On girls and food…
Women aren’t trusted to make decisions about their own bodies…
The hardest thing for a girl is not the fact that her body is always on display; it is the fact that she has no rights to make decisions about her own body, especially about food.
There’s a lot of pressure on girls to eat. If she tries to say that she won’t eat, people assume that there is something wrong with her, that she has developed some kind of warped sense of her own body and is now trying some ridiculous magazine-encouraged diet.
If a man makes a decision not to eat, or to eat this rather than that, his decision is respected. It is assumed that he is in control of his body, that he has every right to make that choice for himself.
It is assumed that he is, in fact, “choosing.” Whereas women are seen to be influenced or coerced by external forces. Her decisions about her own body aren’t respected. We all step in, as though we can’t trust her decide what does and doesn’t go into her own mouth.
People respond negatively to these ideas…
When I started talking about these ideas people responded negatively, either with shock or indignation. One person said, “This sort of thing would only be said by someone conscious of entertaining their own bad eating habits, and being guilty of knowing them of being wrong. If this girl had no problems with eating then she wouldn’t think that way, I wouldn’t try to listen to this person they don’t seem to be in a stable head space.”
Well… I will admit that I have experience with eating disorders, that I continue to struggle with body issues, and that writing this article is part of my need to understand what is happening to me. But this kind of response just proves my point that a woman’s body is not her own. It is a public body, available and open for comment at any time.
We are quick to assume that her decisions about her body and her eating habits are “bad” and “wrong.” We don’t want to listen to her own feelings about her body and food; we would rather write her out of the question by saying that she isn’t in a “stable head space.”
The person went on to say, “I think this person has been looking at too many magazines and doesn’t get enough love. The author of this quote is bonkers.”
Deep-rooted inequalities remain unchanged…
Despite contemporary society’s supposed gender equality, we are quick to make negative judgements about the rational capacity of women. On some deeply unconscious level, women are still seen as porous, uncontrollable, emotional forces without capacity for reason. It is an old misogynistic dynamic that favours men’s feelings and views about women’s bodies over their own (see the work of Luce Irigaray).
A woman’s own feelings about her food and eating are discounted as the ‘madness’ of woman who is out of control, who doesn’t know any better, and who needs the assistance of others. Anyone, and everyone, can comment with more authority than she can on her physical, and mental, health and appearance.
Men with eating disorders
My critic went on to claim that men have eating disorders as well. “It’s even worse for them because no one realises that they need help because of preconceived ideas that only women are stupid enough to starve themselves. In which case that just makes them feel less ‘man’ly and even more embarrassed to possess a ‘woman’s’ disease.”
I am aware that body issues are not restricted to women, but it is important to note that they continue to be treated differently. Our idea of men and women’s bodily self-control remains divided along sexist gender lines. If men are “stupid enough to starve themselves” they become like women in their lack of control over their own bodies. They become automatically feminised, possessing a “woman’s disease” (historically called “melancholia,” read more in Breitenberg’s Anxious Masculinities).
Woman remains the irrational and senseless body…
On a deeply submerged cultural level, women are still not trusted to make decisions about their own bodies. The debate about abortion diverts to a question of the foetus’s right to life, side-tracking the issue of the woman’s body, and the woman as subject of that body. The debate over the Henson case could only assume one version of events: that the man abused the girl because the girl herself was incapable of rationally consenting to be photographed.
As a society, we accept both the continuous monitoring of women’s bodies, and the perpetual distrust of women’s ability to manage their own bodies. Women’s bodies are public bodies – open for discussion.
Another person tells me, “Dieting is only a recent thing in the last 50 or 60 years. It’s more likely for women to go on ridiculous diets and that’s why women have become the focus of all this media attention about it.” But this doesn’t adequately address the fullness of what is going on.
Women are not trusted with their bodies because society assumes that they are mad. We must recognise that men diet too. Men have always dieted, men have often been anorexic, but we don’t think about it as dieting because we trust them to make decisions about their own bodies. We don’t trust women.
Men make insane food “choices,” but we think of it as a rational “choice” rather than an irrational media-induced “diet.” We don’t see a need to scrutinise men’s eating habits the way we scrutinise women’s eating habits.
