It is rare to make it through the day without encountering a starving fashion model. Whether she is emblazoned on a billboard, on a bus or on the cover of a magazine, her sunken eyes are hard to miss. The psychological causes of this trend bear considerable weight and merit closer analysis. Eating disorders are reaching an alarming crescendo in American society today.

Though mostly afflicting women, eating disorders have recently begun to include men. In an article published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Jim McCaffree writes that "In the United States, anorexia and bulimia are often thought of as afflictions of affluent white female adolescents; however, diagnoses of eating disorders in African American and Hispanic women, as well as men, are increasing, as pressure to be thin increases in the media."

Of the few documented cases of males with eating disorders, many have been endomorphic homosexuals. This would predictably dissuade heterosexual males from seeking help if they suffered from eating disorders due to the fear of being stigmatized. It is difficult to obtain a gauge of how far this dilemma may have spread in the male community. It yields to reason that anorexia cannot be to men what it is to women. Male physiology is designed to produce muscle, the inverse of female anatomy.

Until recently it has been reported that anorexia is a disorder of the upper-middle and upper class Caucasian female. This is changing now to include the working classes and women of color as well. It is a popular obsession stoked by the media and fashion industry. This disorder is encouraged by society with fierce focus on the institutions of education.

An easy way to track this trend is by the centerfolds of Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. This magazine features a woman every month that is accepted as the American beauty ideal. As one follows the slimming trend among the Playboy models spanning the last 30 years, one can see an obvious pattern that supports this claim.

The upsurge in women's dieting rituals became noticeable after the mid-1960?s. Fashion out of London took a new, ultra-thin turn and suddenly pronounced slenderness became the vogue. Women wanted to emulate London's Twiggy the fashion model. Further fueling the starve-me-mania was a trend in blue jeans that exposed most of a woman's abdomen by an ultra-low hip-hugger style. Doctors began to prescribe diet pills to women all over the country ; women who were already slaves to fashion were now slaves to their body image obsessions. Pills were the norm in the 1960's -- diet pills to help starve oneself and sedatives to help obtain sleep.

Prior to the 1960's, women had different role models for beau ideal beauty. In the 50's it was Marilyn Monroe in a size 12 and Jane Russell with her huge bust and generous backside. In the WWII Era, women were celebrated for their abundance on the cowlings of military aircraft. It was socially-acceptable to be a biologically-correct female. However, in the mid-60's the beau ideal took a turn to the leaner, boyish standard. This is when eating disorders were first documented among upper-class white women.

From the psychedelic 60's anorexia found purchase to a foothold that has yet to be toppled. Thank you, Twiggy, for bringing your guppy-eyed fashion statement to America. Anorexia, bulimia and a vicious combination of the two took firm root in the following decade.

Dr. Kim Chernin in her seminal body of work, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, asserts that "The body troubles us." We find that we cannot be at peace in this body that wakes hungering in the morning, filled with urges and appetites we cannot control and are unable to transcend. But it may help us, in our lonely anguish over the body, to realize that the struggle to dominate the body is endemic to this culture, and may well characterize patriarchal culture altogether.
Dr. Chernin establishes a follow-up thesis in The Hungry Self that explains a woman's loss of self. The breaking away from the yoke of domesticity is offered as a reason for why women are lost in themselves. They are muddled by new choices due to the recent liberation from such a life.

It has not been long since women have engaged full force in the business of everything from surgical medicine to the strike fighter cockpit. A fighter pilot zips up a G-suit and feels compelled to look svelte next to her male wingmen. A lawyer struts a courtroom stage and feels all eyes upon her as she argues her client's case.

This is a big stretch from whence women came as humble domestic servants and breeders. Dr. Chernin writes, "Women suffering from eating disorders are telling us, in the only way they know how, that something is going seriously wrong with their lives as they take on the rights and prerogatives of male society."

Chernin expounds on the female condition in the best traditions of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, in that a woman is 'given' in marriage and 'taken' as a bride. She gives up her name, dignity, and independence as she takes up the yoke of motherhood and domesticity. In so-doing she gives up a part of herself that yearns for identity and spends the rest of her life in the thankless task of sweeping dirt from her domicile and caring for offspring. Thus, the age-old yoke of muliebrity is identified. The breaking away from this yoke is offered by Chernin as a reason for why women seek refuge in the pattern of control inherent to eating disorders.

Inside the anorectic mind one will find a large portion of what has been discussed here. This is supported in Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. The author quips, "Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times." Ms. Hornbacher shuns feed as principle. She asserts, "We claim a loss of appetite, a most sacred aphysicality, superwomen who have conquered the feminine realm of the material and finally gained access to the masculine realm of the mind."

In her book Sexual Personae, Dr. Camille Paglia lectures the concept of the 'Beautiful Boy.' Paglia puts forth the premise that beauty-worship is based on what the ancient Greeks celebrated in their homosexual beau ideal, the adolescent beautiful boy. She uses this as a rationale for Western Society's present obsession with slenderness.

Dr. Paglia maintains that in society's secret worship of this 'beautiful boy' is the undercurrent of modern eating disorders. The torture for women in their quest for this biologically unattainable 'Holy Grail' is that in nature they are not adolescent boys. In starving themselves to obtain the body of an adolescent boy, modern women forfeit their health and sanity.

In conclusion, it is clear that eating disorders are now a part of American Society. By far they are an affliction of the female sex. Self-loathing and body-shame has ever been the haunt of women. This mindset has been perpetuated by world religions and in modern times, by popular culture. Women have been brow-beaten for their appetites and conditioned to hate themselves for feeling them.
How the afflicted choose to approach their predicament is as individual as how any addict chooses to deal with his addiction. The need to starve is an addiction in anorexia. Starving is how these people cope with their lives. To quote a line from a well known motion picture, "You can always tell a lady by the way she eats like a bird." Starvation makes the hunger-addict feel in control and control is the brass ring of anorexia. The growling of a stomach is the sound of shrewd, personal victory to the anorectic mind.

S.H. Pearson

Sources

Chernin, Kim. The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of
Slenderness, New York: Harper & Row, 1981

Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity,
New York: TimesBooks, Random House, 1985

Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and
Bulimia, New York: HarperCollins, 1998

McCaffree, Jim. ?Eating Disorders: All in the family??
Journal of the American Dietetic Association, June
2001

Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae, London & New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990