Isabelle Caro, dead at 28: she weighed 56 pounds
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve had a policy for quite a while now of not writing about books or movies which are bad. It takes time to write a blog, to write about something awful seems counterproductive: after all, ignoring it is the best way to defeat a book or movie. Finally, you get no thanks, especially from the author. But every once in a while I come across something which seems to me harmful, and when it’s presented as doing good for those it hurts who are themselves at serious risk for pain, suffering from cruelty, or, a lesser thing but still worth saying something about, seriously misleading about some aspect of scholarship I care about, then I do write.
Kate Chisholm’s My Hungry Hell has been touted as seriously conveying the experience of anorexia empathetically and explaining it because 1) she suffered the condition, and 2) (it’s implied) is so smart. She may have experienced anorexia for a time, but her book is a unacknowledged full frontal attack on “anorexic” girls as “bad” (a word she uses for anorexic people over and over again,” causing great trouble to their (presented as) ever well-meaning and concerned family and friends, perverse, seeking and gaining power over others and attention, and if she parrots the correct theories she’s read in some good books, she has no grasp of the meaning of the words she so blithely throws around.
Her book has this use: if you can read past her hostility and stupidity, her condescension to “social isolates” she shows how hard life is for such people, partly because they are misunderstood and disliked. And her inability to understand the particulars of this condition makes her talk about it in terms appropriate to depression, autism, schizophrenia so what she reveals can help many people suffering from the world’s reactive distancing of themselves as least insofar as a truthful description of emotional pain endured alone can.
To begin with, the book is a muddle. There’s no clear argument. I have a hard time critiquing it because of this. There is nothing put before you which step-by-step you could accept or refute or qualify. The book goes round and round. There is also this barrier that she presents herself as having been anorexic and I do not doubt she was. So when she accuses (it’s unacknowledged remember) anorexics of all I outlined above, with a litany of phrases about her own “shameful” behavior and statements (typical of her: “I could never accept what I had done”) one has a hard time saying she is obdurate, cruel, unthinking, unknowing. One sign she does not identify and never did with anorexic girls is how refers to “them” as “they.” It’s never us, we, and only “I” when she is regaling us with the trouble she caused and the bad treatments she got because (forsooth) her condition was so puzzling. She may have endured long spells of dieting to the point that she weighed under 70 pounds, but she speaks as an outsider with little sympathy for women.
She does repeat at the opening what she’s read in Palazzoli (Self-Starvation, a book about how families play an important role in the formation of anorexia in a girl), Mantel’s Girls Want Out (Mantel writes of how girls naturally become anorexic as part of a contradictory highly pressured group of social constructs), and psychiatry (the girl is afraid of sex as it is today experienced by women in our heterosexual — and I would say violent — society). But clearly she doesn’t believe any of it for real. Families mean well and if they are too close to help, if “something goes wrong,” that’s not because they are further harming the girl, are using her or adversarial in any way. No, she is taking advantage of remaining dependent on them in her self-induced isolation, twisting herself into them like some screw based on their weaknesses. She’s the anti-social one all by herself; her behavior is not something that is partly a reaction to how she’s been reacted to as a girl who looks a certain way, comes from a certain class or race, has a sensitive nature.
She’s withering about girls or people who “can’t cope with life.” This phrase is endlessly repeated without any specifics or explanation. You might as well as say “can’t cope with walixes” for any explanation this offers. Where is there a description of how hard it is to get a job, to get through an interview, to network; how aggressive and abrasive and hard is the world of heterosexual sex; how group life is cliquish. We are told “teasing” is natural and “fun” (when it comes from families & friends [!]). Money is never mentioned except to say her parents spent it like water on her. (May still do, or a husband or someone else, for in her little resume, she is not credited with a regular job, only freelance journalism which would not provide her with an upper middle class life without some other resource.)
Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: the sort of book Chisholm disdains (see comments)
Finally, she dismisses the idea that the girls is reacting against cruel pressures with a disdainful paragraph against “feminists.” (A bad word in her vocabulary; used in this book as she does in her book on Fanny Burney where she describes Margaret Doody and Julia Epstein’s books as “if you must talk in this ridiculous way”.) No it’s an eternal condition. The researches into medieval nuns of the kind Mantel uses or Carolyn Walker Byrom has been so careful to present, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women provide ammunition to say this is an eternal universal, something totally opposed to what Byrom shows. Byrom has a long full chapter on how women are pushed into being those who provide food, into being, food and another on anorexics in history and today; Dava Sobel (Galileo’s Daughter) shows how nunneries were often deeply poverty-stricken and the starving of nuns as a religious penance saved the society and their families who dumped them there money. NO. It’s an eternal twist in girls, some crazed drive which goes wrong. So don’t look to society no no.
That this is an unempathetic attack is seen in her way of characterizing anorexics online sites: no understanding whatsoever. They are simply dangerous. She implies they ought to be shut down; the girls are not really in contact with one another. (As a journalist who is part of the published coteries of the world she does all she can to dismiss contacts people have on the Net as utterly unreal, useless. Another is how she retreats from her position (right) that institutional force-feeding is cruel and does not get to the heart of the problem (the mechanism which causes the eating disorder), but then says for some it works. And oh yes young men get this too (I don’t doubt she’d say young men get raped nearly equally with young women if pushed).
The implication this is eternal and takes the same form repeatedly is partly refuted by a death of a model who began this to get employment. Have a look at Cate Blanchett’s arms lately or Nicole Kidman or Rachel Weisz or Carey Mulligan. They are skeletal.
Take a real look at her arms and the thinness of her body
Look at the leading heroines of movies and plays: they are usually 20 years younger than the men they play against as their own age, and frail in comparison. Blanchett and Kidman may be able to control herself not to go into a spiral of absolute non-eating and then death but not everyone can. We can call them semi-anorexics or women seriously at risk for falling into the condition.
She is aware that most anorexia is triggered by some final incident — though no where does she tell us who tormented her or how. I had a girl student in one of my classes who I recognized as anorexic and she told me of how it began in athletics. The woman coach would put up photos of them and show their thigh and make fun of any fat on their thighs. That’s what began it with her. She determined on a diet in order not be humiliated again. My anorexia (for I was fully anorexic between the ages of 16 and 21, weighing 78 pounds most of the time — I’m 5 feet 2 inches). But Chisholm does not say these triggers are humiliations, which are usually repeated enough to drive the girl to diet in the first place.
Her anorexia does not seem to have gone on for any time before her family aggressively intervened and paid for price-y psychiatry, institutions and group therapies not available to most people. She’s a politically conservative person in her other writings and concerned to uphold the established order, so that’s she over it, she exorcises the fiend or “it. “It” seems to be something now outside her though she does have the occasional ominous grumble about how hard she has to work to keep “it” at bay.
True enough. When I was no longer fully anorexic, at age 22 or 23 for many years afterward I still watched my weight fiercely, would eat only a limited number of foods, and until today I have fears I will be fat and don’t have an accurate body image of myself quite. This description of how one has to work at keeping “the thing” at bay shows where if you can read past her hostility and stupidity, the book is of use. Where it’s good is in the parallels of other disorders & seeing girls again and again present in the same helpless and isolated way. Chisholm of herself only says what went wrong was she didn’t want to teach and was pushed into it, and shows herself put into institutions and made worse by them, coming out to be isolated again (like a prisoner from a jail), taking menial jobs, spending her time thinking about how not to eat and avoiding facing the reality of her unhappiness. Her book reveals the difficulties of breaking out of once you move into isolation.
Even here she is to be read with care, for she repeats over and over how this condition makes the girl powerful (hilarious this) and is an attention-grabber. Not in my experience necessarily. In my experience the girl is often ignored and/or snubbed because no one in the family knows what to do or they are angry at her for being ill — chimpanzees will ferociously attack other chimps who are disabled lest they “catch” this state. Luckily on my WWTTA list, Aneilka reacted to my first description of this book as probably “wrong” because surely such a condition (starving, weakening yourself, making yourself unable to sit down to a meal with others) makes a girl powerless, helpless and throws her into the control of others (as she often can’t find a job due to her looks and need to cope with not eating most of the time).
Here is part of my take on this complicated condition: The girl is seeking control (that’s true) by putting people at a distance from her. She shrinks her body in order to fend off male attacks. She has been made understandably afraid she will be ridiculed because she is fat and publicly rejected repeatedly. She is afraid of all the pressures put on her by her family to be thin and super-aggressively popular and successful — part of this is their demand she look fashionable. She is in short afraid and has lost self-esteem and confidence badly. The one area she can control is her body which she has been taught to dislike and to diet and change. What she doesn’t realize is control does not come this way. In fact she is without power and dependent on others to tolerate her and keep her.
Chisholm does show how hard it is for a girl still to get real help, how much suffering the girl is experiencing. She is open about the hostility to the girl, that those around her seek to punish her. Such a girl is an affront to most people. They see her as astonishingly against life. Depressive people are often disliked as a living indictment of society’s infliction of suffering through its social arrangements and customs. They are thriving or okay and don’t want to be told the system is unfair to others without the same genes and background. Force feeding (I’ve always felt) is spiteful behavior. It’s analogous to the way a woman’s vagina is unnecessarily totally shaved when she gives birth. See you brought this on yourself.
Still I’ve never quite understand the special hostility to anorexic girls. The hostility to anorexic girls goes beyond the usual fear depressives and insistence on an appearance of cheer. Unless it be some intuition part of her syndrome is she doesn’t want sex with men on the terms this society offers it? Bynum Walker goes into how societies over and over again insist on defining women as food, as makers of food, cooks, feeders, as sex objects, as nurses, all self-sacrificing mothers. The resentment of girls who will not accept being raped and complain comes from the sense, Who do you think you are? I took it. So women resent the anorexic girl too. She takes the misery of pregnancies, of feeding others. So the girl’s being pushed into this (as Isabelle Caro clearly was) is not sympathized with because they have endure this daily.
I also see in it an addictive personality which can fall into other obsessive patterns: chain smoking, alcoholism, self-injuries. I do not idealize the condition or say it’s a state of being that anyone wants. Such people are to be pitied. I was pitiful myself.
I’ll end on a movie making the rounds just now: Black Swan, a movie which seems to break the taboo against hiding a common way of dealing with stress: self-injuring yourself to get release tension. Like depression, this self-mutilation is anger and pent-up violence felt against others turned against the self and body. I’ve read the depiction of the world of ballet is laughable and this movie does not create sympathy (in the way The King’s Speech does for stammerers).
Kettlewell, Skin Game
I haven’t seen Black Swan so don’t know but would like to cite a book that is genuinely humane about a related condition women and men experience: self-mutilation: Carolyn Kettlewell’s Skin Game. Alas, she has no larger explanation, seems not to have read any general books to explain her suffering to herself, but she does recreate uncannily the inner workings of a mind under stress from rejection and loss of self-esteem, how someone who is different (smarter say) can turn inward to semi-hallucinating compensatory dreams which are now consoling and now self-destructive. The self-destructive leads to the painful acts.
For general explanation of skin games, anorexia, and many other destructive states of mind and body and acts Armando Favazzo’s Under Seige: Self-mutilation and body modification in culture and psychiatry is the best book extant. It should be required reading before going into see Black Swan. He shows that many societies practice self-injury and self-mutilation, bodily harm as part of their rituals. Only those the society does not practice at large are stigmatized. So beheading, torture, circumcision (a slight cut), female genital mutilation (a cruel destruction of a central organ in women), various ordeals to become a man, war, tatoos are accepted if with discomfort and strong attempts at rationales. To see this is to realize the self-injurer is not mad or outside humanity, but rather picking on some area regarded as taboo (fingers, feet, the penis — male transvestites become female by cutting off their penises surgically), and to see how societies at large use violence to release their social tensions and energies of hatred and fear.
Anthony Favazzo, Bodies Under Seige
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
More good books: Mary Pipher’s <<Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, deals with cutting as part of a larger phenomena of emotional problems in adolescent women.
Janice McLane's , "The Voice on the Skin: Self-Mutilation and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Language," (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, November, 1996) to be helpful. The article discusses self-injury as a non-verbal means of expressing trauma. It's written for general readers, not as a specialized piece, and can be used as a resource by self-injurers.
Robin Connors. Self Injury: Psychotherapy With People Who Engage in Self-Inflicted Violence
Kim Hewitt. Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink
Douglas Ebby: cutting / self-injury resources
http://talentdevelop.com/cutting-r.html
E.M.
Victorian novels often retell as part of their stories of characters who engage in profoundly masochistic — self-attacking behaviors. That society was a rough cruel one to the poor and excluded. Trollope’s _Can You Forgive Her?_ is laden with startling images of pain and torture and masochism. Also Edith Dombey in _Dombey and Son_ inflicts red marks on her wrists by grinding her bracelets into her flesh, or something like that. And on a more metaphorical level, _Daniel Deronda_ is full of references to torture, thumb screws, self-inflicted pain, mostly clustered around Gwendolen and her husband. Eliot and Dickens use images of marks left on bodies, either figuratively or literally, in chilling ways.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was also (it’s generally felt) anorexic and, beyond the tyranny of the father, this goes far also to explain why she lived such an isolated life on a couch and why in fact her years with Browning were no idyll.
Ellen
Caro put herself in the public eye. I don’t know anything about her story so I won’t presume to speak about her, but generally if I am honest, I must say I feel immensely jealous of her and people like her, the Marya Hornbachers of the world. I was anorexic, but it didn’t get me anywhere. No one wanted to interview me or cared what I had to say. I did write about the experiences in creative writing classes and then for myself in a writing group and in therapy and women’s studies courses, and mostly no one wanted to publish them. No one cared. I had suffered for absolutely no greater purpose. No one wanted to understand or relate to me. For that, I am jealous of her. In anorexia, some of us do it to feel like role models. To set an example. It’s proof of our perfection, it sets us apart. People want to know how we are so small, what do we eat? At first we are admired, but then if you get too skinny, you just look pitiful. Still, that satisfies somethign in us, because isn’t self-starvation also a cry for help? Some get it, some don’t. Well, Caro got it. Apparently she was on the news, perhaps brushed elbows with Jessica Simpson, not shabby.
I actually turned down a modeling agency that approached me because I knew it would just make me feel the need to lose even more weight. Is that one of my biggest regrets, or is that the smartest decision I ever made? Some days I have one answer, some days another.
I just want to be admired and accepted. I would still do anything to feel that way, but I just know that in the life I have, extreme weight loss is not a path to that goal. But being thinner than my peers is. You bet. I work out two hours 5x a week to wear a size 2 at age 31. I volunteer for everything, especially tasks it seems no one else wants to do. I give gifts, lunches, baby showers, dinners, donations, my time, anything. It’s never enough. People still don’t love me because I still don’t love myself, although with everything I give, I don’t know how they can smell it on me and turn me away.
But this is why after I tried to write some articles and got one published and one encyclopedia article, and after I gave up on my remaining manuscripts, I decided not to write about it any more: I think people who’ve suffered from eating disorders are not the best authorities and often do more harm than good, when they are writing about their own experiences and use themselves as first hand authorities. No one in this world probably wants to read or consider the above paragraphs. What paradigm do those feelings fit into? How would reading that help anyone who is struggling, or anyone who is trying to be a helper toward others? It really wouldn’t. Maybe we just get to a point where we don’t fit the diagnostic criteria and our therapists get sick of us so we think we are cured.
I don’t think there really is a real cure for me, and I should know because I’ve read just about everything the professional fields have to say on the subject. I was practically born broken. I forgave my mother, but then I had to forgive her again, and then again because hurt after hurt resurfaces. I tried confronting her, but that was unsatisfactory because others can’t give us what they don’t have to give, and I tried to nurture my inner child and be my own “good mother,” but that feels like a sham most of the time. I’ve tried to be active in feminist art and woman-positive campaigns against the media, sought archetypes, and performed symbolic acts of all kinds, including some borrowed from wiccan and pagan friends; I mean what stone have I left unturned? None of it seems to matter. I was also hospitalized and tried medications. No one wants to hear that I exist.
It’s probably easier for Chisolm to hate herself and by extension other girls in her shoes. If her path has been anything like mine, she can’t give a nice theoretical model because it’s all too muddled, self-contradictory, and still in progress. In other words, because of the sickness. It’s a rhizome, not a teleology.
but I am not at all discounting the work that has been done by men and women who are in remission or active recovery, but using research and studies, models, instead of their own stories as framework. I could document every bit of what’s contributed to what I am, but that wouldn’t fit one kind of theory or cure. It’s multivalent.
I wasn’t shown love properly, there was some harsh conservative Christianity which affected me oddly, I was always unpopular and never really knew how to integrate myself socially, I was thought quite smart for my age and as result had unfairly high expectations attached to me, I idolized slim celebrities and models, food was the language of love and discipline, I had fear of womanhood, loathed the female body and its excesses and social limitations, it’s everything. Patriarchy, mother-daughter tension, media, sense of powerlessness, desire for perfection, self-loathing.
But by the way, I hope you’ll consider that I think it’s dangerous to randomly name actresses who you find to be too thin. You’re a critic, not a medical doctor with accesss to these womens’ real bodies. One thing recovery should teach us is that we can’t judge ourselves against others, nor should we judge others against ourselves. But if you want to compare that picture of Kidman to the one you’ve posted of Caro, there’s a clear difference between their degrees of thinness. One possibility is that Kidman might have a series of disordered eating patterns and/or exercise addiction and plastic surgery compulsion, but not qualify for the clinical criterion of anorexia. But that’s just my guess.
From Aneilka (WWTTA):
“I would like to get the book and read it myself although I am not expecting a definitive answer to my questions about Anorexia. As someone who has not suffered from Anorexia Nervosa I find it a most puzzling and mysterious condition and I would like to be able to understand it better to be able to offer the empathy and support in a way that is supportive and respectful of sufferers.
For a long time I have contended that Fanny Burney may have had Anorexia Nervosa at court and it was only when she became so thin that she was near fainting that men interposed on her behalf and interceded on Fanny Burney’s behalf with the Queen that she might be permitted to leave her roal appointment. (Boswell from memory, amongst others) to allow her to escape from a bullying environment (one that separated her from her father – a father whom she idealised and yet appears to be quite controlling). Her status at court was low and as a child she had not been valued particularly by her step-mother. If anyone has read her diaries they may also remember the strange incident of the bread and apricots that Mr. F– had in his pocket when they were attending the Queen on a visit:
“While roving about a very spacious apartment, Mr. F came behind me, and whispered that I might easily slip out into a small parlour, to rest a little while; almost every body having taken some opportunity to contrive themselves a little sitting but myself. I assured him, very truly, I was too little tired to make it worth while ; but poor Miss Planta was so woefully fatigued that I could not, upon her account, refuse to be of the party. He conducted us into a very neat little parlour, belonging to the master of the college, and Miss Planta flung herself on a chair half dead with weariness. Mr. F was glad of the opportunity to sit for a moment also; for my part, I was quite alert. Alas! my dear Susan, ’tis my mind that is so weak, and so open to disorder;-my body, I really find, when it is an independent person, very strong, and capable of much exertion without suffering from it. Mr. F now produced from a paper repository concealed in his coat pocket, some apricots and bread, and insisted upon my eating ;-but I was not inclined to the repast, and saw he was half famished himself;-so was poor Miss Planta: however, he was so persuaded I must both be as hungry and as tired as himself, that I was forced to eat an apricot to appease him. Presently, while we were in the midst of this regale, the door suddenly opened, and the Queen came in!-followed by as many attendants as the room would contain. Up we all started, myself alone not discountenanced; for I really think it quite respect sufficient never to sit down in the royal presence, without aiming at having it supposed that I have stood bolt upright ever since I have been admitted to it. Quick into our pockets was crammed our bread, and close into our hands was squeezed our fruit; by which I discovered that our appetites were to be supposed annihilated, at the same time that our strength was to be invincible.”
There’s something about Fanny Burney’s concern with food and the self-abnegation with which everyone else is labelled as “poor this’ and “poor that” that strikes a chord. Fanny Burney also describes several people as thin:
“My poor brother….is grown so thin and meagre, that he looks ten years older
than when I saw him last.”
“He is a tall, thin, spirited Italian”
“Mrs. Montague is middle-sized, very thin and looks infirm.”
“the Booby has nothing to do but to allow some repose to his thin Carcass to get
well again”
She seems strangely preoccupied with eating rituals and the thinness of others.
Anielka”
In response to Anielka and to all,
I am not surprised at all to be told that Fanny Burney suffered some version of anorexia while a coerced handmaid to the queen. She also was intensely repressed over sex (you never hear it mentioned ever in 20 volumes), was early separated from her mother, in awe of the father. My first reaction upon looking at the passage is, yes. I’d have to go back and read more of the diary.
I too have felt an affinity for Burney. When I wrote my “Upon first encountering Fanny Burney” for the Burney paper I told the truth when I said that Burney was as important a figure for me in getting me started on my love of 18th century literature as Austen, that I first was deeply attracted to her through an abridged version of her journals.
Come to think of it the only serious scholarly book Chisholm has written (basically taking Joyce Hemlow’s book and updating it, while eliminating all feminist thoughts) — is a long book on Burney. An affinity?
Aneilka says she does not understand the condition herself. It’s hard to explain when you’ve not suffered it — crystal clear as a feeling and experience when you have. My blog — much to my astonishment has elicited a reply from a woman who was and is still anorexic. She presents a very different portrait from my own — I’d never in a million years want to have myself photographed or try to market myself — which shows how individual is the experience. And yet I see such similarities. If the person reads this before I write again, I mean to come back and try to describe my own case a bit to demonstrate my point.
I do hope I get more replies. Since the Net, anorexic women have a place they can speak out. The woman wants to remain anonymous and could not otherwise. Again this shows how stupid is Chisholm for she wants to shut such a person up. We need to listen to her — and ourselves.
Ellen
Michael wrote: “Patricia McCormick has written a novel _Cut_ about a teen who self-abuses (cuts) herself. It is written for a teen audience. “
Catherine Janofsky “Ellen … if you are doing a piece on anorexia, did you include Colette’s essay on Renee Vivien? It’s a brilliant analysis of a woman’s struggle with her weight.
Catherine, I see that Renee Vivien and Colette were part of the same group, and that apparently they wrote of one another, but for me to find the essay you speak of, which I would very much like to read — as Colette had her own life experiences which would teach her a great deal about her world’s infliction on her and/or others of weight disorders — in order to find and read it, I need the title of the piece or the title of the book one can find it in, or the title of the journal (then the year and issue) it first appeared in.
Ellen
A really interesting and thought provoking blog, Ellen, thank you. Gwyn
Interesting blog about the anorexia. Couldn’t relate much personally as I’ve not had that sort of problem, but it seemed very well done. D.
Catherine:
“I have trouble reading about anorexia. Was your blog post inspired by the death of the Italian model (Caro?)
Personally, I think there is a brain chemistry thing going on that we don’t yet understand. One no more “snaps out of anorexia” than one “snaps out of depression.” Or cancer. We know so little about how brain and body chemistry works.
Some new fields that are opening in medical research suggest that some conditions such as anorexia or autism result from a combination of factors. If you are unlucky enough to get the “deadly triad” you suffer the disorder. (The idea is that some things are a combination of defective genes, environment, and other factors that come together to create “a perfect storm.”)”
It was motivated by my own experience of anorexia and anger at Chisholm’s ugly calling names and pernicious presentation of anorexia, accompanied by vacuous talk about “coping with life” (which apparently some of us can avoid?) and sentimental talk about families (especially teasing as “fun”).
I agree no one snaps out of it, some are more prone than others (addictive and anxiety-prone people) and the environment (especially an unconsciously hostile one — which I grew up in) are important causes. But I think feminists have it right on the environment (other people, surroundings, customs) just the way a sociological study of obsession only could explain the motherhood-at-any-cost craziness. But one is accepted (painful operations, exploiting poor women to carry their eggs or produce some) and the other abhorred.
The difference: motherhood obsession is accepting men and children and sex as central to the woman’s life; anorexia is part of an attempt to escape that.
E.M.
“Ellen,
Thank you for sharing all the thoughts and resources on anorexia in your blog. As I have never suffered from it, I can’t truly understand it, but a part of me can understand the impetus–I dieted severely as a teenager, feeling an intense pressure to be thin, although I never had the body type to be ultra-thin. I had too a warped body image from a “chubby” period I went through at around 14 (though looking at old pix, I was hardly “chubby” by any stretch of the imagination.)
Roger and I recently watched Dogville, which starred Nicole Kidman, and I noticed how very thin she looked, almost wraithlike, and I wondered about her eating. At the same time, both Roger and I commented on how beautiful she was in that movie, showing how much even conscious people internalize the equation of near starvation with beauty.
Diane”
Diane says she doesn’t understand anorexia — as have Aneilka, Diana and others I’ve met who have never been afflicted. Not all as books and articles are written by those not afflicted, though often you do discover they have experienced traumatically some aspect of the unreal contradictory requirements for women’s bodies. Mantel is (as I said) as a result of an unlucky operation obese.
I have a hard time understanding what’s not to understand :). But then I’m on the inside still. I’ve put it as far as I am able in words on my blog. For me one aspect was the aggressive abrasive encounters with boys, the way sex is experienced by the adolescent girl (at least that was partly was it was for me in NYC and Queens), so you get so thin no one will bother you. Safety. Other aspects are humiliating teasing – which also happened to me — as I said I find this is a common link among anorexics, and commonly done to the girl by family members who seek to control her out of their own embarassment.
I find in Gemma Bovery that Posy Simmonds understands. She has subthemes in these two books I’ve read (Tamara Drewe the other). One I said was the daily life of the writer: seen in Nick and from a empathetic standpoint. Watch the pictures and you discover he’s actually alone a lot.
Gemma Bovery is about family life (she hates the adjective and says watch out for experiences which have that as an adjective) and the problem of one’s weight comes out — so it’s presented as many experience it. I put three pictures from the sequences. The first the most awful is a scene of miserable talking in her flat with Charlie in London. Parents there saying precisely the wrong things which needle her. This neighborhood bad. How can you have children here? Who says she wants children? Then she’s grown fat eating with Charlie and is ashamed — standing backwards in flowing clothes. Later she cannot fend off the father’s remark and it is part of what makes her want to move.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/1968829960/pic/1353435473/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=21&count=20&dir=asc
I think of many analogous scenes with my family I experienced. Wretched.
Then I skip to when she’s beginning to shop sensibly in Normandy:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/1968829960/pic/957522829/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=21&count=20&dir=asc
This is part of a winter sequence: Simmonds does give her stories seasonal phases.
Finally when she “gets hold of herself” and decides to lose weight:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/
I couldn’t center the book well, but you see “hate myself!” there and this crap (I had almost said) about pregnancy and chldren again that has been thrown at her. The next page has her on a machine exercising. Luckily Charlie is laid back (she doesn’t appreciate this after a while) and no one has humiliated or teased or and other conditions are not here so she doesn’t go over the top to anorexia, but she begins the journey is my point.
Why I like Favazzo’s book Bodies Under Seige is he points out to many obsession in our culture which are not stigmatized.
The other day on WWTTA I put a brief description of a student paper where she told me she was tempted to sell her body: she was going to undergo painful extractions of eggs after putting into herself lots of pills and I don’t know what else. For $6000. Alas, she fell for the pious cant she was doing good for other women — still she didn’t do it. That obsessive cant is what I am pointing to. I’ve read about women who undergo themselves extraordinary measures to get pregnant. Thousands and thousands of dollars, procedures, pills, multiple births. They are as mad as anorexics but no one says this but Favazzo by implication.
Note in the frames on losing weight the idea Gemma’s body is there to produce children is never far away.
Ellen
“I meant to say too that I was interested in your references to anorexia in Galileo’s Daughter. I read that book some years ago, and it was one of those books that made a disproportionate impression on me–I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a number of reasons. One of them was the convent system, and the large number of girls relegated to convents at the time. The poor Clares, which I believe was the order where Galileo’s daughters ended up, seemed especially cruel, because of the prohibition on owning property and the emphasis on begging–I am not against living that way IF one is called to it (and a few will be) but to impose it on young women against their wills seems a hard fate. I admired Galileo’s eldest daughter so much for how she dealt with the situation she was thrust into, but how awful to be walled away at a young age. I felt that strongly, felt her total dependency on her father for the smallest things, and was glad that he came through for her when she needed money but also found it difficult to forgive his initial decision to put her and her sister away. “
that was a very interesting blog about the anorexia book. Mari Webb.
From Mari:
“Tthat was a very interesting blog about the anorexia book.
Mari Webb.”
< Diane says she doesn't understand anorexia — as have Aneilka, Diana and
others I've met who have never been afflicted. Not all as books and
articles are written by those not afflicted, though often you do discover they
have experienced traumatically some aspect of the unreal contradictory
requirements for women's bodies…. I have a hard time understanding what's not to
understand :). But then I'm on the inside still. I've put it as far as I
am able in words on my blog. For me one aspect was the aggressive abrasive
encounters with boys, the way sex is experienced by the adolescent girl (at
least that was partly was it was for me in NYC and Queens), so you get so
thin no one will bother you. Safety. Other aspects are humiliating teasing
– which also happened to me — as I said I find this is a common link among
anorexics, and commonly done to the girl by family members who seek to
control her out of their own embarassment.
Ellen, part of it is simply that you really only totally understand an
ailment or bad experience by having it, walking in its shoes. You then see it
all around you, and get interested in it. That's natural, and has
happened often to me about lots of things. For example, I used to think that
people who went on about fad diets were fanatical cranks. Then we improved my
husband Peter's diabetes by putting him on a strict low-carb diet. Turned
out he was essentially "allergic" to carbs, and by not eating the "white
groups" (rice, potatoes, pasta, bread), his blood sugar went from hellacious
400 to healthy 100. So now, I go around preaching like the worst crank in
the world! If anybody tells me they or a loved one are diabetic, they get
treated to a lecture on how to substitute grated sauteed cauliflower for
rice!
So that's one aspect. And, as it happens, anorexia is completely outside
my life experience, I've never even had a friend who had it (other than
yourself). Even though I've taken ballet all my life, I only ever saw one
girl who had it (of course, these were adult recreational classes; among
professional dancers, we know it's a different story). So it is very unfamiliar
territory. Then too, we are just *different.* I have been in love with
food all my life, it is one of my constant and enduring great interests, I
love it so much I can't imagine denying myself food any more than I could
imagine denying myself books, or love! I have to work at keeping from
getting too plump (hey, the low carb helps!), but it's not a big concern. I'm
relaxed with my body and with my eating. I rather like being curvy, I feel
healthy and energetic, as if that's the way I'm meant to be.
And when I was a teenager in New York City, at the same time you were,
Ellen, I got the exact same kind of constant attention from guys – much of it
pressing, rude and unpleasant. You and I were both very attractive girls,
and I couldn't walk around the Upper West Side in the 1960s without guys
putting their hands on me and using obscenities. But our gut reactions were
completely different – and who knows why one teenage girl should feel one
way and another, differently? Even when annoyed I took it as a compliment
and would kind of crow inside thinking, "They think I'm pretty!" I LOVED my
cute new figure and would not have dreamed of wanting to change it, or hide
it for safety, to avoid teasing or roughness. I even gloried in it
(though of course I did develop New York protective skills, and crossed the
street if I saw troublesome looking guys coming). At 15/16, the thing I wanted
most in the world was to attract boys! I was quite boy crazy, and
uninterested in my studies, and to tell the truth even now that I'm in my 60s, I
think back on it with a reminiscent smile and think, "I'm glad I had that
time as a pretty girl, and had some silly, frivolous, Lydia-like adventures
before the serious part of life began." (Which it soon did, as I got
pregnant and married at 17!) Just like I'm glad I had the time as a young mother,
or as one of a young romantic pair of lovers. Those stages of life pass,
but I know that having had them once, I haven't missed out, I've had life's
experiences.
I did experience, I think, as much corrosive behavior from men and boys as
you did – near rapes, and men exposing themselves on the subway, threatened
attacks. But strange to say, I didn't dislike, distrust or fear men
because of that. I saw some that were driven by sex to near inhumanity, but
there were a lot of creepy sick people in New York then, it was a rough
place, and I didn't take them as examples of the whole sex. I always liked, no
loved, boys and men, and saw them as friends, not enemies. When I read
this sentence by Louisa May Alcott, in An Old-Fashioned Girl, it resonated
with me:
"being brought up in the most affectionate and frank relations with her
brothers, she had early learned what it takes most women some time to
discover, that sex does not make nearly as much difference in hearts and souls as
we fancy. Joy and sorrow, love and fear, life and death, bring so many of
the same needs to all that the wonder is we do not understand each other
better, but wait till times of tribulation teach us that human nature is very
much the same in men and women."
We're all human and I don't think of men as the enemy, even though a few
roughs tried to attack me. I knew some awful women too. Nor do concepts
like "unreal contradictory requirements for women's bodies" mean much to me.
I'm comfortable with my body and with men, and any unreal images I see in
magazines or on TV I dismiss as just part of the general culture's silliness
– having no effect or impact on my life at all. I resist and ignore it
just as I resist advertising.
The disorder of anorexia as you describe it sounds tortuously painful and
dangerous too, and I can only be thankful I've escaped it, along with many
of the other miserable conditions that afflict man (and woman), at least so
far. So I can understand intellectually up to a point, but I don't *feel*
what it must be like, because it truly is very, very far from anything I've
ever felt or experienced. I can understand standard diseases, like
cancer, better – they hit you and you struggle and suffer. But anorexia seems to
involve one's own will, a faulty self-image, and fear of men, so it is
really complicated and hard for me to understand. It doesn't seem like
something imposed by society – you don't get it because Marilyn Monroe's pointy
bras were once the ideal, or because gang bangers at a bodega ask you to
f–k them. Those things will only trigger an anorexic, but not a
non-anorexic. So it seems to be a psychological disorder that develops from within,
like obsessive compulsive disorder or agoraphobia, I think; and it's hard
to imagine having it, if you don't. It's easier to imagine how you would
feel if you broke your leg, than it is to imagine how you would feel if you
had a psychological disorder. Though one certainly sympathizes!
Diana
To reply to Diana:
To reply:
I never said I disliked men or found them my enemy nor did I say I distrust or dislike sex in and of itself. If I’ve given you that impression, you’ve misunderstood what I wrote. This is an accusation against feminists and for me and most I’ve know it’s not true.
I do intensely dislike what the culture produces in many men. I have recently reread Simon Raven’s Boys Will be Boys, and for a reactionary man, it’s at first surprising. He argues boys are made by our culture just as much as woman and he lashes out against the militarist culture that demands ugly aggressive behavior as central to the male psyche. Not all boys grow up this way, and many just pretend to it — aggressive, competition. I’m going to put up a new model on my site: by a young man training to be a nurse; it’s about the cruel prejudice against men who want to be nurses; right now he’s having a hard time getting a job, though his grades are superhigh and he’s a deeply caring personality.
The second phase of feminism failed utterly to change the macho cultures across societies.
You used the noun “man” as a universal. There are few universal experiences; cultures mediate just about all, and then there’s an important faultline between men and women. I know that Simmonds understands anorexia because she has the beginning journey of her Heroine (who does not fall into it) continually associated with comments about pregnancy. She is asked, Isn’t she pregnant [yet, the implication]? No and she has no intention of getting that way. The percentage of men becoming anorexic is so tiny that it’s less than 1 %.
Yes I disliked and still do the way sexual experience is carried on, especially among adolescents and believe people need to be re-educated. I am — as I assume you are — anything but complacent and accepting about it. I do what I can here on the Net and when I teach to counter it. I find the new culture which encourages girls to be like men — as aggressive, competitive, nasty and so on awful. I do what I can to counter that too.
As for disliking sex, when I met a guy if I liked him usually I went to bed with him the first night. No problem. Food, it bores me, I don’t mind eating yummy stuff but I can’t be bothered to spend time cooking it. I’d rather read and write. I’m no one’s food myself. I don’t mind a glass of wine but again I won’t pay any large sum for fancy stuff. And I do like exercise and feeling light in my body so to speak.
As I wrote on my blog, this disorder seems to me to be a disorder that goes against the grain of some of our culture’s deepest and contradictory demands. So obessive wanting to be a mother to the extent that you will undergo painful procedures, take oodles of pills (which can give you multiple births), spend huge sums, exploit other women’s bodies and needs (desperation for money), their very bodies (like take the child from a woman who gave birth to it because you bought it in a contract) — that’s just fine. Wanting “out” as Mantel puts it so brilliantly is not.
It comes from families too — deeply rooted in that as Pazzolini shows. This point of view is not one that comes out very often. Feminists don’t generalize from this as much because it goes against the grain of sacred unreal ideas (which Gemma Bovery is concerned to expose) and it is a safety net for some in a world where there are so few.
I’ve had the highest number ever coming to my blog since I started it. Nearly 500 hits – the only comparable was when Brad de Long compliment my Winter’s Bone blog and put a link in his blog to it. He’s a semi-famous blogger. The in two days I had slightly over 400.
One of the things I pointed out to show how stupid and unsympathetic is Chisholm is how she anathematized anorexic girls’ sites where they communicate with one another. On Womens’ Studies I’ve seen women inveigh against them. I have read some of them; like the young woman who wrote on my site I find as individuals they differ from me greatly, but I see the syndrome within the differences. I feel for them. I rejoice for them they have found contacts and friends. I am glad for them they are on the net and can tell their stories – though I know in this world they will do very little good for their “cause’ as they put it just the way the woman’s movement has done so little for women in the areas of sex and marriage concretely — and only mild palliations in the western world in the areas of jobs. Education that the establishment will permit us — well until lately and the new Spite has spread across reactionary government after government. Why? it makes no change as the established order is run by the strong for the strong ruthlessly and those who have will do anything they can not to share (most of them) and (as Sarah Fielding shows in her David Simple), People who have things behave badly to those in need of them, especially if the power to give them away or withhold them is theirs
Ellen
Ellen writes”Thousands and thousands of dollars, procedures, pills, multiple births.”
Yep. That’s all me.
“They are as mad as anorexics”
Ummmm. Not quite so sure this is me. I rather like to think I have an earthy sense of reality, early menopause and triplets. (POF = Premature Ovarian failure)
In reply:
IN response to Aneilka, I should probably have said I’ve been pregnant four times and endured various ordeals as an immediate result — including coming near death twice. I also empathize from my own experience with women before the 1930s when they died in huge numbers of pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth and its aftermath. All this is erased in most public discourse now and was before — I was so glad Ron discussed Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel in such a way as to bring this out.
Another “myth” about anorexics and also feminists is this kind of pattern is not found among them. It is. When I was in my 20s I didn’t think about the future the way I do now. I came from a family where women got pregnant in their late teens and early twenties. Working class. When I told my parents and others I was pregnant (with Isabel as it turned out) at age 37-38 I actually got comments which implied, “is that possible?” From people who know that menopause doesn’t come in until one’s later forties for most.
Feminism is an intelligent reaction to experience — but the experience must not only be thoroughly had, it has to be thought about.
Ellen
When I said I don’t fully understand anorexia, that was in a spirit of
not having the hubris to claim I understood what I have not undergone.
I would say the same about losing a child–I have never lost one so
can’t claim a full understanding. In both cases, however, I do
“understand” on some level. I remember dieting obsessively as a
teenager in the 1970s, when the beauty image, as I remember it,
required paper thinness and long, center-parted completely straight
hair. I had an average frame and body type and curly hair, so I
expended a great deal of effort to attain an unnaturally think body
and straight hair. I can understand, having dieted, being gripped by a
fear of gaining weight.
In these accounts of anorexia, and in my memories of thinness and not
thinness, there appear, however, several contradictions. For example,
anorexics starve themselves to become invisible and to shrink the
body–yet what is “seen” in our culture are thin women. (“You can’t be
too thin or too rich.”) Heavier women tend to be either invisible or
perceived as not quite human and thus as fair game” for ridicule. A
case in point–when my children were younger, around the year 2000,
Nickelodeon came out with a “comedy” show for children that centered
on endless ridiculing of –and playing cruel pranks on– a very obese
woman who was an elementary school teacher. This is one of the reasons
we got rid of our TV. So there’s paradox here–the very quest for
invisibility leads to greater visibility; the very quest to de-
sexualize the body sexualizes the anorexic woman, who is likely,
because she is slender, to be considered “hot” according to beauty
norms in this culture. Also, the anorexic seems both rebel and
conformist simultaneously, both wanting to control her food intake/
body and yet at the same time wanting to please authority figures
harping on thinness or condemning or ridiculing weight gain, even the
natural weight gain of developing breasts and a more mature figure.
Perhaps that is part of anorexia–the ability to simultaneously
control and please, even if it is an aggressive and possibly parodic
“pleasing.” But perhaps I am completely wrong about this, in which
case please forgive me.
I do understand that the anorexic is suffering
and often isolated. I suppose the part that is hardest to understand
when you have not “been there” is the inability to pull back at the
point of death–I can understand having a distorted body image and
feeling “fat” when one is thin, as I have done that, but at a certain
point–ending up in the hospital perhaps, or repeated warnings of
imminent death–I believe I would chose being “fat” to death. I had a
roommate who almost became anorexic under pressure from her boyfriend,
but she joined a group and was able to pull back. I also understand
that certain “injuries” to the body are condemned and others
validated. I think you mentioned plastic surgery, Ellen, as well as
egg harvesting, and I would certainly see being underweight also being
validated until it becomes a health problem–the woman who is 10
pounds underweight gets the prize ( a trophy bride for example, must
be thin), whereas the woman who is 25 pounds underweight becomes a
“problem” (to men) and is censured and condemned.
Ellen
Thank you to Diane. We’ve discussed the importance of Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter which ought to be required reading on the formation of anorexia too. One reason it’s not is the book shows the cruel realities that lie behind families dumping their daughters into nunneries which were mostly underfunded. I remembered that book for ever after — as I did The Weaker Vessel (an early feminist historical book).
You’re right about the contradictions — they mirror the contradictions in our society. The reason they are not seen in the obsessive medical inflictions on women’s bodies to have children is that having children is such an overriding consideration. Along with papers on exploitation, I’ve had so many over the years from women who are made miserable because 1) they have miscarriages (in traditional cultures I’ve learned they are made ashamed and told this is uncommon — miscarriages are very common), or 2) are married for more than a year and not yet pregnant and made to feel bad.
Did I pull back from death? No. I never got near it. I am afraid (joke alert) I had not the self-control I’ve glimpsed. This is I discern the case with Chisholm. Maybe she’s smaller than me so she got slightly under 70 pounds, I never got lower than 78 and I was ever edging higher. I didn’t weigh myself and still don’t — in the doctor’s office I either refuse to be weighed or don’t look. A saving thing was coffee. I love coffee with milk and never gave it up, I’d also use sugar because I knew the non-sugar stuff caused cancer. I like fruit and would eat it freely and when I was out never refused a drink, especially scotch whiskey and ginger ale (still a favorite). A worrying thing for me when I see an anorexic is the water bottle. She’s drinking water to stave off a need for food. The water bottle ends them up in hospitals. When I was young, there was no water sold this way. A great evil for anorexic girls.
(Oh you can refuse stuff in a doctor’s office. Nurses make a fuss but after a while if you have regular doctors her nurse is told to leave you alone.)
My father and I had a little joke going. He’d say to me, “how cadaverous we are looking today.” And I’d reply, “just think a size 3 coffin!” A family joke. I should say it was he who ridiculed me – he who humiliated me in front of other relatives and he knew it and remembered it because I told him so. Anorexic women also have a sense of humor — about themselves as frequently as women driving themselves to get pregnant. Some people don’t either because they can’t bear looking at themselves distantly or unempathetically. Austen’s jokes bother me because most of them are not aimed at herself and when she aims them at her culture (the rebarbative jokes about men in love with her) I discern no conscious critique of her culture, but then she’s writing to Cassandra.
Good for you having no TV. I loathe those reality TV shows. People watching them are getting the same kinds of kicks people used to get when they went to freak shows, only it’s prolonged and they get to do it voyeuristically.
Ellen
Ron Dunning:
“I’m reading a book by Antonia Fraser, “The Weaker Vessel”, about women’s
lives in the 1600s, and finding it fascinating. I’ve always believed
that there was more to history than the achievements of politicians and
military leaders. In a section on the reaction to infant mortality she
contradicts, with contemporary reports, the opinion that parents were
less affected by the death of a child because they bore so many, and so
many died, expressed among others by Lawrence Stone in ‘The Family, Sex
and Marriage in England 1500-1800’. In the 1600s religious doctrine
held that women were punished for ‘their grandmother Eve’s’
transgressions, and that the child would surely be received in heaven;
and that extravagant displays of grief, like those of love, were ungodly
and unseemly. Antonia Fraser argues against that with a number of
examples from diaries, etc. That quoted below refers to the sister of
an ancestor of Jane Austen’s – Elizabeth was the sister of Anne
Duncombe, who was one Jane’s 3rd-great-grandmothers. Elizabeth herself
was the 3rd-great-grandmother of the Bishop of Winchester, Brownlow
North, who ordained Henry Austen. (Brownlow and Henry can’t have known
that they were distant cousins.)
‘Sir William Brownlow was a brother of that Sir John Brownlow of Belton
who recommended mares milk for conception; no such expedient was
necessary in the case of his wife, Elizabeth Duncombe. William Brownlow
kept a meticulous record of her child-bearing from 27 June 1626 when
their first child Richard was born, who died in October of that year,
down to the birth of their nineteenth child twenty-two years later; a
daughter who lived – unmarried – till 1726. One third of this vast
progeny survived – two sons and four daughters – which on a larger scale
was something like the average survival rate for upper- and middle-class
families of the time, in so far as it can be estimated.
At one point, between 1638 and 1646, seven children, born at almost
exactly yearly intervals, died in a row; Thomas, Francis, Benjamin,
George, James, Maria and Anne. William Brownlow’s exclamations of grief
as each new tragedy struck show some attempt at reconciliation to the
workings of providence – “Though my children die, the Lord liveth and
they exchange but a temporal life for an eternal one” – but absolutely
no diminution in grief. Little George, for example, his fifteenth
child, managed to live from October 1641 to 29 July of the following
year; when he died, his father wrote: “I was at ease but Thou O God hast
broken me asunder and shaken me to pieces.” That was doubtless the
truth. Parents, in their heart of hearts, could not reconcile
themselves to a doctrine which left the little one happier in heaven –
and their arms empty.’
Antonia Fraser must have found a diary by Sir William, and I’ll try to
find it.
Ron Dunning
A warm welcome to Ron Dunning to our list. I saw your earlier email, Ron, but did not have a chance to respond. All’s well that ends well, for now I can also say I read Antonia Fraser’s book when it came out and remember loving it. It was a rare feminist scholarly book on an early period of history then: a kind of great-great grandmother to say Amanda Vickery’s Behind Closed Doors.
I’m aware that (as today) it was made socially unacceptable to voice strongly that as a woman, you didn’t want any children; paradoxically all the more so because the mortality rate was so high. It’s hard to catch the repressers in the act as this sort of thing is not written down; one really findsd it in the apologetic semi-laments of women then pregnant supposedly writing to the coming new-born child on the supposition the writer is going to die. Occasionally in their reverse defensiveness you’ll hear the accents of someone who “scolded” (a la Cassandra say in that first letter) the woman for her presumption, fear: often religion was thrown out them to shut them up. On the positive side they were told they were worthless until they had children (ha) and that how respected and useful they would be to the husband and family when they did produce a live child (especially a son).
So it makes sense to me that part of the “evidence” we’ve had over the years that adults, especially parents did not invest emotionally in their children might just come from silences imposed by others. I had not thought of that. It would be done in line with the kinds of stances above, reinforced by the usual (to me illegimte and oppressive norm) that one must be “tough” in public, not show emotiona and so on. (This is much used nowdays in hospitals to help rob patients of their autonomy — this is seen in the powerful movie, Wit, which I again showed to my students this term).
Thank you for the insight via Fraser. She can err badly at times — meaning some of her portraits are not convincing, but she does see through the cant of others in history.
Ellen
What I find interesting is the mechanism for repression. While some women
might have wanted to be pregnant, most I’ve read in their letters didn’t
want 13 children; they didn’t want to be pregnant endlessly. Many lived in
terror of death — as Richadfson showed perhaps for the first time in his
portrait of Pamela. None of this was socially acceptable to admit. Ron is
showing us a repression mechanism which stopped people from admitting they
were terribly grieved and overcome by the loss of a child to the point
they’d deny it. So women would be led to deny they were terrified and never
mention they didn’t want endless pregnancy. Today too it’s made socially
unacceptable to voice strongly that as a woman, you don’t any children. To
rejoice openly that you had miscarriage and are so relieved is to court
shock from some people, even those who know what a burden this unwanted
pregnancy might lead to. On our WWTTA list someone pointed out that often
there are social customs where a woman will not openly say she is pregnant
until after the 12th week: since miscarriages occur before this spares her
much grief and accusation; plus she is never called upon to say she’s
relieved either.
I’ve thought that the silence over the dead children was not the result of
not caring and wondered about comments here and there which show
indifference. Again this reminds me of how women are led to talk about rape
and our society treats i — repression mechanisms and refusal to admit to
what happens.
In this period the central fact was the mortality rate was so high. It’s
hard to catch the repressers in the act as this sort of thing is not written
down; it’s admirable for Fraser to try to catch it. I find one really finds
it in the apologetic semi-laments of women then pregnant supposedly writing
to the coming new-born child on the supposition the writer is going to die.
Occasionally in their reverse defensiveness you’ll hear the accents of
someone who “scolded” (a la Cassandra say in that first letter) the woman
for her presumption, fear: often religion was thrown out them to shut them
up. Remember how openly a woman would be told then that she was worthless
until she had children (ha) and that how respected and useful they would be
to the husband and family when they did produce a live child (especially a
son).
I’ve seen the reaction in Renaissance women: one I know well, Vittoria
Colonna, who apparently just never conceived when her husband lived with
her, and then he left her. It was an arranged marriage. When she was older
she would interact with younger men as if she were their mother. She uses
this term in her relationship with Michelangelo.
So it makes sense to me that part of the “evidence” we’ve had over the years
that adults, especially parents did not invest emotionally in their children
might just come from silences imposed by others. I had not thought of that.
It would be done in line with the kinds of stances above, reinforced by the
usual (to me illegimte and oppressive norm) that one must be “tough” in
public, not show emotional and so on. (This is much used nowdays in
hospitals to help rob patients of their autonomy — this is seen in the
powerful movie, Wit, which I again showed to my students this term).
Thank you for the insight via Fraser. She can err badly at times — meaning
some of her portraits are not convincing, but she does see through the cant
of others in history.
Ellen
Another aspect: this from my years of reading medical books for common readers with my students. For high position office jobs men are driven to be slender and manly — for upper class jobs a big belly is out of the question. Some jobs demand hairdos of some sort. The contradition is he’s supposed to look like he could go hunting too. Of course as movies show the demand to look like you can hunt, protects male actors from being nagged to become frail.
The statistics show that men go in for stomach-stapling, the dangerous and risky major surgery called roux-e-y gastric bypass operation. Women still do outnumber men, but I’ve seen statistics which claim for men as high as 40% when they are in their forties.
One reason for this is it’s no no for a boy or man to diet. He’s not supposed to admit it. As Diane says, when a girl goes on a diet, she’s often congratulated. A boy or man has to hide dieting. It’s shameful. An article on anorexia and eating disorders in Austen’s fiction and films made from it (the article points out how little detail about food is in most of Austen’s fiction, the one exception is Emma); the author talks about how the demand a girl be thin connects to the demand she control her body sexually too: she’s not supposed to give in to her appetites.
Insurance companies do pay for these for non-obese people — as they pay for viagra.
It’s salutary to see how absolutely opposed are these gender behaviors when it comes to what’s accepted and encouraged to be “thin.”
Ellen
Gwyn: “Your blog about anorexia showed again how little society in general understand anything that has to do with any sort of mental health issue.”
Some of the comments I got (especially the one about anorexics as women who distrust sex and dislike men) certainly showed how little some understand. The way the medical world work (quite apart from money) does encourage medical staff to look upon patients as their enemies making things tough for them. How dare we get sick? Hilary Mantel had a moving column in the London Review of Books a few months ago now about how badly she’s been treated in hospitals. Here they are also for profit so it’s worse. Ellen
From Kathy:
“I read your excellent blog on anorexia. Such a terrible disease, and I’ve known many who suffered from it. Your essay made me think, and I certainly agree about actresses. We went to a mediocre comedy, How Do You Know, and I found it painful to look at Reese Witherspoon, whose face is so bony it seems she hasn’t enough skin. Of course she’s a very good actress but why the unhealthy look? A girl here died a few years ago, a track star who had been treated for anorexia but couldn’t believe she needed calories and was running some incredible amount of miles every time she ate. “
[…] Patchett’s books are not pernicious in the way say Kate Chisholm’s My Hungry Hell is. Chisholm does harm to anorexic girls because she creates fear and hatred of them while pretending […]
[…] kind) that works to harm people. Kate Chisholm’s supposedly empathetic book on anorexia, My Hungry Hell is deeply hostile to anorexic women; it harms those it purports to help. You and Me and Everyone We […]
[…] on table since Chisholm wrote My Hungry Hell, an open attack on anorexic girls masquerading as explanation out of identification (!) it’s […]
[…] a stealth attack on cats as ruining our environment. Rather like Kate Chisholm’s Hunger Games is a ferocious attack on anorexics by someone claiming to have been anorexic so Tucker pretends to be a cat lover while […]
[…] for it, though it may attract attention. It needs to be bad in some important way: like a book on anorexics which purports to be sympathetic but is actually a vitriolic attack. (Another hatchet job by Kate Chisholm.) This film cannot be described as awful; it is rather […]