Violation (12 page)

The predominant biological myth of weight is that thin people live longer than fat people. The truth is far more complicated. (Some deaths of fat people attributed to heart disease seem actually to have been the result of radical dieting.) If health were our real concern, it would be dieting we questioned, not weight. The current ideal of thinness has never been held before, except as a religious ideal; the underfed body is the martyr's body. Even if people can lose weight, maintaining an artificially low weight for any period of time requires a kind of starvation. Lots of people are naturally thin, but for those who are not, dieting is an unnatural act; biology rebels. The metabolism of the hungry body can change inalterably, making it ever harder and harder to stay thin. I think chronic dieting made me gain weight—not only pounds, but fat. This equation seemed so strange at first that I couldn't believe it. But the weight I put back on after losing was much more stubborn than the original weight. I had lost it by taking diet pills and not eating much of anything at all for quite a long time. I haven't touched the pills again, but not eating much of anything no longer works.

When Oprah Winfrey first revealed her lost weight, I didn't envy her. I thought, She's in trouble now. I knew, I was certain, she would gain it back; I believed she was biologically destined to do so. The tabloid headlines blamed it on a cheeseburger or mashed potatoes; they screamed
OPRAH PASSES 200 POUNDS
, and I cringed at her misery and how the world wouldn't let up, wouldn't leave her alone, wouldn't let her be anything else. How dare the world do this to anyone? I thought, and then realized I did it to myself.

The “Ideal Weight” charts my mother used were at their lowest acceptable-weight ranges in the 1950s, when I was a child. They were based on sketchy and often inaccurate actuarial evidence, using, for the most part, data on northern Europeans and allowing for the most minimal differences in size for a population of less than half a billion people. I never fit those weight charts, I was always just outside the pale. As an adult, when I would join
an organized diet program, I accepted their version of my Weight Goal as gospel, knowing it would be virtually impossible to reach. But reach I tried; that's what one does with gospel. Only in the last few years have the weight tables begun to climb back into the world of the average human. The newest ones distinguish by gender, frame, and age. And suddenly I'm not off the charts anymore. I have a place.

A man who is attracted to fat women says, “I actually have less specific physical criteria than most men. I'm attracted to women who weigh 170 or 270 or 370. Most men are only attracted to women who weigh between 100 and 135. So who's got more of a fetish?” We look at fat as a problem of the fat person. Rarely do the tables get turned, rarely do we imagine that it might be the viewer, not the viewed, who is limited. What the hell is wrong with them, anyway? Do they believe everything they see on television?

My friend Phil, who is chronically and almost painfully thin, admitted that in his search for a partner he finds himself prejudiced against fat women. He seemed genuinely bewildered by this. I didn't jump to reassure him that such prejudice is hard to resist. What I did was bite my tongue at my urge to be reassured by him, to be told that I, at least, wasn't fat. That over the centuries humans have been inclined to prefer extra flesh rather than the other way around seems unimportant. All we see now tells us otherwise. Why does my kindhearted friend criticize another woman for eating a cookie when she would never dream of commenting in such a way on another person's race or sexual orientation or disability? Deprivation is the dystopian ideal.

My mother called her endless diets “reducing plans.” Reduction, the diminution of women, is the opposite of feminism, as Kim Chernin points out in
The Obsession
. Smallness is what feminism strives against, the smallness that women confront everywhere. All of women's spaces are smaller than those of men, often inadequate, without privacy. Furniture designers distinguish between a man's and a woman's chair, because women don't spread out like men. (A sprawling woman means only one thing.)
Even our voices are kept down. By embracing dieting I was rejecting a lot I held dear, and the emotional dissonance that created just seemed like one more necessary evil.

A fashion magazine recently celebrated the return of the “well-fed” body; a particular model was said to be “the archetype of the new womanly woman … stately, powerful.” She is a size 8. The images of women presented to us, images claiming so maliciously to be the images of women's whole lives, are not merely social fictions. They are absolute fictions; they can't exist. How would it feel, I began to wonder, to cultivate my own real womanliness rather than despise it? Because it was my fleshy curves I wanted to be rid of, after all. I dreamed of having a boy's body, smooth, hipless, lean. A body rapt with possibility, a receptive body suspended before the storms of maturity. A dear friend of mine, nursing her second child, weeps at her newly voluptuous body. She loves her children and hates her own motherliness, wanting to be unripened again, to be a bud and not a flower.

RECENTLY I
'
VE STARTED
shopping occasionally at stores for “large women,” where the smallest size is a 14. In department stores the size 12 and 14 and 16 clothes are kept in a ghetto called the Women's Department. (And who would want that, to be the size of a woman? We all dream of being “juniors” instead.) In the specialty stores the clerks are usually big women and the customers are big, too, big like a lot of women in my life—friends, my sister, my mother and aunts. Not long ago I bought a pair of jeans at Lane Bryant and then walked through the mall to the Gap, with its shelves of generic clothing. I flicked through the clearance rack and suddenly remembered the Lane Bryant shopping bag in my hand and its enormous weight, the sheer heaviness of that brand name shouting to the world. The shout is that I've let myself go. I still feel like crying out sometimes: can't I feel satisfied? But I am not supposed to be satisfied, not allowed to be satisfied. My discontent fuels the market; I need to be afraid in order to fully participate.

American culture, which has produced our dieting mania, does more than reward privation and acquisition at the same time: it actually associates them with each other. Read the ads: the virtuous runner's reward is a new pair of $180 running shoes. The fat person is thought to be impulsive, indulgent, but insufficiently or incorrectly greedy, greedy for the wrong thing. The fat person lacks ambition. The young executive is complimented for being “hungry”; he is “starved for success.” We are teased with what we will have if we are willing to have not for a time. A dieting friend avoiding the food on my table, says, “I'm just dying for a bite of that.”

Dieters are the perfect consumers: they never get enough. The dieter wistfully imagines food without substance, food that is not food, that begs the definition of food, because food is the problem. Even the ways
we don't eat
are based in class. The middle class don't eat in support groups. The poor can't afford not to eat at all. The rich hire someone to not eat with them in private. Dieting is an emblem of capitalism. It has a venal heart.

THE POSSIBILITY OF
living another way, living without dieting, began to take root in my mind a few years ago, and finally my second trip through Weight Watchers ended dieting for me. This last time I just couldn't stand the details, the same kind of details I'd seen and despised in other programs, on other diets: the scent of resignation, the weighing-in by the quarter pound, the before and after photographs of group leaders prominently displayed. Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, says, “Most fat people need to be hurt badly before they do something about themselves.” She mocks every aspect of our need for food, of a person's sense of entitlement to food, of daring to
eat what we want
. Weight Watchers refuses to release its own weight charts except to say they make no distinction for frame size; neither has the organization ever released statistics on how many people who lose weight on the program eventually gain it back. I hated the endlessness of it, the turning of food into portions and exchanges, everything measured out, permitted, denied. I hated the very idea of “maintenance.”
Finally I realized I didn't just hate the diet. I was sick of the way I acted on a diet, the way I whined, my niggardly, penny-pinching behavior. What I liked in myself seemed to shrivel and disappear when I dieted. Slowly, slowly I saw these things. I saw that my pain was cut from whole cloth, imaginary, my own invention. I saw how much time I'd spent on something ephemeral, something that simply wasn't important, didn't matter. I saw that the real point of dieting is dieting—to not be done with it, ever.

I looked in the mirror and saw a woman, with flesh, curves, muscles, a few stretch marks, the beginnings of wrinkles, with strength and softness in equal measure. My body is the one part of me that is always, undeniably, here. To like myself means to be, literally, shameless, to be wanton in the pleasures of being inside a body. I feel loose this way, a little abandoned, a little dangerous. That first feeling of liking my body—not being resigned to it or despairing of change, but actually liking it—was tentative and guilty and frightening. It was alarming, because it was the way I'd felt as a child, before the world had interfered. Because surely I was wrong; I knew, I'd known for so long, that my body wasn't all right this way. I was afraid even to act as though I were all right: I was afraid that by doing so I'd be acting a fool.

For a time I was thin. I remember—and what I remember is nothing special—strain, a kind of hollowness, the same troubles and fears, and no magic. So I imagine losing weight again. If the world applauded, would this comfort me? Or would it only compromise whatever approval the world gives me now? What else will be required of me besides thinness? What will happen to me if I get sick, or lose the use of a limb, or, God forbid, grow old?

By fussing endlessly over my body, I've ceased to inhabit it. I'm trying to reverse this equation now, to trust my body and enter it again with a whole heart. I know more now than I used to about what constitutes happy and unhappy, what the depths and textures of contentment are like. By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room, I have more space, I can move. The pursuit of another, elusive body, the body someone else says
I should have, is a terrible distraction, a sidetracking that might have lasted my whole life long. By letting myself go, I go places.

Each of us in this culture, this twisted, inchoate culture, has to choose between battles: one battle is against the cultural ideal, and the other is against ourselves. I've chosen to stop fighting myself. Maybe I'm tilting at windmills; the cultural ideal is ever-changing, out of my control. It's not a cerebral journey, except insofar as I have to remind myself to stop counting, to stop thinking in terms of numbers. I know, even now that I've quit dieting and eat what I want, how many calories I take in every day. If I eat as I please, I eat a lot one day and very little the next; I skip meals and snack at odd times. My nourishment is good—as far as nutrition is concerned, I'm in much better shape than when I was dieting. I know that the small losses and gains in my weight over a period of time aren't simply related to the number of calories I eat. Someone asked me not long ago how I could possibly know my calorie intake if I'm not dieting (the implication being, perhaps, that I'm dieting secretly). I know because calorie counts and grams of fat and fiber are embedded in me. I have to work to not think of them, and I have to learn to not think of them in order to really live without fear.

When I look, really look, at the people I see every day on the street, I see a jungle of bodies, a community of women and men growing every which way like lush plants, growing tall and short and slender and round, hairy and hairless, dark and pale and soft and hard and glorious. Do I look around at the multitudes and think all these people—all these people who are like me and not like me, who are various and different—are not loved or lovable? Lately, everyone's body interests me, every body is desirable in some way. I see how muscles and skin shift with movement; I sense a cornucopia of flesh in the world. In the midst of it I am a little capacious and unruly.

I repeat with Walt Whitman, “I dote on myself … there is that lot of me, and all so luscious.” I'm eating better, exercising more, feeling fine—and then I catch myself thinking, Maybe I'll lose some weight. But my mood changes or my attention is caught
by something else, something deeper, more lingering. Then I can catch a glimpse of myself by accident and think only: that's me. My face, my hips, my hands. Myself.

Harper's
, March 1993

This is another
Harper's
essay that has been reprinted many times, and another title fight. This was published as “A Weight That Women Carry.” I'm not sure why
Harper's
editors like these long-winded titles. To me this story is about reducing the self, the venality of deliberate hunger, the cultural imperative to be small. I wish the title didn't focus on women; men struggle with weight as well, in different ways. This is our cultural issue. Thinking about dieting and hunger in this way eventually led me to write the book
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted,
which is about why Americans are the best fed and least satisfied people on the planet.

I've gained weight since this was written.

     
The Happiest Place On Earth

I
'
M JUST BACK FROM MY THIRD TRIP TO DISNEYLAND. I
visited for the first time at thirteen, courtesy of a grandmother. From that weekend I remember little more than descending into Monsanto's Adventure Thru Inner Space ride, and glancing up to find a giant eye staring at me through a telescope. I rode that ride again and again. Inner Space was subsumed into the new and recurring futures of Tomorrowland, and I vanished into adolescence. Except for a single day twelve years ago, I never returned, yet Disneyland always has a familiar, avuncular feel. Disneyland seems obvious, yes, but more than that, inevitable.

Recently I had a windfall, and I looked at my nine-year-old daughter who has a poster of Mickey Mouse on her bedroom door, and I made secret plans. I told her only a few days before we left, a few days to pack and anticipate the details and call Grandma to exclaim about it with a certain wild silliness. Then we flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, drove across town to the hotel, and took the hotel shuttle to Disneyland all in a few hours on a hot Friday in August. The hotel, which I'd picked out of a Column A-B-or-C list at the travel agent, was nearly new, one of many look-alike mountains of rooms thrown up by investors in the crowded, noisy blocks around Disneyland. The wallpaper was beginning to peel, rugs bunched up in the corners. The shower was broken, a light bulb burned out, the door to the balcony stuck shut. Room service plates lay outside a half-dozen doors in the long, empty corridor, the sticky yellow cheese of leftover nachos drying to a rubbery
sheen. But from our big corner windows we could see the rumpled gray Matterhorn, and the shuttle waited below.

Every day, beginning around seven o'clock in the morning, cars trickle into the Disneyland parking lot, which is bigger than Disneyland itself. Only in the United States of America is there ever a parking lot as big as Disneyland's under a sky as bright and dirty as the sky in Los Angeles. (Excuse me,
Anaheim,
as my friends in Los Angeles are quick to remind me.) The streams of cars give way to parking lot shuttles for people who don't want to walk from their cars to the gates, pass the hotel shuttles, and become streams of people, on foot, in strollers, in wheelchairs, small creeks of people converging into rivulets and then rivers, all heading toward the spillway of the narrow gates, where they pile up like a torrent of white water and shove themselves through. We left the shuttle, entered the stream, squeezed through the gates. Coming and going, the signs call Disneyland “The Happiest Place on Earth.” And there, right there, right inside, is Winnie the Pooh larger than life, bending clumsily down to pat a child, his Pooh grin never wavering. The thing that works about Disneyland is that it works. We submit. We're glad to be here.

I HAD BOUGHT
the trip as a Disney Package, airfare and rental car and hotel and Disney Passports all rolled into one big credit-card charge. Part of the package is something called the Magic Morning, an outdoor breakfast in Disneyland early in the morning, before the park officially opens, attended by a half-dozen characters. The characters appear without warning, all over the park, cartoon characters come to life, who dash or pad or stomp or dance around depending on their species, and never speak lest the illusion be shattered. Whenever they appear, they draw families with strollers and diaper bags and camcorders, happy kids, and sometimes shy, tearful, frightened kids pressed forward by eager parents. Captain Hook, who stands several inches taller than me and whose hat casts long shadows around him, is greeted by a respectful distance wherever he goes. Snow White, petite, slender,
smiling, is happily stroked by toddlers. My nine-year-old, cheerfully growing up as slowly as she can, still believes in Santa Claus and only this summer learned about the Tooth Fairy. She is frightened by clowns. Does she know? I wondered, each time she held her autograph book up to a silent mask. Should I tell her? That morning, at the breakfast, we saw Aladdin, the Genie, Snow White, Eeyore, Pluto, and Tigger. “Tigger!” she screamed, and raced for a hug, smiled for the camera, asked for an autograph. Late that day, she said, “I bet they get hot in those costumes.”

As far as I was concerned, the point of Magic Morning wasn't the characters or the sticky, sweet breakfast, but the park's emptiness. Perhaps a few hundred people shared Tomorrowland and the Matterhorn with us at 7:30 on a crystalline, rosy morning, and they all but disappeared in the silent open spaces. The bustling, noisy herd of the day before was gone as though it had never been. But the emptiness was strange, more dreamy than the rides themselves, and disconcerting.

There is a fine psychology built into Disneyland's long lines, which are well hidden and bend continually back upon themselves and around corners and through doorways. You have no idea, really, how long a line is until you are unavoidably part of it; the gasp of understanding when you finally see what a forty-five-minute wait with a child means is held back until you can't change your mind. “If you aren't the sort of person willing to invest an hour of agony for two minutes of joy,” says my Disneyland guide, “you probably shouldn't have had children in the first place.”

More importantly, the waiting draws you slowly down into each ride's particular shifting world, working bit by bit on one's natural disbelief. Each major ride and each “land” has its own employee costumes and myriad other cues transcribing the borders of the imagined world; each creates, with varying degrees of success, a conditioned response to sights barely seen and sounds barely heard, subtly and casually dropped into the background as though they had no importance, no effect. There is first the willingness to accede to fantasy, and then, without warning, the body's
own unwilled and astonishing ability to suspend its own knowledge of reality. So the foyer of Star Tours, an intergalactic travel agency, is rather dull and as bland as a Greyhound bus depot, and the slow descent into Space Mountain takes you into a coolly decorated, impersonal space station designed for maximum bureaucratic efficiency on a cosmic scale. The Matterhorn has a buoyant alpine bouquet, and you are handled by strapping young Nordic men in lederhosen, and Thunder Mountain, a Wild West roller coaster, feels hot, arid, and lawless. Splash Mountain is all Brer Rabbit and Zippity-Doo-Dah, and its lines curl slowly along with the tranquil repose of Valium.

On Magic Morning, there were no lines anywhere. We climbed over the fence to leap on the Matterhorn, jogged gleefully up into Star Tours without pausing to listen to C-3PO's complaints, and sat in an empty shuttle for our trip. The assembly-line shiver, the sense of being part of some enormous piece of carefully timed machinery, was gone. My daughter talked me into Space Mountain. One enters first by climbing, up moving sidewalks and then ramps, and then far down a switchback walkway. The ride slowly pulls you up into darkness and then throws you brutally into space like a slingshot. One feels obligated to scream. We screamed with vigor, alone in our car, and after two minutes slid into the space station, where no one was waiting. We had only to stay seated a moment to ride again, and again.

When Magic Morning ended and the entire park was about to open for real at eight o'clock, we stood with about fifty other Disney Package customers at the edge between Tomorrowland and Main Street, waiting for the security guard's signal. When he looked at his watch and waved us on it was like a Mother's Day stroller dash, the beginning, for many families, of a long day force-feeding high-stimulation fun to small children who preferred to linger at the fountains and watch pigeons, but would not be allowed to do so. Their parents were too willing to be rude on behalf of them, too hungry to see and do, photograph and experience, to fill up, to fill out.

By the afternoon I couldn't stand the place any longer. The crowds are amazing, enormous, they're Hong Kong at rush hour, Tokyo subways, a pan-Manhattan Labor Day sale. Families and camp groups come dressed the same way, moving like schools of fish through the churning rivers of people; Junior and Grandpa and all the cousins dressed in bright green t-shirts and red shorts for easy spotting in the throng. On a busy day, when more than fifteen thousand cars fill the parking lot and one hotel shuttle after the other disgorges its passengers every half hour, and the monorail fills up at the enormous Disneyland Hotel with more guests for the park again and again, there may be fifty or sixty thousand people inside at the same time. And they're all in line, or rushing to the end of one.

Then, near the 60-
MINUTE WAIT FROM HERE
sign, I watched a Space Mountain employee patiently try to explain to a large family why the ride has a height requirement, why the very tiny girl with bows in her hair, holding Daddy's hand and standing mutely near the moving sidewalk, could not be allowed to go on the scariest ride in the park. They wanted to argue. I wanted to go. So we tramped back to Main Street, through the gates to get our invisible, indelible hand stamps, back through the parking lot to wait for the shuttle, back to the empty hotel hallways, the water stained wallpaper, the silent view of the shadeless parking lot crawling with cars.

My friend Harry, who lives in Beverly Hills, refused to come see me in Anaheim. He never goes to Anaheim, he tells me, loftily. And I won't go to him. I'm exhausted, beaten into submission, dozing by the pool, gathering strength for another onslaught. My daughter seems as happy to bob in the pale blue water as she was to ride Space Mountain. “No one ever comes here to go to Disneyland and does
anything
else,” he tells me, but he's wrong. Our package included One Other Attraction, we could have gone to Knott's Berry Farm or Universal Studios, and lots of people are doing that around us, packing up the kids into the rental car and driving all over hell and back for another parking lot, more long
lines, big crowds, more sensation. We used ours for a third day in Disneyland.

WHEN DISNEYLAND OPENED
in 1955 a complicated intellectual debate began—about Disneyland as a work of art, as a cultural artifact, a piece of architecture, a symbol of capitalism. It was, above all, taken seriously. The debate seemed to end, without conclusion, decades ago, and now Disneyland is treated as a lark. (Except, that is, as a market force, where Disneyland is taken very seriously indeed.) Most people I know treat a trip to Disneyland as an indulgence just for the kids, a kind of mental slumming. Disneyland is low-class fun, lower-class no matter what it costs. Disneyland is common. One definition of common, of course, is whatever satisfies the masses. But in fact Disneyland is uncommon to a fault, it's unique, unrepeatable. The park and everything in it is well made, never tawdry or thin in any way; its textures are always complex and layered. And Disneyland is awfully good at what it does.

Everywhere, an incredible attention to detail. Everything unsightly, disturbing, or mindful of ordinary life is hidden from sight. Thirty tons of trash are collected every
day
in Disneyland, twelve million pounds a year, the detritus of four million hamburgers and more than a million gallons of soda pop, and rarely is there a single straw wrapper on the ground, never does a trash can overflow or a distant glimpse of a garbage truck mar the view. It has always been thus, always a miracle of anal-retentive inspection, compulsive control, unceasing surveillance. The park was built on the bones of orange groves in a year and a day by workers using only hand tools, workers who are always smiling in the photographs. In fact, they went on strike several times during that year, the park wasn't actually finished when it opened, and the opening day was an unmitigated disaster. But in the Disney tradition, people have forgotten all that now.

The intense orderliness of Disneyland, its extremes of cleanliness and unflagging courtesy, its Teutonic precision and appalling vision, and especially the way it deliberately shuts out the
niggling problems of reality and gives us an illusion of goodness are all deliberate. Walt Disney was a hard-drinking, pill-popping, anti-union, Communist-baiting, bad-tempered man, an obsessive, depressive, control freak. He gave names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and proudly informed for the FBI. Disney was stingy, mildly anti-Semitic, and feared death so badly he investigated cryonics. But Disney was never cynical. He was amazingly uncynical, in fact. Disneyland is the world he wanted to live in, and as soon as he could build it, he did.

Disney's world is one of impulse without risk, childish spontaneity devoid of danger. All is cued and manipulated, telegraphed and choreographed, manufactured, manicured. Disneyland offers freedom from decision in the guise of endless choice, freedom from confusion, from having to do anything we don't want to do. (Except wait in line, which makes the fun more virtuous.) Even the grand fireworks are introduced over the park-wide public-address system by an unseen Big Brother with a primetime commercial voice, soothing and boosterish, their explosions accompanied by patriotic music to be sure we all understand the point. Disneyland is an exceptionally smart place, a conception of wide-ranging intelligence that allows visitors to be as stupid as they could possibly be and still breathe.

And more. Disneyland is a dream that flitters with genius and then turns into the repeating shrieks of nightmare without warning. (One friend of mine compares it to a particularly bad episode of
The Prisoner
.) In every Disney film there's a moment when the cheerful music turns sour or threatening, when the Sorcerer's Apprentice realizes he can't stop the water coming, when Dumbo's mother screams in grief, chained in the dark. In every film the giggles of psilocybin eventually give way to the mania of speed. Disneyland is Pleasure Island from
Pinocchio,
the island of endless fun that ruins you if you stay a moment too long. As Richard Shickel wrote, it's a dream without any of the dark, dangerous elements that are the essential characteristics of real dreams. There is no incongruity, no unpredictability. No sex, no violence,
except the childish sex of an animatronic pirate and the bloodless violence of cartoons. As a dream, Disneyland isn't much good for therapy. It's more a daydream than anything else, closer to Marie Antoinette than Carl Jung.