Community Essay : ‘Slow Suicide’ for the Sake of Fashion

Last weekend, my friend Jennifer and I went shopping. It was a lazy, rainy day and all four saleswomen at the trendy Santa Monica shop devoted their afternoon to our fashion enlightenment. Most of their attention was focused on Jennifer.

“You have the perfect figure!” they raved. “Those pants hang just right on you!”

“I wish I was thin enough to wear that,” they complained, “my thighs (behind/hips/waist/chest/ arms/neck) are too fat to get away with it.”

“You look beautiful,” the told her.

Jennifer (not her real name) is anorexic. Her kneecaps stick out. Her legs show no muscle tone, no fleshiness, no fat. Her hipbones jut sharply through her jeans. You can count her ribs through the back of her T-shirt.

Jennifer’s shoulders are beginning to hunch. They foretell the collapse of her body after five years of abuse. Her eyes are raccooned and bloodshot from vomiting. She isn’t bulimic, but her stomach rejects most foods. Her hair is thin and brittle; it sticks up a little on the crown where it has broken off. Her arms are dusted with a fine covering of blond hair--her body’s last-ditch attempt to keep itself insulated against the low body heat of starvation.

Beautiful? This slow suicide? Yet everywhere that Jennifer and I go, people compliment her. “How do you stay so thin?” they ask in admiration. Men buy her drinks in bars and ask for her number.

Studies show that girls in grammar school already consider their pre-pubescent bodies fat or thin. They know about calories. They know about fat content. They diet.

Jennifer has always been thin. But in college she began to eliminate foods from her diet because she said they were “unhealthy.” She couldn’t eat anything that contained meat, dairy or fish products. If forced to eat publicly, she complained that the food wasn’t “pure” enough, that she could taste traces of those products in the dish. “I’ll just eat when I get home,” was her excuse.

Jennifer has her excuses down to an art. “I just ate,” she told me before I met her that morning to go shopping. “I’m not hungry,” she told me at four o’clock that afternoon. I could see that she was ready to collapse from exhaustion. “I’m a little tired,” she said, “I think I should go home.”

Jennifer is tired all the time. She drinks coffee, has 20-minute bursts of energy, then collapses. She is constantly battling the flu. She is evasive, secretive. She shuns anyone who gets close enough to discover her secret. She is ashamed.

But in that Santa Monica store, Jennifer is a star. She is revered simply because she is thin. She may be dying, but she is the American Dream.