Famine Mystique, The

Off Our Backs, May/Jun 2005 by Martin, Courtney

What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with no one to order which path she will take, the freedom and the necessity to take paths women before were not able to take? What if those who choose the path of "feminine adjustment"-evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping-are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?

-Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique

(1963)

Starving, in its inimitably perverse way, gave me a way to address the anxiety I felt as a young, scared, ill-defined woman who was poised to enter the world and assume a new array of rights and privileges; it gave me a tiny, specific, manageable focus (popcorn kernels) instead of a monumental, vague, overwhelming one (work, love.)

-Caroline Knapp

Appetites

(2002)

The words written by landmark feminist and psychologist Betty Friedan were penned 50 years before Knapp articulated her own theory: that the epidemic of eating disorders in this country is largely a form of displacement. Young women, Knapp contends, are overwhelmed with life's choices-which she describes as a sickening buffet of everything and anything-so they avoid gazing at the terrain of identity (lifestyle, love, or career) by focusing on only one tiny facet of their existence: their appetites. Friedan wondered 50 years earlier whether women were giving in to the housewife hype ("the feminine mystique") in order to make their lives as small and manageable as possible.

Knapp believed that the women of her generation have adopted a new method of such shrinking focus in the body. Women in both Friedan's and Knapp's generations, overwhelmed and underdeveloped emotionally, tried to make the grand potentiality of their lives as diminutive as possible.

These feminist writers echo one another across a great distance of time and cultural space. So much has changed in the 50 years between their tomes. The Internet was invented, wars have been waged and lost, and women have struggled up the ranks of almost every profession. How then is it possible that they speak with such similarity?

Women my age, and, I suspect, women of all ages, are bound by a strange and almost silent collusion. Betty Friedan called it the feminine mystique 50 years ago, a time when she saw women hiding inside of their own homes instead of taking on the world. Now, women are hiding inside of their own bodies, avoiding asking the real questions: Who am I? What is my purpose on this earth? Instead they distract themselves with never-ending measurements (pounds, calories, cookies). But you cannot measure pain in this way. You cannot measure self-worth. You cannot measure potential. As Naomi Wolf wisely wrote in The Beauty Myth: "If there is a natural female shape, it is the one in which women are sexual and fertile and not always thinking about it"

Eating disorders are the famine mystique of my generation. According to Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorder, Inc. more than half of teenaged girls are, or think they should be, on diets. The National Association for Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reports that "eating disorders have reached epidemic levels in America: all segments of society, young and old, rich and poor, all minorities, including African American and Latino, seven million women." And then there is the reality: you can not count the amount of times a "healthy" woman stares in a mirror and chastises herself for hips too round or arms too soft. There certainly aren't statistics on the number of minutes wasted counting calories. There are no numbers that can describe a little girl discovering that unique female guilt over food for the first time.

I recently had the opportunity to hear the courageous Eve Ensler speak and one of the things she said has been echoing in my head over and over ever since: "See what you see, say what you say, know what you know."

See What You See

I have seen monumental suffering housed in women's bodies. I have seen teenage girls watch their mothers starve, deny and hate themselves, call their distorted ideas about food "will power." I have seen these mothers teach this language to their daughters, usually unintentionally. I have seen vomit in toilets across America. I have seen protruding bellies, working so hard to get nutrients out of food that only rests for a few minutes before being retched up again. I have seen grown women's wrists the size of toddlers' wrists. I have seen a young woman pass out in an exercise room. I have seen the smartest college students in the world spend the majority of their days thinking about calories. I have seen shame, loads and loads of it, piled so high that women climb on top and reign there. I have seen a nine-year-old on a diet. I have seen women refuse dinner invitations because they don't want anyone to see them eat. I have seen the blank, dry eyes of a best friend directly after vomiting up our shared dinner.