The flesh and the devil

Obsession: The Tyranny of Slenderness
Kim Chernin

[excerpted from The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness,
featured in the analogy Women in Culture, edited by Lucinda Joy Peach.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. pp. 203-215

The flesh and the devil

We know that every woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.
Susie Orbach

I must now be able to look at my ideal, this ideal of being thin, of being without a body, and to realize: “it is a fiction.”
Ellen West

When the body is hiding the complex, it then becomes our most immediate access to the problem.
Marian Woodman

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The locker room of the tennis club. Several exercise benches, two old-fashioned hair-dryers, a mechanical bicycle, a treadmill, a reducing machine, a mirror, and a scale.

A tall woman enters, removes her towel; she throws it across a bench, faces herself squarely in the mirror, climbs on the scale, looks down.

A silence.

“I knew it,” she mutters, turning to me. “I knew it.”

And I think, before I answer, just how much I admire her, for this courage beyond my own, this daring to weigh herself daily in this way. And I sympathize. I know what she must be feeling. Not quite candidly, I say “Up or down?” I am hoping to suggest that there might be people and cultures where gaining weight might not be considered a disaster. Places where women, stepping on scales, might be horrified to notice that they had reduced themselves. a mythical, almost unimaginable land.

“Two pounds,” she says, ignoring my hint. “Two pounds.” And then she turns, grabs the towel and swings out at her image in the mirror, smashing it violently, the towel spattering water over the glass. “Fat pig,” she shouts at her image in the glass. “You fat, fat pig…”

Later, I go to talk with this woman. Her name is Rachel and she becomes, as my work progresses, one of the choral voices that shape its vision.

Two girls come into the exercise room. They are perhaps 10 or 11 years old, at that elongated stage when the skeletal structure seems to be winning its war against flesh. And these two are particularly skinny. They sit beneath the hair-dryers for a moment, kicking their legs on the faded green upholstery; they run a few steps on the eternal treadmill; they wrap the rubber belt of the reducing machine around themselves and jiggle for a moment before it falls off. And then they go to the scale.

The taller one steps up, glances at herself in the mirror, looks down at the scale. She sighs, shaking her head. I see at once that this girl is imitating someone. The sigh, the headshake are theatrical, beyond her years. And so, too, is the little drama enacting itself in front of me. The other girl leans forward, eager to see for herself the troubling message imprinted upon the scale. But the older girl throws her hand over the secret. It is not to be revealed. And now the younger one, accepting this, steps up to confront the ultimate judgment: “Oh God,” she says, this growing girl. “Oh God,” with only a shade of imitation in her voice. “Would you believe it? I’ve gained five pounds.”

These girls, too, become a part of my work. They enter, they perform their little scene again and again; it extends beyond them and in it I am finally able to behold something that would hve remained hidden—for it does not express itself directly, although we feel its pressure almost very day of our lives. Something, unnamed as yet, struggling against our emergence into femininity. This is my first glimpse of it, out there. And the vision ripens.

I return to the sauna. Two women I have seen regularly at the club are sitting on the bench above me. One of them is very beautiful. The sort of woman Renoir would have admired. The other, who is probably in here late sixties, looks, in the twilight of this sweltering room, very much an adolescent. I have noticed her before, with her tan face, her white hair, her fashionable clothes, her slender hips and jaunty walk. But the effect has not been soothing. A woman of advancing age who looks like a boy.

“I’ve head about that illness, anorexia nervosa,” the plump one is saying, “and I keep looking around form someone who has it. I want to go sit next to her. I think to myself, maybe I’ll catch it…”

“Well,” the other woman says to her, “I’ve felt the same way myself. One of my cousins used to throw food under the table when no one was looking. Finally, she got so thin they had to take her to the hospital…I always admired her.”

What am I to understand from these stories? The woman in the locker room who swings out at her image in the mirror, the little girls who are afraid of the coming of adolescence to their bodies, the woman who admires the slenderness of the anorexic girl. Is it possible to miss the dislike these women feel for their bodies?

And yet, an instant’s reflection tells us that this dislike for the body is not a biological fact of our condition as women—we do not come upon it by nature, we are not born to it, it does not arise for us because of anything predetermined in our sex. We know that once we loved our body, delighting in it the way children will, reaching out to touch our toes and count over our fingers, repeating the game endlessly as we come to knowledge of this body in which we will live out our lives. No part of the body exempt from our curiosity, nothing yet forbidden, we know an equal fascination with the feces we eliminate from ourselves, as with the ear we discover one day and the knees that have become bruised and scraped with falling and that warm, moist place between the legs from which feelings of indescribable bliss arise.

From that state to the condition of the woman in the locker room is a journey from innocence to despair, from the infant’s naïve pleasure in the body, to the woman’s anguished confrontation with herself. In this journey we can read our struggle with natural existence—the loss of the body as a source of pleasure. But the most striking thing about this alienation from the body is the fact that we take it for granted. Few of us ask to be redeemed from this struggle against the flesh by overcoming our antagonism toward the body. We do not rush about looking for someone who can tell us how to enjoy the fact that our appetite is large, or how we might delight in the curves and fullness of our own natural shape. We hope instead to be able to reduce the body, to limit the urges and desires it feels, to remove the body from nature. Indeed, the suffering we experience through our obsession with the body arises precisely from the hopeless and impossible nature of this goal…

The boutique

It is now fashionable to be thin, but if it were fashionable to be fat, women would force-feed themselves like geese, just as girls in primitive societies used to stuff themselves because the fattest girl was the most beautiful. If the eighteen-inch waist should ever become fashionable again, women would suffer all the tortures of tight lacing, convinced that though one dislocated one’s kidneys, crushed one’s liver, and turned green, beauty was worth it all.
Una Stannard

Well then, why can’t we manage to be proud of our large bodies? Why can’t we altogether grasp the fact that there might be something of a positive nature in the very fact of fleshly existence? What, we say? Woman's abundance, her fullness of body, her pot-belly and her fat ass and her big thighs regarded as beauty? Somehow it remains very hard for us to imagine women fashioning an ideal image for ourselves that required us to be grant and voluptuous. We can’t quite conceive what it would be like to take back to ourselves the right to decide how our bodies should look, choosing an aesthetic according to health and nature, wishing our bodies to bear witness to our celebration of appetite, natural existence, and women’s power.

And yet we do know that there were times, not so long ago, when women did not feel about their bodies the way we do. Then, a woman considered it a disaster if she stepped on the scale and found that she had lost weight. There once actually were woman who had no respect for the anxieties of their physicians, who went ahead and cause their doctors to feel despair. These women would not lose weight because they did not wish to, and they did not wish to because their bodies seemed more beautiful to them when they were fat.

A physician in that day actually complained that it was fashion and aesthetic that interfered with prescribed weight-reducing programs:

One must mention here that aesthetic errors of a worldly nature to which all women submit, may make them want to stay obese for reasons of fashionable appearance. It is beyond a doubt that in order to have an impressive décolleté each woman feels herself duty bound to be fat around the neck, over the clavicle and in her breasts. Now it happens that fat accumulates with greatest difficulty in these places and one can be sure, even without examining such a women, that the abdomen and the hips, and the lower members are hopelessly fat. As to the treatment, one cannot obtain weight reduction of the abdomen without the woman sacrificing in her spirits the upper part of her body. To her it is a true sacrifice because she gives up what the world considers beautiful. [NOTE]

That was in 1911. And the little parable tells us one thing quite clearly. If the standard of beauty that prevailed in Paris in 1911 were still in fashion in America of 1980, none of us would go home tonight after a large meal, and take laxatives, and run the risk of ruining our digestion, upsetting our electrolyte imbalance, and disturbing the natural condition of the flora of our intestine. If we were admired for having fat around the neck, as women were in 1911, and were permitted to have large abdomens and well-padded lips, tens of thousands of women would not kneel down next to the toilet tonight and put our fingers down our throat, and vomit.

From this simple fact we come to appreciate, all over again, the way an aesthetic ideal affects our lives with extreme coercive power. Fashion lets us know what our culture expects us to be, or to become, or to struggle to become, in order to be acceptable to it, thereby exercising a devastating power over our lives on a daily basis. The image of women that appears in the advertisements of a daily newspaper has the power to damage a woman's health, destroy her sense of well-being, break her bride in herself, and subvert her ability to accept herself as a woman.

Thus, it is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day. The nude body of a woman, as we have seen carries a tale that proves interesting beyond the boundaries of women’s aesthetic speculation. Similarly, fashion, in the image it creates of woman, expresses itself on a variety of issues its makers would never imagine so deeply concerned them. By studying the face, the expression, the body, the gesture of the recurring image in our culture, we begin to read our culture’s attitudes toward power in a woman, her sensual freedom, her right to joyfulness, subjectivity, and expressiveness through her body, her right to age, to grow mature in her body, to acquire authority, to bear this authority in the angle of her jaw, the setting back of her shoulders, the tilt of her head. If the pages of Vogue presented us with pictures of large women, their bodies muscular like these of athletes, their heads held high like those of a person of prestige and influence; if the pages of the daily newspaper showed women wearing clothes that emphasized the beauty of a powerful back, the strength of a large hip, hands and feet that were able to work and to accomplish, necks that were capable of carrying life’s burden, or a softness, a fullness, and abundance that seemed, like a ripening fruit, to stand for the abundance and fullness of life itself, there would not be six million women in the US today who had joined Weight Watchers to change the size of their bodies; eight thousand of us next week would not be moving through the doors of the diet salon, and the word bulmarexia might never have had to be created, in 1974, to describe our unique cultural disorder—a disease that includes simultaneously the symptoms of insatiable appetite (bulimia) and (anorexia) the rejection of food. [NOTE]

But it is also true that the fashions we are speaking about have changed several times since 1911. We know that, during the 1920s, women were binding their breasts and bobbing their hair and hoping to look like boys, and we remember that in 1960 Marilyn Monroe, when she made the film Some Like It Hot, was still permitted to be as large as a woman in a drawing by Modersohn-Becker. We who fell in love with her then and yearned as growing girls to look like her, seeing this film now, and the size of the woman who was our heroine, must marvel at what has happened to our very perception of beauty. For Monroe, if she were alive now, and still as grand and voluptuous as she was then, would today no doubt be considered fat….

But this zaftig body of Monroe, when it appears on a woman of our time, becomes a source of profound despair; it is measured, frowned upon, afflicted with starvation, hidden away, and taken finally into surgery, where for $ 2,500 the buttocks are reduced, and where for another $ 3,000 the thighs are made smaller, and where for yet more thousands of dollars the roundness of the belly is made flat….

And so we make our way into the street life of our culture, hoping now to look again, with a new quality of perception, at the most commonplace expression of the conflicts and dilemmas that inspire literature and art, philosophy and psychological perceptions. But we are now not surprised to find that the conflict over the flesh is reflected here too, in this stamping ground of the anorexic heroine, whose picture is repeated on every page of the fashion magazine, and whose form is sculpted in the stylist mannequins of the store windows, and whose representative greets us, with a false smile, a secret disparagement, as we enter a clothing store, for it is clear that we enter without being able to conform—we will need a size nine or ten or maybe eleven; we will not do justice to the new, slender line, the tapering curve at the hip, the girdle-like constriction of the jeans. How often we have been filled with panic, catching a glimpse of ourselves, in all our unredeemed femininity, looking back with a frantic expression from the mirrors that reflect everything we are supposed to be—those girls who have succeeded where we have failed, those long-limbed mannequins who have become our omnipresent reminder, our reproach….

…The signs on the rack are bold and explicit—they wish to make it clear that here, in the showplace of our culture, some significant transformation has occurred. SIZE THREE? But what has happened to the sevens or the nines? The place is thick with ones and twos and there, shamefacedly in a far corner, is a rack of fives. They don’t have size nine, the girl tells us, although we have not asked. “But don't you know,” we want to say to her, “that there are over twenty-five million women in this country who wear size sixteen and over? That, if you want to know, is more than 30 percent of the women in this land. [FOOTNOTE]. And what of all the rest of us, uncounted, who are unable to adapt ourselves to these style suited for adolescents? And what, if you come to that, do you make of the fact that the large-size clothes are called, in the vernacular of the garment industry, “women’s sizes,” and just what, if you follow me, does that reveal about these gaunt garments hanging here? For surely, you see that they were not intended for a woman?”

Why now?

A woman should never give the impression that she is so capable, so self-sufficient, that she doesn’t need him at all. Mean are enchanted by minor, even amusing frailties. The quality of vulnerability, of needing a man, is something that the mature woman should study very carefully. Because it’s that quality that she loses most easily. Years of dealing with home and family, of making decisions, of coping, can turn the woman of forty-plus into a brusque, cold-eyed, and somewhat frightening figure.
Gloria Heidi

Is it a conspiracy, unknown even to those who participate in it? A whole culture busily spinning out images and warnings intended to keep women from developing their bodies, their appetites, and their powers?

Maybe, when we see another calorie counter on the stand, or read of another miracle diet in a women’s magazine, or pick up another container of low-calorie cottage cheese, we must begin to understand these trivial items more symbolically and realize that what we are purchasing is the covert advice not to grow too large and too powerful for our culture.

Maybe, indeed, this whole notion of the body’s reduction is analogous to the binding of women’s feet in pre-revolutionary China? [FOOTNOTE]

“My mother buys me a girdle when I am fifteen years old,” says Louise Bernikow, “because she doesn’t like the jiggle…Tighter. I hold myself tighter, as my mother has taught me to do…Is the impulse to cripple a girl peculiar to China between the eleventh and twentieth centuries? The lotus foot was the size of a doll’s and the woman could not walk without support. Her foot was four inches long and two inches wide. A Doll. A girl-child. Crippled, indolent, and bound.” [FOOTNOTE]

There is a relationship between the standards set for women’s beauty and the desire to limit their development. In the name of a beautiful foot, the women of China were deprived of autonomy and made incapable of work. A part of the body was forced to remain in a childish condition. They did not walk, they hobbled. In the name of beauty they were crippled.

What happens to women today in the name of beauty?

I’d never wear a girdle, she said,
Just medieval throwbacks
to whale baleen brassieres ’n’
laced-up wait confiner corsets.
We burned ’em in the sixties,
girdles, she said walking
into Bloomingdales, grabbing
a pair of cigarette-legged
tight denim jeans off the rack.
Hoisting them up to her hips,
how do ya get ’em on, she said,
have surgery, take steam baths,
slimnastic classes ’n’ Dr. Nazi’s
diet clinic fatshots for a month?
These aren’t jeans for going
to lunch in, she said trying
to do the snap, these
aren’t even jeans
for eating an hour
before ya put ’em on, just
for standin’ up in without
your hands in the pockets,
there’s not even room
in here for my underpants.
One hour later she returns
to the store for a new zipper,
front snap, and the side seams
re-stitched. These’re jeans
for washing in cold water only
then wearin’ round the house
til they dry on yr shape,
put ’em in a clothes dryer,
she said, and you’ll get
all pinch bruised
round the crotch ’n’
your stomach covered
with red streak marks
cross the front.
We burned ’em in the sixties,
girdles, she said. [FOOTNOTE]

We must not imagine that it is only the fashion industry that is upset about the large size of our bodies. Fashion creates and it reflects. Creates, as we have seen, an image few women in this culture are able to realize for themselves. Creates longing—and we all know this longing to win the approval of our culture even at cost to our health, our identity as women, our experience of pleasure in our bodies. But fashion also reflects hidden cultural intentions, as it did in China with the binding of women’s feet. As it does in our own day, with pants so tight they serve as an adequate replacement for the girdles that used to bind us. Fashion, for all its appearance of superficiality, is a mirror in which we can read the responses of conventional culture to what is occurring, at the deepest levels of cultural change, among its people.

For instance, if the problem of body and mind is as old in this culture as I have suggested, why is anorexia a new disease and bulmarexia a condition first named in the 1970s? Why, for that matter, is Christine Olman a model new and not 20 years ago when Marilyn Monroe inspired our imagination?

These questions may help us to understand that something has happened in oour culture during the past 20 years that has mad us particularly uneasy about the abundance of our flesh. Something, unnamed as yet, which fashion expresses as a shift from the voluptuous to the ascetic.

I wish to place before us a cluster of related fact that constitute an important cultural synchronicity.

FACT: During the 1960s Marilyn Monroe stood for the ideal in feminine beauty. Noe Christine Olman represents that ideal.

FACT: During the 1960s anorexia nervosa began to be a widespread social disease among women.

FACT: During the late 1960s and early 1970s bulmarexia began to be observed as a condition among women.

FACT: During the 1960s Weight Watchers opened its doors. In 1968 Diet Workshop appeared, in 1960s Over-Eaters Anonymous, in 1966 Why Weight, in 1968 Weight Losers Institute, in 1969 Lean Line.

FACT: During the 1960s the feminist movement began to emerge, asserting a womean’s right to authority, development, dignity, liberation and above all, power.

What am I driving at here? I am suggesting that the changing awareness among women of our position in this society has divided itself into two divergent movements, one of which is a movement toward feminine power, the other a retreat from it, supported by the fashion and diet industries, which share a fear of women’s power.

In this light it is significant that one of the first feminist activities in our time was an organized protest against the Miss America Contest and the idea of feminine beauty promulgated by the dominant culture through this pageant, in which women strut and display their bodies, as men sit passively, judging them. It is interesting, further, that as a significant portion of the female population in the past to years began to go to consciousness-raising groups and to question the role and subservience of women in this society, other women hastened to groups where the large size of their bodies was deplored. The same era gave birth in these two contradictory movements among women.

Yet we sense that there is an underlying similarity of motive in both movements. In both, women are driven to gather together and make confessions and find sisterly support for the new resolutions they are taking. In both, women have created new forms of social organization, apart from the established institutions of the dominant culture.

There is, however, also a fundamental divergence here. The groups that arise among feminists are dedicated to the enlargement of women. Confessions made in these groups reveal anger over rape and the shame women have been taught to feel about their bodies; there is interest in the longing to develop the self, concern for the boredom and limitations of motherhood, acknowledgment of the need for sisterly support in the resolution to return to work, go back to school, become more of oneself, grow larger. But in the other groups, confessions are voiced about indulgence in the pleasures of eating, and resolutions are made to control the amount of food consumed, and sisterly support is given for a renewed warfare against the appetite and the body.

Listen to the spontaneous metaphor that finds its way into the discussions of these two groups. In the feminist group it is largeness in a woman that is sought, the power and abundance of the feminine, the assertion of a woman’s right to be taken seriously, to acquire weight, to widen her frame of reference, to be expansive, enlarge her views, acquire gravity, fill out, and gain a sense of self-esteem. It is always a question of widening, enlarging, developing, and growing. But in the weight watching groups the women are trying to reduce themselves; and the metaphoric consistency of this is significant: they are trying to make themselves smaller, to narrow themselves, to become lightweight, to lose gravity, to be-little themselves. Here, emphasis is placed upon shrinking and diminution, confinement, and contraction, a loss of pounds, a losing of flesh, a falling of weight, a lessening.

These metaphoric consistencies reveal a struggle that goes beyond concern for the body. Thus, in the feminist groups the emphasis is significantly upon liberation—upon release of power, the unfettering of long suppressed ability, the freeing of one’s potential, a woman shaking off restraints and delivering herself from limitations. But in the appetite control groups the emphasis is upon restraint and prohibition, the keeping of watch over appetites and urges, the confining of impulses, the control of the hungers of the self.

When all other personal motives for losing weights are stripped away—the desire to be popular, to be loved, to be successful, to be acceptable, to be in control, to be admired, to admire one’s self—what unites the women who seek to reduce their weight is the fact that they look for an answer to their life’s problems in the control of their bodies and appetites. A woman who walks through the doors of a weight watching organization and enters the women’s reduction movement has allowed her culture to persuade her that significant relief from her personal and cultural dilemma is to be found in the reduction of her body. Thus, her decision, although she may not be aware of it, enters the domain of the body politic and becomes symbolically a political act.

It is essential to interpret anorexia nervosa, that other significant movement among women during the past decades, so that it, too, can be understood as part of women’s struggle for liberation during the past decades. Indeed, Hilde Bruch calls it a new disease because in the past 15 or 20 years it has occurred at a “rapidly increasing rate.” From 1960 on, she writes, “reports on larger patient groups have been published in countries as far apart as Russia and Australia, Sweden and Italy, England and the United States.” [FOOTNOTE].

The fact that these are highly developed industrial countries, and that anorexia occurs primarily among girls of the upper-middle class, should remind us that anorexia is a symbolic illness. Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express a cultural conflict or even a social protest….

In America of the 1970s and 1980s, no woman can possibly remain unaware of the fact that significant numbers of her sisters are asserting their rights to autonomy, to power, to the development of their full emotional and creative capacities. This movement of women into their enlargement is likely to affect her in a number of ways. She may grow depressed with the life she is living and rebel against it. She may refuse to recognize that her life depresses her and fail to develop a meaningful analysis of her condition as a woman. Or she may feel the force of these contradictory tendencies and enact her entire response to them through her body.

Let us imagine then that a woman comes to awareness of her condition one day in 1969. She is, let us say, 45 years old, she wears old, dreary clothes, and she is seriously depressed. She is a woman who has tried to diet and failed and who has exhausted her tolerance for weight-watching groups. For her the anorexic solution is simply not a possibility. And so she decides to join a women’s consciousness-raising group. There, she tells the other women that her husband has just left her after 25 years. She tells how she is stuck in a job with a poverty wage in an insurance company, how she feels a thousand years old. She blames herself, she says, and the fatness in her body, for everything that has gone wrong with her life. But now, because she is encouraged to talk and because no one here believes her rounded belly is the cause of these complex failures, she speaks about a dream she had once as a young girl when she wished to become a writer. She tells how absurd this old dream seems now and how she is afraid. But because the women listen to her fears and encourage her to speak further, she goes home and she begins to dream that she might want to dream of becoming a writer.

Let us also imagine that another woman comes to a group intended to help women change their lives. But here, in fact, we do not have to provide the script, for the story of a middle-aged woman named Faye has been written for us by Gloria Heidi, in her unintentionally revealing book:

She was about forty-five years old when she enrolled in my class—a gray-doughy woman in a dreary maroon, half-size dress—a woman who had obviously come to me as a last resort. “Look, my husband Harry has just walked out after twenty-five years. I’m stuck in a poverty-wage, nowhere job at the insurance company. I feel a thousand years old—and look sixty. But I’m determined to be a new me…and I want to start by losing this excess weight. After all, now that I’ve lost Harry”—her eyes filled with tears—“what else have I got to lose?” [FOOTNOTE]

In this group, where the woman comes with a complex social and personal situation, her terrible despair is attributed to the fact that she is fat. She is therefore encouraged to lose weight; a chart is kept of the weight she loses. When the magical transformation finally takes place we are told that the horror of her personal and social position has miraculously altered. A moral is drawn. We are assured that we, too, if only we will lose weight, can be “filled with energy, go aggressively after a better job and with a new figure, a revitalized personality, and an exciting new social life, [like] formerly dowdy and half-sized Faye, [soon] be sitting on top of the world.”

The hidden message in this story is profoundly disturbing. Implicitly, we are asked to believe that if every woman lost 25 or 30 pounds she would be able to overcome the misogyny in our land; her social problems would be solved, the business world would suddenly fling wide its gates and welcome her into its privileges. Isn’t it incredible? We as women need only lose weight and all of us will find jobs equal in authority and status and salary to those of men? The need for the Equal Rights Amendment will vanish? Unemployment figures will dissolve and the very structure of our society will be transformed?

There is a profound untruth here and a subversion of the radical discontent women feel. In a class of this sort, women are directed to turn their dissatisfaction and depression toward their own bodies. They are encouraged to look at their large size as the cause of the failure they sustain in their lives. Consider what it means to persuade a woman who is depressed and sorrowful and disheartened by her entire life, that if only she succeeds in reducing herself, in becoming even less than she already is, she will be acceptable to this culture which cannot tolerate her if she is any larger or more developed than an adolescent girl. The radical protest that she might utter, if she correctly understood the source of her despair and depression, has been directed towards herself and away from her culture and society. Now, she will not seek to change her culture so that it might accept her body; instead, she will spend the rest of her life in anguished failure at the effort to change her body so that it will be acceptable to her culture. [FOOTNOTE]

We should not be misled by the fact that we fell more at home in our culture when we lose weight. It may indeed happen that a woman becomes more attractive to men, finds it easier to get a job, experiences less discrimination, receives fewer gibes from strangers, and endures far less humiliation in her own family. Culture rewards those who comply with its standards. But we have to wonder what cost the woman is paying when she sacrifices her body in this way for the approval of her culture.

It is only when we cease to trivialize our bodies and our feelings about our bodies that we begin to appreciate how powerful a tool against the development of women is daily exercised by this conventional orientation, which assures us that our suffering and our depressions are caused by the recalcitrant behavior of our bodies—by their insistence upon feeding themselves, by their unsuppressible urges and wantings and desires, which make us fat.

For what happens when the woman gains back the weight? (Ninety-eight percent of women who have lost weight gain it back.)

What happens when she gains back even more than she lost? (Ninety percent of women gain back more weight than they ever lost.)

What indeed happens to her job and her lover and her new social power and her status in her family and her freedom from the hostility that our culture directs against women who live out their lives in large bodies?…

…For we can imagine that a culture based upon the suppression of women will be inclined, precisely in that era when a significant number of women are rediscovering the imagery and meaning of the Amazon, to turn away from whatever is powerful in women. The images in fashion magazines, on billboards, in store windows reflect this turning away from female power, but so also does the masculine retreat from grown women as erotic images. This retreat runs a parallel course to the women’s reduction movement and expresses an identical fear of female power. Thus we come upon one final cultural synchronicity. In the era of women’s liberation, which is also the era of fat farms and the body’s emaciation, popular culture begins to produce movies in which photographers, grown men, become entranced with the Pretty Baby who lives in a whorehouse. In this same era of women’s development some 264 periodicals appear on the marketplace with child pornography. [FOOTNOTE]. In 1975, Houston police uncover “a warehouse filled with child pornography…15,000 color slides of children, 1,000 magazines, and thousands of reels of film.” [FOOTNOTE]. During this time of the assertion of women’s power we have films like Taxi Driver, “in which a twelve=year-old prostitute happily gratifies any male in order to please her loathsome pimp. Jodie Foster, who played the adolescent prostitute, was so well received in the role that she soon starred in The Little Girl who Lives Down the Lane, in which she performed as a thirteen-year-old bundle of budding sexuality.” [FOOTNOTE]. In the film Manhattan the most popular comedian of his day, a man 40 or so, afflicted with an old-fashioned European melancholy and an entirely modern haplessness in the face of existence, turns for comfort and redemption to a 176-year-old girl when his wife, a grown woman, leaves him and becomes a lesbian. There is Chester the Molester who seduces little girls and boys as humor in the pages of Hustler magazines. And there is the adolescent girl who wrote the following letter to the author of Kiss Daddy Goodnight, a book of horror tales of incest inflicted upon little girls by their fathers: “So if a girl wants my advice now I would say it is OK to do it with Dad until you are about thirteen or fourteen but after that he will lose interest in you and abuse you sexually by letting other people do it up you so it is best to stop at that age, and if I did, then I would still like Dad and not be so mad at him like I am.” [FOOTNOTE}

Naturally, I cannot prove that the masculine preference for little girls is on the increase in our time because grown women are asserting their right to power. The preference itself is not as easy to document as the fact that the women in the fashion magazines are made to look like adolescent children or that the sizes in the clothing stores are growing smaller or that millions of women are attending diet organizations and seeking to reduce themselves while tens of thousands of others cause themselves to vomit every night. I am asking only that we begin to think about these simultaneous events in our cultural life; that we ponder the words of a fifth grade teacher in a city school: “Sexual abuse…incest…you don’t know,” she says, “you don’t know…the kids in my class, the littlest girls…the uncles, the brothers, the fathers. It’s epidemic and they all cover it up.” [FOOTNOTE]

Taken together, these words and the books and films and cartoons and letters we have been considering suggest a tendency in which men prefer to encounter little girls instead of grown women. Upon reflection, there is even something highly predictable about this. “Certainly,” says Grace Paley, “any culture that prefers women to be childlike and dependent will, with a certain terrible logic, use its children as though they were grown women.” [FOOTNOTE]

Thus, what we are seeing in this tyranny of slenderness is more than a cultural warfare between body and mind, more even than a bitter struggle against the life-cycle and the free expression of our kinship with nature. In this age of feminist assertion men are drawn to women of childish body and mind because there is something less disturbing about the vulnerability and helplessness of a small child—and something truly disturbing about the body and mind of a mature woman.