BOOK MARK : Fear of Eating: How U.S. Women Lock Themselves Into Hunger Camps

“The Beauty Myth” argues that a backlash undermines material freedoms that feminism has earned for women. One aspect of this “beauty backlash” is fear of eating. An excerpt.

There is a disease spreading. It taps on the shoulder America’s firstborn sons, its best and brightest. At its touch, they turn away from food. Their bones swell out from receding flesh. Shadows invade their faces. They walk slowly, with the effort of old men. A white spittle forms on their lips. They can swallow only pellets of bread, and a little thin milk. First tens, then hundreds, then thousands, until, among the most affluent families, one young son in five is stricken. Many are hospitalized, many die.

The boys of the ghetto die young, and America has lived with that. But these boys are the golden ones to whom the reins of the world are to be lightly tossed: the captain of the Princeton football team, the head of the Berkeley debating club, the editor of the Harvard Crimson. Then a quarter of the Dartmouth rugby team falls ill; then a third of the initiates of Yale’s secret societies. The heirs, the cream, the fresh delegates to the nation’s forum selectively waste away.

The American disease spreads eastward. It strikes young men at the Sorbonne, in London’s Inns of Court, in the administration of The Hague, in the Bourse, in the offices of Die Zeit, in the universities of Edinburgh and Tubingen and Salamanca. They grow thin and still more thin. They can hardly speak aloud. They lose their libido, and can no longer make the effort to joke or argue. When they run or swim, they look appalling; buttocks collapsed, tail-bones protruding, knees knocked together, ribs splayed in a shelf that stretches their papery skin. There is no medical reason.

The disease mutates again. It becomes apparent that for every well-born living skeleton there are at least three other young men, also bright lights, who do something just as strange. Once they have swallowed their steaks and Rhine wine, they hide away, to thrust their fingers down their throats and spew out all the nourishment in them. They wander back into Mory’s or “21,” shaking and pale. Eventually they arrange their lives so they can spend hours each day hunched over like that, their highly trained minds telescoped around two shameful holes: mouth, toilet; toilet, mouth.

Meanwhile, people are waiting for them to take up their places: assistantships at the New York Times, seats on the stock exchange, clerkships with federal judges. Speeches need to be written and briefs researched among the clangor of gavels and the whir of fax machines. What is happening to the fine young men, in their brush cuts and khaki trousers? It hurts to look at them. At the expense-account lunches, they hide their medallions of veal under lettuce leaves. Secretly they purge. They vomit after matriculation banquets and after tailgate parties. The men’s room in the Oyster Bar reeks with it. One in five, on the campuses that speak their own names proudest.

How would America react to the mass self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons? How would Western Europe absorb the export of such a disease? One would expect an emergency response: crisis task forces convened in congressional hearing rooms, unscheduled alumni meetings, the best experts money can hire, cover stories in newsmagazines, a flurry of editorials, blame and counterblame, bulletins, warnings, symptoms, updates; an epidemic blazoned in boldface red. The sons of privilege are the future; the future is committing suicide.

Of course, this is actually happening right now, only with a gender difference. The institutions that shelter and promote these diseases are hibernating. The public conscience is fast asleep. Young women are dying from institutional catatonia. The world is not coming to an end because the cherished child in five who “chooses” to die slowly is a girl. And she is merely doing too well what she is expected to do very well in the best of times.

Up to one-tenth of all young American women, up to one-fifth of women students in the United States, are locked into one-woman hunger camps. When they fall, there are no memorial services, no intervention through awareness programs, no formal message from their schools and colleges that the society prefers its young women to eat and thrive rather than sicken and die.

Flags are not lowered in recognition of the fact that in every black-robed ceremonial marches a fifth column of death’s-heads.

The weight-loss cult recruits women from an early age, and eating diseases are the cult’s bequest. Anorexia and bulimia are female maladies: From 90% to 95% of anorexics and bulimics are women. America, which has the greatest number of women who have made it into the male sphere, also leads the world with female anorexia. Women’s magazines report that there are up to a million American anorexics.

Each year 150,000 American women die of anorexia. If so, every 12 months there are 17,024 more deaths in the United States alone than the total number of deaths from AIDS tabulated by the World Health Organization in 177 countries and territories from the beginning of the epidemic through 1988. If so, more die of anorexia in America each year than died in 10 years of civil war in Beirut.

As criminally neglectful as media coverage of the AIDS epidemic has been, it still dwarfs that of anorexia; so it appears that the bedrock question--why must Western women go hungry--is one too dangerous to ask even in the face of the death toll such as this.

The anorexic patient herself is thinner now than were previous generations of patients. Anorexia followed the familiar beauty myth pattern of movement: It began as a middle-class disease in the United States and has spread eastward as well as down the social ladder.

Some women’s magazines report that 60% of American women have serious trouble eating. The majority of middle-class women in the United States, it appears, suffer a version of anorexia or bulimia; but if anorexia is defined as a compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most Western women can be called, 20 years into the backlash, mental anorexics.

1991, by Naomi Wolf. Reprinted with permission from the author.