Keenie commented on my anorexia nervosa post, and I wanted to respond in full. Also, I need to post something, don’t I?
I understand the point you are making, but there seems to be, even in the language of it, the need to distance yourself from the fat.
Not at all. And don’t ever assume that someone with an eating disorder or disordered history is has no firsthand experience with being fat. I wrote this in part to dispute the equation of “severely disordered” with “living skeleton.”
Did you read Jill’s original post? The article she and I were responding to was about how society supposedly demonizes the thin and glorifies the chubby (yes, that was his actual thesis). His evidence was the ostracization of anorexics, as represented by the jealous sniping at skinny girls and the “She’s so anorexic!” cliche. Apparently, the fact that women fear anorexia is merely proof of their laziness–anorexics are admirable! Anorexia is merely proper restraint taken too far! Women should be disgusted by fat people, not thin people! We could all use a little anorexia!
I wrote this to explain that while anorexia nervosa must be read in the context of a body-obsessed, fat-phobic culture, anorexia is not about being too thin. In other words, it’s not that you’re fit and then slender and then svelte and then a little underweight and then–oops!–you cross the line into anorexia. That was the calculus the writer of the article was working under: if you weigh eighty pounds and subsist on 500 calories a day, you’re anorexic; if you weigh one-ten and subsist on 1200, you’re necessarily, objectively less afflicted. And if you’re overweight, you clearly need to spend more time hating yourself for eating.
That was what I meant by “inverted obesity.” As far as this argument is concerned, anorexia is to restraint as obesity is to indulgence: the effect of a behavior that’s positive in moderation, inseparable from the impulse that drives one to go hiking on the weekends or to the salad bar at lunch.
That’s a standard that will perpetuate a lot of misery. An eating disorder isn’t defined by your BMI; you don’t become disordered when you’ve dropped a certain amount of weight. It’s defined by self-hatred as expressed in an irrational relationship to food and eating. There are eating disorders that keep you relatively normal, eating disorders that cause your weight to cycle, eating disorders that cause you to gain weight, and eating disorders defined by exuberant physical health. Their defining characteristic is a life bound up in controlling and punishing the body. There is a qualitative difference between that mindset and a healthy one.
I would venture that most people with eating disorders are invisibly ill–particularly since our society encourages women to relate to their bodies in unhealthy ways. That’s why it was so offensive to me to hear someone arguing that anorexia is dangerous only to the body, and that it exists as a social ill only when the body is threatened. By that standard, I was never sick.
No, it’s not. But it isn’t a suffering contest. There are control issues, psychological and physical suffering that go along with being fat (obese, whatever) as well. It isn’t and it IS about the fat. This goes for obesity too. Fat girls have the added shame of being on the wrong side of the ‘Everybody loves a skinny girl’, and a walking neon sign of your inner problems.
Who’s trying to impose a contest on this discussion? Of course all of those things apply to being fat as well, and of course fat people are pressured to define themselves by their bodies in many of the same destructive ways. In a culture that hates fat bodies and fat people, it would be difficult if not impossible to be aware of that hatred.