Thanks to Jill at Feministe, I read this article in yesterday’s New York Times: Before Spring Break, the Anorexia Challenge.
I REALLY gotta start losing weight before spring break," a 15-year-old from Long Island wrote in her blog on Xanga.com, a social networking site. "Basically today I went 24 hours without food and then I ate green beans and a little baked ziti. Frankly I’m proud of myself, not to mention the 100 situps on the yoga ball and the 100 I’ll do before sleep … Yey for me."
For most students spring break represents the promise of a beer-soaked respite from Northern cold and midterm stress, a time to let go and revive. But for a subculture of students with eating disorders, this annual weeklong bacchanalia, unfolding across Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean during March and April, represents the summit of deprivation and self-denial.
Though not widely discussed — sufferers of eating disorders often spend years in denial about their condition, and therapists treating them can rarely isolate any single reason for these complex psychological syndromes — those who treat eating disorders say spring break is one of the most dangerous times of the year for young women struggling with their weight and eating.
The article discusses the huge number of pro-anorexia ("pro-ana") sites now flourishing on the Internet, including many that offer encouragment and even contests to help readers lose weight and practice ever more extreme restriction and restraint. As anyone who has worked with eating disorders will tell you, anorexia is a competitive disease — and while girls a decade ago competed against their classmates and nearby peers, the ‘net allows comparisons to go global (or at least national.) A 15 year-old in Pittsburgh can offer her extreme diet tips to her cyber buddy in Portland, and her cyber buddy can triumphantly list the ways in which she has "topped that." The potential for dangerous escalation is obvious.
From a feminist standpoint, it’s easy to point out how destructive it is for young women to try to live up to an impossible media ideal. We can also point out — feminists usually do — that anorectic behavior is sometimes about attaining a perfect body and more about an extreme form of social protest.
Young women who feel profoundly disempowered by their culture and their families and their peers find a deep sense of control and pride through compulsive exercise and caloric restriction. After all, if you can control nothing else, you can usually control what goes in your mouth! By battling hunger pangs and conquering the basic desire to eat, a young person with an eating disorder can quietly but powerfully live out a "heroic" life. If heroism is about obstacles overcome and about dragons slain, what more visceral way to create a heroic life narrative than to practice radical self-denial? While women and men in centuries past might have sought religious ecstasy through fasting, young women (and some young men) today can pursue a cultural ideal of physical perfection as well a psychological sense of power and control.
As a youth leader, I have to deal with this in a practical way. This past weekend, as I mentioned in my first post today, we did a lot of eating on our retreat. At one point on Saturday afternoon, while we were taking a break from our activities, a discussion broke out among a few of the girls about their tummies. Like the young women mentioned in the Times article, several of our girls were keenly aware of the approach of swimsuit season. Though we were bundled in comfy sweats, there was a brief period of lifting of shirts to expose bellies and discuss strategies for flattening and firming. (Mind you, not much flesh was exposed, and my shirt stayed in place.) At one point, two of the girls got on the floor and started doing ab exercises. Knowing that I work out, one of them asked me, "Hugo, can you show us an exercise to do?"
Not thinking it through, I got down on the carpet and began to show them one very simple, safe, basic, Pilates exercise. It was nothing that could be dangerous to them — really just a simple movement (combined with correct breathing) that is designed to work the lower abs. As the girls were pointing out, lower abs are the hardest part of the midsection to train — and Pilates really does teach you to work that part of the body safely and efficiently. So we did a few reps of very simple abs, and I gave some generalized advice. (Yes, my All Saints friends, I did mention six ways to Sunday that though I have a lot of experience, I am not a certified instructor, and I made sure that the only exercises I mentioned were the very basic and safe ones. Some routines in mat Pilates, done without training and supervision, can be dangerous. I didn’t even mention those, but did recommend Pilates for core training.)
Today, reading the Times article that Jill mentioned, I began to wonder if I might have handled the situation in a better way on Saturday. I’ve led lots of workshops for the kids on eating disorders, but that was not our focus this weekend. Still, I could have started some discussion about the pressures young people (especially but not exclusively girls) feel to have the perfect "bikini-ready" body for summer. Rather than question the need for perfect abs, however, I reinforced that desire. I made it clear that even at more than twice their age, I shared their interest in pursuing an ideal, and showed them (safely and briefly) one way in which I pursue my own goal of a rock-hard core. Was I being helpful, or was I merely affirming an unhealthy way of thinking about the importance of the body? I mean, they were going to "do abs" anwyay — wasn’t it better to show them a safer and more effective method for reaching the "target" area? Or should I have re-directed the discussion?
On a related note, one of the other volunteers (who is also a runner) and I are planning to lead a marathon training program next year for All Saints youth and staff, modeled on the very successful "Students Run LA" program associated with our city’s marathon. We’ll start in the fall, with a goal of helping as many kids as possible train to run the marathon — and perhaps raise some funds for worthy charities in the process. (We’ll call it, "All Saints Runs LA" or maybe "Saints Run LA""). As someone who loves running and loves to spread the gospel of running, I’m eager to do this. But thinking about my own motives and this past weekend, I realize I will have to be very careful in terms of how I approach this project. The goal must not be on attaining an ideal body, but rather on setting goals and accomplishing them. We must be especially careful to lead this program in a way that encourages a love for physical exertion while not reinforcing self-loathing. That will be a vital needle to thread.
I know very little about this topic but I am not sure whether I buy the notion of anorexia being a form of social protest. There are and have been in the past plenty of other cultures where young women are far more constrained than they are in our culture. Is/was anorexia as rampant in those cultures as in ours? Or does this form of social protest not manifest itself elsewhere because slenderness is not exalted to the same extent in those cultures?
But if those other cultures are more constraining upon young women and if young women are inclined to some form of social protest, wouldn’t young women in these other cultures manifest their discontent in some fashion, even if it’s not fasting necessarily? Do young women in these other cultures practice any widespread forms of social protest?
Maybe these questions are too basic and I admit to not knowing much about this theory of anorexia. Unfortunately, I don’t have any advice for talking to young girls about their abs either!
Well, protest is likely to manifest itself in a way that is fundamentally subversive — and what can be more subversive than asserting absolute control over one’s own body? Of course, while autonomy is a feminist good, pleasure and health are also important goods — and the regular and ritualistic denial of pleasure and health vitiates any good that can come from the assertion of autonomy.
It seems to me that the truly subversive thing to do in this culture is for a girl to have a healthy appetite and not worry about her abs. Do you think anorexia is somehow about having it both ways - being your family’s perfect princess with the perfect body and self-control, yet also passive-aggressively striking out against them by making them worry about you - so you can feel both subversive and approved-of at the same time? As Hugo says, it would be subversive for a girl to exert absolute control over her body, but if she’s doing it by conforming to a peer-group or media ideal, maybe she just wants the thrill of autonomy without the risk of real nonconformity? Just theorizing, no first-hand experience here. As for me, I’d just like to fit into the pants I wore 2 years ago…which is not a very feminist thing to worry about, alas!
While anorexia has a multitude of causes including a shame/control mix - In my experience, I have never had a response which made me feel that anorexia was a bad thing. Indeed, when I tell people that I was anorexic one of the first things they ask is: How low did you get your weight? I stand there feeling ashamed, not of what I used to weigh, but what I weigh now; of only being 10% below body weight instead of 40%.
And while prevelant at a younger age, Anorexia doesn’t just disappear at 18 or 19. My grandmother was/is anorexic at 83, and my grandfather was hospitalized several times because of her limiting his calorie intake in order to keep him “appropriately thin.”
At university we had a anorexia club (not offical) where we would meet to compare how much we had run that day/week. One would say, “My gums bleed” while another would say, “Well, I bruise every time I sit down.” - If out in normalville you ever start hearing someone saying, “I think you are getting too thin” just say, “Since I started working out, I went from a size 16 to a size 10/12″ and wait for the words of envy and adoration. If we truely loved people of all body sizes then reoccurance of anorexia would be a fraction of what it is now.
I don’t starve because I won’t - because I have to control wanting to starve as much as I controlled starving. But it has nothing to do with not wanting to be thinner. I’ll always want to be thinner.
I believe social expectation creates a range of actions which are bad for women. How else to explain girls/women wanting to have female circumcision done in then tens of thousands (an act which makes a trip to the dentist look almost attractive). Or even for that matter a leg or brazilian wax. Can anyone tell me that when the strip is pulled they are thinking “my, what a wonderful and relaxing way to spend $50″
There are and have been in the past plenty of other cultures where young women are far more constrained than they are in our culture. Is/was anorexia as rampant in those cultures as in ours?
I don’t know that it’s possible to compare real numbers, what with the lack of documentation, but it was certainly known and practiced, in Western societies, at least, in many different eras and cultural atmospheres - see “greensickness,” Victorian tight-lacing, and vinegar-drinking, Colette’s sensationalizing descriptions of schoolgirls’ strange compulsions to eat dirt, swallow needles and drink ink - this assumes that various forms of adolescent female self-punishment are linked, from anorexia to cutting, but I do believe that. Furthermore, the associations of thinness = self-control and corpulence = slovenliness are certainly not only modern. You can see bits of it in Charlotte Bronte, in the popular literature of the 20s, all over the place. I’ve never read The Body Project, but I’d expect it to have some historical background on this kind of tihng.
Not to pile on the guilt, Hugo, but I would add that women’s lower abs are never, ever going to look like yours without massive starving. Our bodies keep a little feminine pouch of fat there that the media teaches us is wrong and bad to have–the amount of starving and working out to achieve the “correct” flat tummy is far beyond all health standards. Believe me–I’ve got a flat tummy and I still don’t have a man’s tummy. Male tummies are the gold standard for women now, and therefore I think that makes it even more problematic for a man to participate in exercise talk.
Amanda, I understand that our bellies are different! I was showing an exercise, however, one that I learned from a female Pilates instructor, and one that is designed more to build strength than to create any particular look. Pilates is less about exterior appearance, and more about fitness and strength.
Still, by participating in the impromptu exercise session, I legitimized the desireability of a certain kind of look. That may well have been an unfortunate thing to do.
I think the marathon training program is a great idea!
The way I dealt with my body issues in high school was to exchange body-related goals (like losing 10 lbs) for an athletics-related goals (like shaving 10 seconds off my mile time). I was still anxious about my body, but I think externalizing the goalposts made things a lot easier than they could have been. The measure of my worth was not how my body looked, but how much it could do. Obviously, it would be best for me to accept my worth regardless of how my body is, but since I don’t know when I’ll get there, valuing myself for my athletic prowess is better than valuing myself as a passive object of the male gaze.
Do you have a sports nutrition program? Teaching your kids to eat enough food, and to eat the right nutrients, might be a really helpful way to combat anorexia. Especially if you link proper nutrition to sports goals (e.g., “you’ll be able to run a lot faster if you don’t starve yourself…”)
We will definitely incorporate a sports nutrition part of the training program if we decide to go ahead with it. Jenny, I completely agree that athletics (especially in a non-coercive environment) can have an enormously powerful positive influence.
I figured as much, Hugo, but as someone who knows what it’s like to be those young women I guarantee at least one was wondering if she could get your stomach by doing the exercises.
That may well be true, Amanda. Who I am as a human being today is the result of God’s grace and hard work. The body I have is also a result of hard work, but genetics and sex also have played a role. The same effort will not give everyone the same result, and it’s important to acknowledge that.
I’ve been anorexic i guess since i was 12 I’ve never been more then 105lbs at 5′7” which is perfect but I never relised it now I’m 128 and I must have streched my stomach so much its just irratating. I just want to know where the old pro ana sites wnt I haven’t been online for 3 yrs. if anyone knows please let me know