internally toward the littlegirl part of herself. In some ways the little daughter becomes an external representation of that part of herself which she has come to dislike and deny. The complex emotions that result from her own
   

deprivation through childhood and adult life are both directed inward in the struggle to negate the littlegirl part of herself and projected outward onto her daughter" (p. 44). Despite a real desire to be totally responsive to her daughter's emotional needs, the mother's own anxiety limits her capacity to respond. The contradictory messages she sends out convey to the little girl "the idea that to get love and approval she must show a particular side of herself. She must hide her emotional cravings, her disappointments and her angers, her fighting spirit She comes to feel that there must be something wrong with who she really is, which in turn must mean that there is something wrong with what she needs and what she wants This soon translates into feeling unworthy and hesitant about pursuing her impulses" (pp. 4849). Once she has grown up, of course, these feelings are reinforced by cultural ideology, further social training in femininity, and the likelihood that the men in her life will regard her as "too much" as well, having been schooled by their own training in masculine detachment and autonomy. (With boys, who do not stir up such intense identification in the mother and who, moreover, she knows will grow up into a world that will meet their emotional needs [that is, the son will eventually grow up to be looked after by his future wife, who will be well trained in the feminine arts of care], mothers feel much less ambivalent about the satisfaction of needs and

behave much more consistently in their nurturing. Boys therefore grow up, according to Eichenbaum and Orbach, with an experience of their needs as legitimate, appropriate, worthy of fulfillment.) The male experience of the woman as "too much" has been developmentally explored, as well, in Dorothy Dinnerstein's ground breaking
The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976). Dinnerstein argues that it is the woman's capacity to call up memories of helpless infancy, primitive wishes of "unqualified access" to the mother's body, and "the terrifying erotic independence of every baby's mother" (p. 62) that is responsible for the male fear of what he experiences as "the uncontrollable erotic rhythms" of the woman. Female impulses, a reminder of the autonomy of the mother, always appear on some level as a threatening limitation to his own. This gives rise to a ''deep fantasy resentment" of female impulsivity (p. 59) and, on the cultural level, "archetypal nightmare visions of the insatiable female" (p. 62).

1. Quoted in Brian Easlea,
   WitchHunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy
   (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), p. 242 (emphasis added).
   

2. Quoted in Easlea,
   WitchHunting,
   p. 242 (emphasis added).
   

3. See Peggy Reeve Sanday,
   Female Power and Male Dominance
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 17284.
   

4. Quoted in Easlea,
   WitchHunting,
   p. 8.
   

5. Peter Gay,
   The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.
   Vol. 1:
   Education of the Senses
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 197201, 207.
   

6. Chernin,
   The Obsession,
   p. 38.
   

7. Ehrenreich and English,
   For Her Own Good,
   p. 124.
   

8. See Jeffrey Masson's controversial
   The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory
   (Toronto: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984) for a fascinating discussion of how this operation (which, because Fliess failed to remove half a meter of gauze from the patient's nasal cavity, nearly killed her) may have figured in the development of Freud's ideas on hysteria. Whether or not one agrees fully with Masson's interpretation of the events, his account casts light on important dimensions of the nineteenthcentury treatment of female disorders and raises questions about the origins and fundamental assumptions of psychoanalytic theory that go beyond any debate about Freud's motivations. The quotations cited in this essay can be found on p. 76; Masson discusses the Eckstein case on pp. 55106.
   

9. Banner,
   American Beauty,
   pp. 86105. It is significant that these efforts failed in large part because of their association with the women's rights movement. Trousers like those proposed by Amelia Bloomer were considered a particular badge of depravity and aggressiveness, the
   New York Herald
   predicting that women who wore bloomers would end up in "lunatic asylums or perchance in the state prison" (p. 96).
   

10. Banner,
    American Beauty,
    pp. 14950.