Archive for the 'Eating disorders' Category

Reprint: Fat, Slut, Selfish

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 06, 2009
in Eating disorders, Family, Sexuality, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Virginity
. 4 Comments

This first appeared in June 2007.

I’ve been teaching women’s history here at Pasadena City College for more than a dozen years now, and throughout that time, have made journals a critical part of the course. It’s a lot of reading for me, but I remain convinced that my own teachers were right when they told me that putting my words down on paper is the single best way to figure out what it really is I think, feel, and believe.

Over these twelve years or so of teaching gender studies, of meeting with countless students in office hours, of listening. of reading student journals and reflecting on what I find there, I’ve noticed some fairly clear patterns. And the pattern that’s in my head this morning is the ubiquitousness of self-doubt and self-criticism that I see in so many of my female students (and youth group kids).

As my students will confirm, I’m fond of insisting that there are “three key points” to be made about virtually anything. (Too much Trinitarian Christianity; too much of the “three-column system” in Kabbalah; too much Hegel… or three divorces. Take your pick.) And if I were to try and sum up all of the negative self-talk I encounter from my students in just three words, it would be easy:

Fat, Slut, Selfish.

Let me be very clear that I’m not claiming that most women regularly beat themselves up with all three of these. For most of my students and youth group kids, one or two of these three words is particularly haunting. The fear of fat is much commented upon, and in looking back over the last twelve years of journals, the best that I can say is that that crushing anxiety about the body has, at least, not gotten significantly worse. Of course, it couldn’t get much worse. (I do notice more of my male students admitting to body dysmorphia and a desire to lose weight or change their shape.)

If the label “fat” still has tremendous power to wound, there are signs that at least among some young women, “slut” is losing at least a little of its force. From what I can tell (and to generalize enormously), we’ve done a marginally better job of helping young women claim ownership of their sexuality. Compared to what I was seeing, hearing, and reading in the mid-1990s, I see slightly more acceptance among young women (and their male peers) of the notion that women have the right to be sexual subjects rather than objects. Of course, as many feminists worry, when it comes to “sex talk” it’s often difficult to distinguish between false bravado and a genuine embrace of erotic agency. One role of feminist mentors (and youth group leaders) is to provide a safe environment where students can get honest about sexuality. It’s in these safe environments that those who are merely “talking big” about their comfort with their sexuality can begin to acknowledge that some of that apparent confidence is a facade; it’s also in these environments that those who are anxious or confused about their own sexuality can begin to unburden themselves. Continue reading ‘Reprint: Fat, Slut, Selfish’

“Better-looking when I leave”: a short note on vanity, aging, and Los Angeles

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on October 02, 2009
in Eating disorders, Traveling, Vanity and Youth
. 21 Comments

After a few days back in Los Angeles following a dozen on the East Coast — and after a few months of living in West Los Angeles again after thirteen years in Pasadena — I’m feeling once again twinges of discomfort about spending so much of my life in a place that, for all its merits, is so famously focused on looks.

Yesterday, I chatted with Meredith, who cuts my hair. Meredith is from Mississippi, and herself recently back from a trip to her hometown on the Gulf Coast. She asked me about my trip to the East, and I remarked “Everytime I leave Los Angeles, I feel as if I get better looking.” Meredith laughed loudly, and agreed; the stylist next to her and her client chimed in with their assents. What started was a four-way conversation among the two stylists and their clients (all non-natives) about the toll that living in L.A., particularly on the Westside, takes on one’s self-image.

I’ve always struggled with vanity and body issues; in previous posts, I’ve talked about my struggle with a serious eating disorder and exercise addiction. I’m much more content and self-accepting in my forties than I was in my twenties, and that is a blessing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t, with disappointing regularity, find myself studying my figure in a mirror or assessing the fit of my clothes, wishing that I were as lean as I was when I was at my thinnest. (Never mind that my thinnest years, though they corresponded with very fast running times, were also in most respects my unhappiest.) Becoming a father has been a huge help; focusing on a child is an excellent distraction and an effective palliative for narcissism. (How awful would it be if it weren’t!) Yet there’s no denying that my desire to be thin has not yet left me. I’ve said it before: I’ve been blessed, thanks to therapy and hard work and grace, with great success in overcoming so many of my addictions. My body dysmorphia and my anxieties about weight, however, remain with me to a far greater degree than I would like to admit.

Here’s the thing: I don’t realize until I leave Los Angeles how much more comfortable in my own skin I feel in other places. In New York, I invariably feel less self-conscious, even on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, than I do here in Southern California. And when I’m in Europe — even in fashion-conscious places like Paris or Florence or Mayfair — I don’t feel that sense that I’m too old. To put it another way, I feel more visible virtually everywhere else. I’ve written before, and many other feminists have as well, about the ways in which aging women are made invisible. There’s no question that we erase “older” women from our gaze in a way that we don’t with men; I’m keenly conscious that my authority as a teacher, for example, only grows with age. But though middle-aged men (I am certainly middle-aged now) are far less often rendered invisible than their female peers, I’ve felt — perhaps because of my unfortunate character defect of vanity — the way in which I too am more likely to “disappear” as I grow older. At least, I feel this keenly when I’m in West L.A.

I’m not writing this post to fish for compliments. I’m certainly not writing to complain about how tough it is to be me. I’m a damned lucky man in virtually every imaginable respect. But this character defect that leads me to be unduly concerned with my own appearance, this anxiety about my weight and my attractiveness that, while blessedly diminished lingers with me still, this puerile self-absorption — this , this, this is exacerbated by place. I wouldn’t go back to my younger, presumably “hotter” days for all the tea in China; the anxiety was crippling and the narcissism repellant. But I will say, as I move more deeply into that long and ill-defined period known as mid-life, that there are many other places I would rather live than here.

Oprah, weight, hubris, humility: on addictions we overcome, and the addictions we don’t

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 10, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness, Eating disorders and Food
. 22 Comments

Oprah Winfrey announced this week that she’s deeply “embarrassed” at having put on more than forty pounds in the past two years. Our nation’s most public and beloved yo-yo dieter, Oprah has been gaining and losing, gaining and losing, in front of hundreds of millions of people for more than two decades. She’s tried liquid diets, she’s worked with some of the world’s best trainers, she’s made the spiritual and psychological connection between eating and emotional needs. She’s done it over and over again, and — at least in her eyes — she’s “failed” at the task of overcoming what she sees as her addiction to food.

There’s a lot to unpack about Oprah in general, as well as her very public quest to be trim and fit. She deserves tremendous credit for her willingness to risk humiliation and to admit embarrassment; whether the issue is recovery from sexual abuse or overeating, Oprah has always been brave about connecting her private story to her public work. As someone who does the same thing (on a much smaller scale, with a blog and a classroom instead of a massive global franchise), I am repeatedly inspired by Oprah’s blend of raw ambition and near-naked transparency. That’s a rare combination, and it’s an enviable one.

From the standpoint of those of us interested in fighting “body fascism”, we could wish that Oprah could demonstrate greater self-acceptance. While on the one hand, it is perhaps comforting to some that even the powerful and the wealthy can suffer from low-esteem, to others Oprah’s plight makes their own struggle seem all the more hopeless. If Oprah, with all the vast resources at her disposal, cannot permanently overcome what she sees as a shameful addiction to food, who can? If Oprah, whose achievements have made her an icon (and, in the case of Barack Obama, perhaps something of a king-maker), still suffers from the pressure to live up to an unattainable ideal, doesn’t that make clear how utterly absurd and destructive it is for any of us to be chasing that ideal so relentlessly? These are questions worth asking. Continue reading ‘Oprah, weight, hubris, humility: on addictions we overcome, and the addictions we don’t’

Obeisance to Big Ag dressed up as personal liberation from body fascism: how Paul Campos gets it wrong

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 19, 2008
in Eating disorders and Food
. 17 Comments

I’ll admit that it isn’t easy to be a vegan and an animal rights activist on one hand, and an advocate against eating disorders on the other. Obviously, these commitments should be compatible, as the issues aren’t necessarily linked. Yet in a culture where repressive images of female beauty are used to make veganism alluring (say what you will about the generally excellent content of the book, the title “Skinny Bitch” for a text designed to encourage vegan eating is at best problematic), and in a culture where more than a few young women with body dysmorphia “hide” their eating disorders behind the more socially-acceptable facade of veganism, it’s clear that there are some problems to work out.

I’m not going to post about animal rights for a while yet. But I did want to respond to this piece from columnist Paul Campos in the Rocky Mountain News: Fight food fascists’ effrontery. (Let’s leave aside the asinine reference to fascism.)

Campos makes the case, popular with the fat acceptance movement and with at least some feminists, that the “war on obesity” is misplaced. Campos gives talks:

My talk involved points I’ve made hundreds times over the past few years, to audiences ranging in size from a dozen high school students to a few million TV viewers.

I spoke about how the definition of “overweight” used by our public health authorities is a bunch of completely unscientific garbage, created by pharmaceutical companies eager to push the next generation of diet drugs through the regulatory pipeline.

I described the absurdity of various widely held ideas about weight: that we know how to make people thinner (we don’t); that haranguing people about their weight is doing them a favor (it isn’t); and that the reason there are fat kids in America is that fat kids haven’t been informed that it’s considered desirable in this culture to be thin.

This last bit of rampant insanity, which is at the center of the government’s current response to the panic over “childhood obesity,” makes about as much sense as arguing that poor people are poor because they haven’t been informed it’s considered desirable in this culture to be rich.

Fair enough. But there’s one teensy-weensy problem with Campos’ argument. He presents the dynamic as innocent (and hungry) consumers being browbeaten by haughty fashionistas and hysterical policy wonks. The public, apparently, is shamed out of the pleasure of eating by Vogue magazine and state assembly members. And while there’s much to be said that is critical of both government food policy and the fashion industry, Campos ignores the biggest and baddest villain of them all: the agriculture industry. Continue reading ‘Obeisance to Big Ag dressed up as personal liberation from body fascism: how Paul Campos gets it wrong’

Boys, fathers, teasing, and disordered eating: spite more often wears a man’s face

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 05, 2008
in Body, Eating disorders and Youth
. 4 Comments

I’ve been meaning to blog about the new study, reported in the Washington Post, about the clear gender differences that appear in adolescent disordered eating behavior. The study appears in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, and is entitled Family, Peer, and Media Predictors of Becoming Eating Disordered.

This was fascinating:

Frequent dieting and trying to look like persons in the media were independent predictors of binge eating in females of all ages. In males, negative comments about weight by fathers was predictive of starting to binge at least weekly.

The study makes clear that for younger teen girls, a mother’s negative attitude towards her own body can impact a daughter’s self-image and put her at risk for developing disordered eating; in older teen girls, the media had a much greater influence. For boys, however, critical comments by dads about their sons’ weight turns out to be the most highly reported cause of disordered eating behavior. Boys are less influenced by the media, in other words, while both sexes are impacted by the words and views of their same-sex parent. Indeed, while young teen girls are as influenced by their mothers as boys are by their fathers, by later adolescence males are much more likely to be negatively impacted by Dad’s criticism than their sisters will be by criticism or self-loathing from Mom.

Older girls were, according to the study, much more likely to be negatively impacted by critical comments about their bodies from male peers than by similar remarks from parents of either gender, or by female peers. From the study:

Among the females, teasing by mothers, fathers, and other females was unrelated to the risk of starting to binge or purge weekly, but teasing about weight by males was associated with an increase in the risk of starting to purge weekly.

Among males, a high level of concern with weight and negative comments about weight by fathers were both significant predictors of starting to binge eat at least weekly.

What to make of this? Clearly, one of the most common assumptions we make about adolescent girls is false: popular wisdom often suggests that girls are harder on other girls than are boys. The idea that disordered eating in girls is driven by competition with other women is a popular one, yet this study suggests that teasing by male peers is a more important predictive factor than any other, including same-sex peers, parents of either sex, or even the media. As a society, it seems we often over-estimate the degree to which teen girls exhibit cruelty towards each other, and we may woefully underestimate the damage done by boys and men.

In the case of teen boys, the power of fathers to impact their sons’s self-image is striking. Let’s hope this study is widely publicized among Dads across the nation, as fathers need to learn that their sons are just as sensitive as their daughters to ridicule, while teen boys need to be reminded that teasing girls about their bodies is never, ever okay.

The most important takeaway from this study is that men — both fathers and teen boys — have a greater impact on disordered eating behavior in teenagers of both sexes than was previously thought. In a culture that too often assumes that spite wears a woman’s face, this study appears as a sobering and important corrective.

Nouns, not adjectives: Caroline Heldman and young women’s self-objectification

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 28, 2008
in Body, Clothing and Fashion, Eating disorders, Mass media and Sexuality
. 8 Comments

The new issue of Ms. Magazine hits the stands tomorrow. Of particular interest is an article by Caroline Heldman, assistant professor at nearby Occidental College: Out-of-Body Image: Self-objectification—seeing ourselves through others’ eyes—impairs women’s body image,mental health, motor skills and even sex lives. (It’s not available online; you will need to splurge for the magazine, which is well worth doing. A subscription is better. Ms., Bitch, and MakeShift are the three indispensables of feminist publishing.)

Heldman:

A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions
of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and
girls’ perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been
recognized by social scientists as self-objectification—
viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the
male gaze. Like W.e.b. DuBois’ famous description of the
experience of black Americans, self-objectification is a
state of “double consciousness…a sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

In my work as a youth minister and as a women’s studies professor, I’ve seen this phenomenon grow seemingly worse in recent years. Paris Hilton’s remarks about sexualiy and her own self-objectification resonate; in 2005, she remarked that her titillating image is a product of her sexy sense of style, and in reality her boyfriends have commented on her less than rampant libido. She says, “I’m sexual in pictures and the way I dress and my whole image. But at home I’m really not like that. In other words, her sexuality is largely performative, almost entirely a response to an outsider’s gaze and not an expression of her own inner longing for anything other than validation. I’ve brought up this insight of Hilton’s with some of my students, and seen a variety of reactions, ranging from surpise to vigorous nods of recognition. Continue reading ‘Nouns, not adjectives: Caroline Heldman and young women’s self-objectification’

“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2008
in Books, Eating disorders, Father, Myth of Male Weakness and Youth
. 11 Comments

When I was in grad school, I started doing quite a bit of reading about eating disorders. Some of that interest was personal, as I developed (relatively late) a rather serious obsession with food and exercise in college. Some of it was intellectual, as it intersected nicely with my interest in women’s studies. At one point, back in 1992-93, I got involved in an outpatient treatment program for folks with disordered eating at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was a mixed-sex group, and I was one of only two guys in a group of about fifteen students who met weekly with a clinician.

I remember that no topic came up as often as did parents. And the clinician, at least, generally asked questions about mothers. Indeed, I heard her once say something like “The first question I ask most women who have eating disorders is: ‘what is your relationship like with your mother’?” Most of the research done on anorexics and bulimics has been done on women; indeed, it’s only been relatively recently that we see a formal acknowledgement that eating disorders are becoming more prevalent among men. And for over a century, the assumption of therapists and doctors has been that a young woman’s disordered eating is almost always tied up in the invariably complex and entangled relationship she has with her mother. As Joan Brumberg illustrates in her essential monograph, Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia Nervosa, as early as the 1870s doctors suggested that food refusal in middle-class girls was a form of quiet rebellion against the strictures and limitations for women modelled by their mothers.

There’s a lot to be said for that analysis, but it often has the unfortunate tendency to let dads off the hook. In her wonderful Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Courtney Martin offers a chapter called “The Male Mirror: Her Father’s Eyes”. Some of what she says is new, some of it has been said before, but her analysis of the role of the father-daughter relationship and its role in the development of eating disorders is very good, and it offers a special challenge to those of us eager to help adult men transform the ways in which they relate to young people, particularly their own teenage children. Continue reading ‘“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book’

FUSS, bikinis, and board shorts: Passover teen ministry by the pool

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 21, 2008
in Body, Eating disorders and Youth ministry
. 2 Comments

It’s 5:48AM Pacific Time, and I’ve been up for nearly three hours. I’m in Miami International (the appropriately acronymed MIA), which may be the worst major airport in America. I’ll be home, Lord willin’, in time for my night class. It will be a very long day.

We spent this past weekend at a Passover gathering with the Kabbalah Centre International here in Florida. I’m happy to report that the number of practicing Christians participating in Kabbalah Centre events continues to grow each year; I had many conversations over the past few days about the ways in which faith in Christ and the study of this ancient practice intersect. (An old post about the compatibility of Christianity and Kabbalah is here.)

I’ve been working with the teens in the Kabbalah Centre, continuing a role I’ve been honored to play in several different churches. And Saturday afternoon, before the first Seder began, we gathered about a dozen of them by the pool on a warm Florida afternoon for some conversation. The story of the Passover is multi-layered; it is a historic remembrance of the Hebrew people’s escape from slavery in Egypt — and much more. During this afternoon chat, we talked about our own “personal Egypts” and what we each longed to overcome. Passover is a reminder of the possiblity for both collective redemption and individual transformation. Focusing in on the latter, we asked each of the teens to share a little bit about what they wanted to “pass over and out of” this year.

It was a normal enough session, save for the fact that we were all in bathing suits. I remembered the last time I led a youth group discussion in a beach setting, several years ago. The discomfort and awkwardness was palpable then, and it was present on Saturday as well. So I gently steered the conversation right to that difficult place. Continue reading ‘FUSS, bikinis, and board shorts: Passover teen ministry by the pool’

Friendship, weight, and the collective rejection of an unattainable ideal

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 26, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Eating disorders and Food
. 9 Comments

I know everyone else in the ’sphere is writing about the major new study on obesity and friendship, but I can’t seem to resist weighing in (ouch) as well.

The opening sentence in the Times report yesterday left me wincing:

Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too.

My first reaction is fury. Fabulous, another excuse for the shunning and shaming of fat folk. I can almost hear it: “Bob, you know I love you. But the New York Times says that obesity is contagious, and I’ve noticed you’ve gained a lot of weight lately, so I’d rather not spend as much time with you because I’m afraid you’ll infect me.” The phrase “much like a virus” is infelicitous at best and genuinely misleading at worst, and to have it in the opening sentence is deeply unfortunate.

The study’s point, of course, is that other people’s behavior and appearance can impact our feelings about ourselves.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said.

I’m not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. After all, we’re all well aware that the media (in its nearly infinite manifestations) has a huge impact on women’s self-image; the endless message that one must be thin and toned has done demonstrable damage. The struggle to emulate movie stars and supermodels, the struggle to achieve an unattainable ideal, breaks hearts and spirits and bodies year after year after year. For most women, that struggle is played out in two dimensions — in private acts of self-denial and in public, shared acts of self-loathing. Poor body image is reinforced by peers (or parents) who make self-deprecating remarks about their own bodies, and it’s reinforced by the common and unhappy practice of “bonding” over mutual self-hatred.

When a good friend or family member begins to gain weight, it’s as if he or she has “opted out” of the destructive pursuit of an eternally elusive ideal. This opting out provides an alternative model for friends and family. Seeing a good friend gain weight can be liberating, as it raises the prospect that if you yourself put on some pounds, you won’t be alone to face the judgment of a hostile and censorious culture. Most of us who teach and practice feminism, after all, are eager to create “feminist communities” in which women and men consciously reject the culturally prescribed ideals for our appearance and our behavior. We know that it’s hard to opt out alone, and much easier to do so when you have visible allies. This study reinforces the importance of those visible allies.

While extreme obesity may be unhealthy, it may well be that the negative effects of modest weight-gain are exaggerated. Certainly, the social and psychological costs to dieting are immense. The damage that pursuing the thinness ideal does to men and women (especially women) is colossal. In many ways, the physical and spiritual damage brought on by a lifetime of dieting and self-loathing may be far worse than the threat posed by twenty, thirty, or even fifty “extra pounds”.

I’m a recreational athlete who is married to a recreational athlete; we spend a lot of our social time with other recreational athletes. We belong to a subculture in which exercise and competition is normative, and where discussions of the latest “brick workout” or the benefits of heart-rate monitoring are common at picnics and luncheons and around the dinner table. We reinforce not self-loathing, but a sense that a physically active life is an important one. This doesn’t make us in the least bit more virtuous; we’re simply competitive people who love exercising outdoors. The point is, we’ve created a small subculture in which our lifestyle choices are supported and reinforced. There’s nothing wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong with a group of people who don’t enjoy exercise and hate dieting mutually supporting each other as they collectively reject a societal ideal of thinness.

So there’s much about this study that is, frankly, potentially encouraging. But my fear is that the way in which it is being reported, and the way it is being discussed, will morph into still another tool with which to shame and shun those whose bodies don’t meet our societal standards.

A long and enthusiastic review of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2007
in Books, Eating disorders, Feminism and The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls
. 10 Comments

It’s been a smoky week here in Southern California. Two places I know well have been burning: Griffith Park and Catalina Island. I know almost all the trails in the former; the latter hosts one of my favorite dirt marathons, which I last did in 2004. I’m thinking this morning about the people who’ve been displaced, the firefighters who have worked so hard, and about all the countless animals who’ve been terrified, hurt, or worse.

In comparison, all I’ve faced is a little tightness in my chest from running hard in this poor air we’ve got, with a little stinging around the eyes. Not much to worry about by comparison. Some friends and I did the 8.6 mile Mt. Wilson trail early this morning, and coming down we could see the brown haze of smoke and other pollutants sitting on top of the entire L.A. basin.

So, last night I finished Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating your Body It’s a powerful book, even as it revisits familiar ground. This is a long post, so the rest will be below the fold. Continue reading ‘A long and enthusiastic review of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”’

Meat, Dairy, Porn: some preliminary thoughts on women, dieting, veganism, guilt, pleasure and exploitation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 07, 2007
in Animal Rights, Eating disorders, Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Food, Veganism and Youth
. 36 Comments

I mentioned this morning that I am reading Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. I’ll try and say more about it once I’m finished, as I’m only through the first couple of chapters. It’s a grim go, early on — story after story of the bright, the beautiful, the dazzling consumed with self-loathing and tortured by body dysmorphia. It’s not a new story, but for those of us who have been dealing with this sort of thing for a while, it’s always a bit disheartening to realize that things aren’t getting any better. Still, a fuller review coming next week.

I was thinking about Courtney’s book a few minutes ago. Mondays are my long days here at the college; I teach four classes, and in order to fit those in as well as office hours, I get here around 8:00AM and won’t leave until close to 9:00PM tonight. Mondays, it goes without saying, are hard days to be a vegan. When I run in the mornings I rev up my appetite for the entire day, and though I try and pack a lot of food (nuts, fruits, veggies, tofu, juice) it only gets me so far sometimes. In the old days, I would go and grab a burrito or a chicken bowl at the “El Pollo Loco” franchise across the street. It filled me up if nothing else.

Half an hour ago, feeling peckish, I wandered into the little student cafe by my building. Tons of things to eat, but so few completely vegan choices. I settled for a little pre-packed bowl of melon and papaya (I’ll try and recycle the plastic container) and another banana. I thought about the slice of greasy, cheesy sausage pizza, and for a moment, I really wanted it.

There’s a trick to living a strictly vegan life. First off, as reading a book about eating disorders reminds me, I have to draw a bright and clear line between self-denial for the sake of self and self-denial for the sake of justice for my fellow creatures. I tell myself — and everyone else who will listen — I am NOT on a diet. This is not a temporary plan to lose weight, or something I’ll give up once marathon season comes to an end. This is a lifestyle choice — not to take into my body any animal products at all, to eat “raw” as much as possible, to avoid preservatives and high fructose corn syrup and all the rest of it. Whether it makes me thinner or fatter, makes me more pudgy or more defined, it can’t be about me anymore.

The funny thing is that being strictly vegan (off honey entirely) means that I am more attentive to what I eat than at any time in my life since I was crash dieting fifteen years ago. Back in 1992, I dropped from 175-145 the summer and fall after a divorce; on my 6′1″ frame, the 145 looked awful. I lived on small portions of junk food, and had no consciousness at all about whether or not animals were involved in producing what I was eating. I just wanted to have a body devoid of fat. Back then, I counted calories and fat grams obsessively. Today, I largely ignore fat and calorie information and read to make sure that what I’m eating is entirely plant-based and devoid of hidden dairy or egg traces. (Damn that sneaky caseinate!) I’m once again radically concerned with everything that goes into my mouth — but for a radically different reason.

But it’s hard not to focus on diet so much and not also think about how eating vegan (and doing a whole mess of runnin’) affects my physique and my overall appearance. The “is this about my ego, or is it really about the animals” question pops into my head almost every day, reminding me, as they told me in AA, to always “check my motives.” For anyone who has had an eating disorder, which I have certainly had, to move from casual vegetarianism to strict veganism is an experience that requires some regular self-examination.

It’s also hard to fight the urge to judge what other people put in their mouths. When I was exhibiting anorectic behavior, I got high as a kite on the bittersweet drug of self-denial. I did judge folks who ate a lot and didn’t work out. I spent years unlearning all that judgment, especially for my role as a feminist professor and youth mentor. I didn’t want the young people I worked with to torture themselves, to feel that overwhelming guilt over what they put in their mouths. I’ve wanted them to understand that they have a God-given right to joy, to delight in their own flesh. I’ve been adamant that feminism, food, and pleasure are all linked.

My feminism and my veganism, therefore, are in an uneasy alliance. On the one hand, they are natural allies. As many others have pointed out, there’s a link between patriarchal exploitation of women and human exploitation of animals. Men have used women to do unpaid work for millenia, and humans have used animals in the same fashion. The bodies of women are seen as “fair game” (a hunting reference) for predatory men, and pornography celebrates the idea that men are entitled to take delight (visual or otherwise) in the flesh of women who have little or no say in the matter. The meat industry teaches us that cows and pigs and fish exist solely to bring delight to our taste buds and satisfaction to our bellies. In patriarchal culture, the bodies of women and the bodies of animals exist to be consumed. Feminist veganism rejects the exploitation and abuse of living things; it counsels radical self-denial on the part of the consumer as a tool for liberating the consumed.

But women, particularly first-world women, eat plenty of meat. They also feel guilty about it, as Courtney Martin reminds us. The feminist in me wants the young women in my life to enjoy food, to reject the destructive cult of thinness. The vegan in me wants to curb and redirect the appetites of these very same young women. I don’t want them to have the pizza, the burger, the Milky Way bar, the mahi-mahi — not because I don’t want them to have pleasure but because that pleasure comes at the expense of a confined and tortured dairy cow, or a fish who died a slow, gasping death.

While historically meat and fish consumption might have been essential for survival, few Americans today would drop dead if they were forced to go vegan. They’d find life rigorously hard, at least many of them would. Hard, perhaps, in a way not dissimilar from the way a compulsive dieter finds her life hard. But the difference would be in the purpose of the self-denial.

So many feminist voices want our daughters and our little sisters to be less obsessed with calories and fat grams. We want our daughters to love their bodies, to delight in their flesh. We want them to stop readiing labels, and just eat what they want to satiety. But for me — and for other vegan feminist voices — that delight in guilt-free eating is highly problematic when it involves the exploitation of the victims of factory farming. Pleasure is a good. Overcoming crushing, unnecessary guilt is a good. But living, eating, and buying cruelty-free is also a powerful good.

There’s a book to be written here, or at least a longer article. I’ll muse on it some more. But I’m thinking that the phrase radical self-denial on the part of the consumer as a tool for liberating the consumed pretty much sums up my position on meat, dairy, and porn.

UPDATE: Stentor, who shares many of my concerns, has an interesting take here.

Pro-ana websites and abs on the floor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 03, 2006
in All Saints Pasadena, Body, Eating disorders, Vanity, Youth and Youth ministry
. 13 Comments

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.

A long bit on teaching the body as a male professor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 13, 2006
in Body, Eating disorders, Men and Masculinity and Teaching
. 18 Comments

It’s a busy week as we head towards winter intersession finals…

Lots of good stuff out there this week on feminism and body image.  Mind the Gap, a Welsh feminist blogging collective, has put up a series of terrific posts this week on the subject of women and bodies.  A  number of powerful, first-person accounts from the frontlines, as well as some interesting feminist analysis.  Let me, in that regard, also recommend this recent post from Jen at Righteous Revolution, Theorizing Breasts.

Today in my women’s history class, we’ll have our last discussion about "body history."  I’ll be talking about the recent shift towards the ideal of the toned and athletic female body.  Forty years ago, adult and adolescent women dieted — but rarely if ever joined gyms to tone and define their bodies.  The coming of women’s sports (especially thanks to Title IX), seems to have inadvertently helped to make the perfect body even more elusive.   Joan Brumberg reports that it is only in the 1970s that girls start to mention "working out" as part of their "body projects", while dieting to lose weight is first mentioned regularly beginning in the early 1920s!  Young women today have the difficult task of navigating through contradictory ideal after contradictory ideal: thin but still athletic; toned but not overly muscular; breasts big enough to attract attention and look good in clothes but not so big as to attract too much attention or interfere with athletic pursuits, etcetera.

In my classes, we trace the history of these ever-shifting, unattainable ideals.  In my youth group, we talk often about the pain and frustration that result from trying to live up to them (or choosing to live outside of them).  In both forums, we talk about solutions.  In an academic setting, we tend to focus more on cultural and social strategies for changing women’s relationships with their bodies; in the youth group, with younger teens, we focus more on spiritual and psychological tools for coping and transforming.   I certainly don’t have a magic bullet to help either high school or college students cope with the colossal pressures that come with trying to live up to the ideal, but I do provide a history of the problem and a safe place for discussion and sharing.

Let me get to the point of my post: I’ve spent a long time reflecting on how my identity as a male professor and youth leader affects the work I do.  For starters, I often have to overcome an extraordinary amount of suspicion as to my motives.  Who, some folks wonder, is this grown man with such an intense professional interest in young women’s body image?  What are his real motives?  Folks assume that I must be deriving some sort of sexual thrill from the work I do, or that I’m pretending to be sensitive (in order to gain access to young women) by expressing great interest in a intensely painful and important subject.  Most of my students and youth group kids (as well as their parents), who spend enough time around me come to realize that my boundaries are (if I may say so) pretty darned solid.  I like to think I’ve worked out a way to be both emotionally nurturing and intellectually provocative without crossing any lines I ought never cross.

But still, it is a bit odd for many people to have a man teaching this aspect of women’s history in particular.  It’s not just suspicion about my motives.  It’s the fact that I haven’t lived in a woman’s body, even for a moment.  Though I’ve struggled with my own body issues, I’ve struggled with them as a man trying to live up to a very different (though perhaps equally elusive) physical ideal.  And so when leading discussions on these topics in either a church or classroom setting, I’m always very careful not to presume too much.  I let my students and my teens share their experiences, and then I try (sometimes deftly, sometimes not), to tie their personal narratives into the larger cultural story.  After all of these years, I will say that most of what I hear is fairly familiar!  Self-loathing is a predictable constant, as is the desire for control.  It is axiomatic that there will be usually be a lot of ambivalence about sexuality; some are desperate to use their sexuality in order to be seen, others desperate to hide their sexuality for the very same reason, some anxious simply to disappear and not be "seen" at all.  Sometimes, I feel the weight of the collective pain in the room and I almost gasp.

In a way, it’s easier for me to teach this material than it is for my female colleagues.  I’ve got a few colleagues who teach women’s history here and at other places; a couple of them do offer lectures and sections on body issues. Invariably, they become aware that their own bodies are being assessed and judged.  One of my colleagues is a woman of considerable size, and has been since she hit puberty.   She’s become comfortable in her skin, but she reports that some of her students simply won’t listen to her on the subject of eating disorders and body image.  "They’re afraid, you see" , she says.  "They worry more about ending up looking like me when they are older than they worry about being happy."  Another colleague has the opposite problem; like me, she’s a distance runner.  She is lean and petite.  She’s had students with different body types react angrily to her:  "What could you know about how I’m feeling?"  In a way, the fact that I’m male makes things easier for me because female students (the overwhelming majority of those enrolled in my women’s history classes are of course female) aren’t comparing their bodies to mine.   They can’t set me up as a role model, and they can’t turn me into a mother figure with whom to compete or by whom to be judged. 

I had a young man recently email me; he’s just started a grad program in women’s studies and is beginning to TA his first courses.  He wanted advice about being a man and teaching courses on women’s history and feminism; in particular, he wanted to know how I made myself seem "safe".   He knows that in academic feminism, the line between the intensely personal and the rigorously intellectual is often razor-thin.  He knows enough feminist theory to know that we always bring our embodied selves to the classroom.  He wants to know how he can get his students to open up, to feel comfortable sharing anecdotes as well as debating ideas.  He’s particularly interested in "body issues", but worried about how his own maleness will affect the discussions he leads on that topic.  I told him that the obvious thing he needs to do is work on becoming a good listener; he needs to remember (if he ever forgot) that in gender studies, personal narratives do matter and do deserve both time and respect.  That doesn’t mean turning the classroom into the Oprah show, but it does mean giving students the opportunity to share the ways in which the material has meaning for their own lives.  I told him "Don’t worry about empathizing.  You don’t have to ‘get it’ on a personal and experiential level.  Trust your own compassion and your own intuition, and don’t worry if you don’t identify with every aspect of every story you hear.  Not every woman identifies with every other woman either.  Your job isn’t to share someone else’s pain, your job is to listen actively and respectfully, and then gently weave her story into a larger web of stories".  Seeing that larger web of stories is key to moving to the next step, which is talking about solutions.

In the end, no serious feminist can deny that teaching "body history" is a vital part of women’s studies.  And it would be silly to pretend that when we do teach it, we teach as disembodied voices.  We must all acknowledge the plain reality that our students and others will always filter what we say through their understanding of the bodies they see us in.  They will make comparisons and judgments, just as we do.  In some ways, the male professor’s body is a limitation — it is evidence that his experience has been, ultimately, radically different than that of the majority of his students.  At the same time, because of this difference, it gives him the chance to connect with his students without the complications that come from having the students over-identify the material with the teacher’s own life story.  Above all, though, a man doing this job must approach the subject with a healthy degree of both patience and humility.  As the yeas go by, the stories may seem depressingly familiar.  But the fact that we hear similar stories from our students, year after year, about despair and self-loathing doesn’t mean that we don’t have an obligation to hear them with rapt attentiveness.

Do I benefit from being a man who listens?  Sure.   Some folks are so amazed that a man is willing to do this work and lead these discussions that they tend to treat me with a sense of wonder.  That’s male privilege again — men getting patted on the back for doing what women do without thanks.  But the fact that I do get undue praise doesn’t mean the work isn’t vitally important, and it doesn’t mean that men shouldn’t be doing it.

Two kinds of fasting

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 23, 2006
in Body, Eating disorders and Food
. 5 Comments

I’m very tired this morning; the worst Santa Ana winds in several years kept me awake much of the night.  This morning, I had to move dozens of palm fronds just to get the driveway gate open.  And there’s talk that the mountain trails will be closed due to fire danger until we get some more rain.  What a difference from last year’s torrential downpours!

Our "Fast Relief" project at All Saints Church was successful on a number of levels.  We raised a few thousand dollars for Episcopal Relief and Development.  Of equal importance, the twenty-seven high schoolers and the three adult leaders who did the fast had a terrific experience: physically and spiritually challenging, yes, but immensely rewarding. I’ve always liked the power of a shared painful experience to bond people together.  And I suppose I’ve also liked doing these 30-hour fasts (this was my sixth year in a row participating through All Saints Pasadena) because it represents how radically different my own attitude towards food and hunger has become in recent years, especially since my conversion experience began. 

I posted last week about eating disorders, and I’ve written about food and body issues several times.  (BTW, see this fine response from Jen to that post and those who commented upon it.) So…

Growing up with a very unhealthy set of attitudes towards eating and my own flesh, I tended to experience food privately.  As an adolescent, I became a private binger, starting with (I kid you not) my regular breakfasts in junior high school of 8-12 Hydrox cookies and two big glasses of fruit punch.   They say adolescent boys daydream about sex a lot, and I’m sure I did — but even in the throes of puberty, my waking and sleeping fantasies were as often about sugar as they were about girls!

When I first began to diet and exercise compulsively in my early twenties, my "food" experiences were again private.  Like many folks with eating disorders, I became good at "pretending to eat" while actually consuming very little.  (I rarely threw up my food.  It wasn’t for lack of trying; I never have been able to make myself vomit on command, despite countless sad attempt in my youth.)  I binged alone, starved alone, exercised alone.  I didn’t talk to many folks about food because (and here’s where being a male hurts), frankly, we don’t live in a culture where young men are given sanction to complain about their bodies the way that women do. 

When I first began to take steps to get over my eating issues, I had a "food sponsor". I called this person, a woman I’d met through mutual friends, every day.  I practiced what she called "declaring your food".  I told her exactly what I’d eaten, and I also told her how much I’d exercised.  My food and workout behavior ceased to be my own private concern.  I found a group of folks with whom I was able to share my own anxieties and my progress, and I discovered (as is the way of such things) that my fears and obsessions were not all that unusual.  That was humbling, in that I had a rather grandiose perception of my own "terminal uniqueness"!  I began to experience food as a shared experience with others, realizing that how I ate did affect everyone around me.  If I binged or if I was starving myself, my close-knit community of folks with "food issues" would know — and I would be setting a poor example for those newer to recovery than myself.  (Most folks who know the language of Twelve Step will know the program I’m talking about, but I have an odd compunction about not naming the actual program.  The tradition of anonymity in Twelve Step programs is very powerful still.)

Bottom line: over the years, especially since coming to the church and to Christ, I’ve seen some huge changes in my relationship to food.  From a global perspective, my food choices (and those of other affluent First Worlders) have consequences for folks everywhere else.  From a social perspective, my food choices affect those around me — if I’m eating to soothe myself or starving to punish myself, my friends and family are going to be impacted in ways of which I am not even aware.   And from a Christian perspective, I’ve come to see that we are called to eat and fast in community.  Jesus may have fasted for forty days alone, but the Bible is filled with stories that illustrate the importance of eating in fellowship with others.  Food is not, it seems, intended to be one’s private pleasure alone.

The difference between starving myself in isolation and fasting in community is enormous. The former was an entirely self-centered activity, as I sought to make my body fit a particular and elusive standard that, if ever achieved, I believed would bring me an enduring sense of peace and joy.  When I fast as I did this weekend, with "my kids" and fellow volunteers, I fast to raise money.  I fast to express solidarity with those hundreds of millions around the world for whom genuine hunger is not a choice but a daily reality.  I fast to draw closer to God, as my hunger gives me a heightened sense of dependence and vulnerability.  If I’m feeling hungry and a bit weak, but am still needed to entertain and inspire teenagers, then I’m going to have to rely more than usual upon Him!  And I fast to have a shared experience with people whom I love, knowing that communal discomfort has the power to bind us together.

I’m grateful that my experiences with food have changed so radically since my adolescence.  I no longer have Hydrox and fruit punch for breakfast.  I no longer get "high" on solitary self-deprivation. I do still choose to go without food for a day or two from time to time.  But now, that choice is exercised publicly, in community, and it is done in solidarity with those who suffer far more than I.  It has damn all to do with staying thin and fit, and everything to do with building the Kingdom.  That’s an amazing blessing.

A lengthy musing on body image, Millay, and the possibility of transformation: a response to Jen

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 18, 2006
in Body, Eating disorders, Sexuality and Vanity
. 9 Comments

From the Carnival of the Feminists, I found this blog post from Jen, a student at Smith College, on being a young feminist struggling with body image issues.  She writes:

My being a feminist does not, unfortunately, make me immune to the widespread dissatisfaction of women with their bodies. I, too, hate my body. Well, that’s not entirely true. My ass is pretty shapely. And I enjoy my surgery scar on my knee. But everything else? There’s definitely room for improvement, to say the least.
And see? Even that, I know, is problematic. Seeing my body as something that needs to be improving. Wanting that waifish, bony (read: passive, unaggressive) body is purely a product of the patriarchy.
I know this.

And because I know this, I’m having an ideological dilemma. On the one hand, I have the typical eating-disorder-esque mindset of self-hatred and celery sticks*. On the other, though, I fully recognize and acknowledge that the source of the majority of the aspects of this mindset lie in the way that my mind has been socially constructed to play into the patriarchal beauty myth. I recognize these things, but I cannot change them.

Part of the reason I use this disordered eating is because I want that socially constructed impossible ideal of the 6-pack abs - the "perfect" body. I know that this body is largely unattainable, and my desire to attain this level of "perfection" plays easily into the hands of the patriarchy. But that doesn’t mean that the social pressures to attain this ideal affect me any less.
But the main reason that I need these disordered eating patterns is control. It is an explicitly personal need to control my life and what happens in it. It being so explicitly personal, it almost becomes easy to dismiss it as not really part of the patriarchy, because it is my (intrinsic?) "nature" that makes me so reliant on the idea of self-control. It’s not, and I know this. After all, the personal is political. And the personal, too, is largely socially constructed.
Even so.
I need that control. And no amount of feminist theory can give that to me.

Bold emphasis is mine.  For some reason, this old Millay line comes to mind:

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

This is true for so many of us, feminists and non-feminists alike! We go to college, we get filled with all sorts of interesting and useful theories, and we become first-rate students of ourselves and our motivations.  We very quickly discover why we do what we do.  We wax eloquent about the constellation of factors that made us who we are today, about parents and peers and popular culture.  But the intellectual grasp of the nature of the problem is not the same as a solution to it!  Ask any sad and wise alcoholic, who can tell you eloquently why he drinks and is fully aware of what it is doing to him and those who love him, but feels powerless to stop his behavior.

I was moved by Jen’s short post.  I’ve struggled with my own eating disorder/exercise addiction/body dysmorphia for years.  It began in my teens and continues to haunt me, though I am pleased to report that I have an infinitely healthier relationship to food and my own flesh than I did in my youth.  I don’t exercise twice a day any longer, I don’t try and get by on 800-1000 calories a day while training for a marathon, and I don’t weigh what I did at my "adult bottom" (just under 145 pounds on my  6′1"  big-boned frame).  But I still run plenty of miles, lift plenty of weights, take plenty of Pilates classes, and still gaze critically at myself in the mirror.  Yes, though I am 38 and tenured and at peace in my life, I’m still known to exasperate my patient wife with queries about whether or not I look good in a specific outfit.  But praise be, I’m infinitely more self-accepting with each passing year, even as the wrinkles sprout across my skin.

Of course, male privilege affected my own experience with an eating disorder.  In the early 1990s, when my weight plunged below 150 and I became gaunt and emaciated, my friends and family rallied to help me.  Folks told me I looked awful, and that they were worried.  My department secretary asked me privately if I had AIDS (the rumor was going around).  You see, by getting so thin and frail, I was doing something distinctly at odds with the masculine ideal.  My "sickness" was easy to see.  I got help, and I got it quickly.  (I wrote about some of this before, here.)

But I’ve known plenty of women who’ve dieted and exercised as hard as I did, and who became just as skinny.  But instead of attracting oodles of worried attention, they got validated.  "You look great!"  "Keep it up!"  "I’m so jealous, how do you do it?"  When I starved myself, I was rejecting a traditional message about manliness; when my female friends starve themselves, they are embracing a very seductive and very dark message about what it means to be a desirable woman.   Though I do not make light of my experience, I do recognize that I got much more attention and support as a man exhibiting anorectic behavior than I would have as a woman in a similar situation.

So what does this have to do with the Jens of the world?  Jen is hopeful about what we can do to reach out to little girls, but though still  young herself, is somewhat despairing of feminism’s ability to help her and those like her work through these immensely difficult body issues:

I’m sure there are cases where feminist consciousness has brought someone out of their eating disordered life, but in my case, and in many others’, understanding these social implications does not immunize you, or even seriously protect you, from the patriarchy’s message that you must attempt to attain this unattainable, "perfect" body. It might allow you to deflect the more blatant indoctrination of this ideal, but I don’t think that anything, really, can protect women from the subtle forms of patriarchal control over our bodies.

I do think, however, that feminism’s role in this issue of eating disorders is one of prevention, of preventing the indoctrination of young girls into this distorted body image cult. There is, unfortunately, little that can be done about the women who have already been indoctrinated by the patriarchy, an indoctrination that runs much deeper than we could possibly hope to reach. But it can change for the future generations. And, really, it must.

Though I share Jen’s commitment to reaching younger girls before they are "indoctrinated", I’m deeply saddened by her belief that there is little we can do for college-aged and older women who have already got years of experience with loathing their own flesh.  Certainly, reciting feminist aphorisms about beauty and identity is insufficient.  And though I have found that spiritual conversion has been an immense source of solace in this regard, I’m not going to crassly suggest that what Jen and other young feminists really need is to "come to Jesus."  Believe me, there are plenty of young women at evangelical colleges whose hearts are on fire for the Lord but who share with their secular sisters an intense hatred of their own flesh! A relationship with Jesus, even if it becomes the Great Fact of one’s existence, is not a prophylaxis against the damaging lies of the culture about beauty and the body.

But while neither feminism nor faith is a magic bullet to kill self-loathing, feminism does offer more than theory.  At its best, feminism — like the church — is about building community. It’s about creating a family of like-minded individuals with similar ideological or theological commitments who are devoted to each other.  So many women, and some men, struggle with comparing their bodies to those of their peers.  Feminist community, at its best, ought to offer a safe haven to women, a place where they can be challenged when they need to be challenged and nurtured when they need to be nurtured.  Above all, feminist community is about creating meaningful, safe, and enduring relationships where men and women can and do hold each accountable for their eating, their exercise, and their own slow and painful progress in extricating themselves from the Great Lie about their own bodies and their worth.  This is more than just an opportunity to bemoan one’s shortcomings — it’s an opportunity to hear the truth in love, and to be challenged to take small steps to change one’s own behavior and thinking.

I work with teenagers who have exquisitely sensitive bullshit detectors.  One reason I’ve worked so hard on my own issues around the body (anorexia, compulsive exercise, cutting) is because I feel an intense obligation to show kids who are struggling with similar problems that hope exists, that change can happen.  As they say in Twelve Step programs, "You can’t give away something you haven’t got."  We can’t ask our younger brothers and sisters to overcome problems which still have us bewildered, overwhelmed, and defeated.  Overcoming one’s own disordered eating and body dysmorphia is thus not merely about self-improvement and personal happiness, it’s about setting an example and transforming the culture.

I have nothing but great sympathy — and to the extent that it’s possible for a man twice her age — empathy for Jen.  I’m not asking her to try any harder than she’s already tried.  But I grieve the tone of despair I sense in her writing, and it reminds me that those of us who are a wee bit older must redouble our efforts to transform our own relationships to our body, and to witness about that transformation to our younger brothers and sisters so desperately in need of that good news.