eating disorders and feminism

The following post is taken from: http://musingsofafemmefeminist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/eating-disorders-attack-institutions.html

"Eating Disorders: Attack the Institutions, not the Sufferers

I really have no idea where to post this- on my recovery blog or here- but I guess I'll post it on both, because it's relevant in both places. I'm finding that sometimes I post about larger issues and sometimes I get more personal on here- either way, I only discuss what I think will be relevant to other people.

Since I returned home from Guatemala, I have felt completely lost. My eating disorder wasn't symptomatic in the slightest when I was in Guatemala, because I got on a regular meal schedule, my body dysmorphia was controlled due to a lack of mirrors, and because social justice is one of my greatest passions- and when I am immersed in my passions, restrictive eating and food and body rituals don't appeal to me as much. Focusing on larger issues gets me out of my own head and motivates me to focus on making the world a better place rather than destroying my body. I was terrified that when I returned home the disordered mindset and behaviors that I left at home would come back into my life with a vengeance- and I was right. 

How is this relevant to feminism at all? Because whenever I struggle with eating and body image, I am overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and disgust- guilt for being "a bad feminist, a negative role model, and a hypocrite" since I am such a strong advocate for body positivity, and disgust with myself for being "superficial and vain" when there are more important things I should be worrying about, like how to make the world a better place. Apparently, according to Post Secret, I am not the only feminist who feels this way. Check out these two archived secrets: (see images)

Knowing that other people feel the same way as I do puts this into perspective. It makes me sad to think that women berate themselves for struggling with their health, when the only way to recover from an eating disorder is through self-compassion. An eating disorder is painful enough without adding feminist guilt on top of it, and frankly, guilt over one's feminist identity is unnecessary.  

Because Anorexia Nervosa in particular manifests itself in an obsession with thinness, the average person may forget that the illness is not a diet, nor a lifestyle choice, nor a quest for beauty- but rather a direct attack on the flesh that is a symptom of larger, deep-rooted issues (In September I'll be writing an article for Libero on how an eating disorder is really a form of self-harm, so you should check it out!). The thin ideal permeates our entire culture, but only a small percentage of people have eating disorders- why? Because an eating disorder, while fueled by the thin ideal in some cases, is so much more complicatedthan a response to societal ideals. I want to remember this the next time I start hating myself for thinking about food and weight so often when I'm supposed to be a feminist. 

My eating disorder is an illness, not a reflection of my character. My eating disorder is about deeper issues, not about being vain or superficial. I can still advocate for body positivity without feeling like a hypocrite, because my struggles are very personal to me and do not negate my views on body positivity/Health At Every Size as a social movement. Besides, it's not like I am not actively working on overcoming my eating disorder. I am. I am motivated by my desire to practice what I preach as a feminist- but that doesn't mean I should hate myself in the process for not being "perfect" at recovery and self-love.

I think people forget sometimes that feminism is about standing up to oppressive institutions rather than tearing down individuals. Take patriarchy, for example: you can actively fight patriarchy, the systematic outlook of men as superior beings, without hating on individual men who are also negatively impacted by gender stereotypes and expectations (unfortunately, I don't think all feminists realize this!). So, if you want to fight institutions that perpetuate thin ideal, more power to you! Sign petitions to stop magazines from photoshopping, create your own positive body image blog, boycott stores that promote pro-ana attitudes, encourage the young people in your life to value their hearts and minds more than their appearance. However, fighting the thin ideal doesn't include placing the blame on individuals that are victims to our cultural ideals, and that includes people with eating disorders- whether it is someone you know or yourself. People with eating disorders do not deserve your anger or judgment- their personal struggle is really not your business (unless it is a loved one trying to help them with recovery) or a feminist issue. Want to make a difference? Get angry and judgmental about the societal forces that normalize disordered eating. Get angry and judgmental at the health care industry for not putting enough focus on mental health (eating disorder research receives barely any funding and insurance companies are reluctant to cover eating disorder treatment- although this has improved with recent legislation!). Get angry at our cultural ideals for being so fucked up that people who are genuinely passionate about body positivity fall for myths about food, weight, and body image just as much as people who aren't actively trying to be body positive.

I am not saying that you shouldn't hold yourself and the people around you accountable for their words and actions. If someone makes a sexist comment or insults someone else's body, by all means call them out! I would just say that if someone is going through a personal struggle, be supportive- save the feminist analysis and rage for institutions. Hating and judging myself for being both a feminist and in recovery from eating disorders has not benefited myself or society in the slightest, so I am done making my personal recovery journey into a feminist issue. I am actually quite torn about being so public about my eating disorder, because while I have always thought that it is important to be open about it to raise mental health awareness and encourage other people in recovery (making the personal the political!), it is awfully exhausting trying (and sometimes failing) to be a role model/advocate/activist all the time. When I take on these roles, I start to see myself through the eyes of other people rather than through my own eyes, and sometimes I get lost in trying to portray myself in a certain light rather than taking active steps to overcome my eating disorder for ME. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is this: I advocate for body positivity. I am also in recovery from an eating disorder. The two are not mutually exclusive, and I have decided that I will no longer be ashamed. I will also have to think about how open I choose to be about my personal struggles in the future... 

So, if you're a feminist like me and also struggling with body image and eating- or if you know someone that fits this description- take a step back for a second and show some compassion. And in general, remember that judgment against individuals and judgment against institutions are two very different things.

Love, 

your femme feminist,

Jess"

see more at: http://musingsofafemmefeminist.blogspot.co.uk/

f e m a l e

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

― Anaïs Nin

“The strength of a woman is not measured by the impact that all her hardships in life have had on her; but the strength of a woman is measured by the extent of her refusal to allow those hardships to dictate her and who she becomes.”

― C. JoyBell C.

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”

― Roseanne Barr



“I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy

“Womanhood is a wonderful thing. In womankind we find the mothers of the race. There is no man so great, nor none sunk so low, but once he lay a helpless, innocent babe in a woman's arms and was dependent on her love and care for his existence. It is woman who rocks the cradle of the world and holds the first affections of mankind. She possesses a power beyond that of a king on his throne."

― Mabel Hale, Beautiful Girlhood

“Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.”

― Elizabeth Cady Stanton



“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.”

― Gloria Steinem

“I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.”

― E.M. Forster

lighter fluid

Nancy Venable Raine describes finding the pair of underwear that she was wearing when she was raped, and her subsequent experience with anger:

"I stood up slowly, as if not to wake the forces that I had unwrapped, and went to the kitchen for a baking sheet, a can of lighter fluid, a box of long kitchen matches, and a soup spoon. I put the newspaper and its contents on the tray and slipped down the stairs and out the back hallway door. I carried everything outside to a corner of the garden near the pond where the ducks were gliding on the dark, still water. I placed the wood and the underpants on top of the newspaper, doused them with lighter fluid, and struck a match. I watched what happened.

Then I imagined the worst thing I have ever imagined: the man who had raped me burning up alive. I imagined his screams of agony, his hideous pain. I saw the fat under his dirty skin crackling in the flames. A terrible pleasure consumed me. "Die," I said, over and over.

Until this moment, I had not allowed myself to feel my hatred. Now my body felt huge and powerful. It felt good to be a monster, very good. My mind-all thoughts and feelings-seemed to vanish into the pleasure of the pain I gave him. His pain, my pleasure made a perfect desolation. I relished it...I thought I was fine now that I had killed my underpants."


-------


What felt [safe] was to tell her how furious I was that the rapist had driven me to a shrink. It was his fault I was falling apart. I told Helen that my rape was 'worse than death,' and that I felt the rapist had destroyed my life, that I could never rebuild it. 'Never, never,' I said. I hate him with my entire being. I wanted to see him dead. I wanted to kill him myself. I had never expressed my rage to another human being this directly. It was no longer deflected onto someone or something else in my life. It was the rapist I hated that night.

N. Raine

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“To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.”

------

One result of turning a blind eye to the horrors of the world, because you can stand only so much, is that you end up forgetting that each individual who is subjected to heinous suffering is your fellow, your equal, and that you could have been in their shoes, and that he or she could one day have become your friend.

Michel Fitoussi Stolen Lives: Twenty

Years in a Desert Jail

------

women did not invent dust. the sticky residue that collects on the kettle does not come out of women's vaginas. it is not oestrogen that covers the dinner plates in tomato sauce, fishfinger crumbs and bits of mash. my uterus did not run upstairs and throw all of the kids' clothes on the floor and put jam on the banister. and it's not my tits that have skewed the global economy towards domestic work for women.

caitlin moran

victim training

 from susan brownmiller's Against Our Will:

i strongly recommend this book to everyone, whether you're a victim of rape & abuse or not..
it's very insightful..

women are trained to be rape victims. to simply learn the word 'rape' is to take instruction in the power relationship between males and females. to talk about rape, even with nervous laughter, is to acknowledge a woman's special victim status.

we hear the whispers when we are children: girls get raped. not boys. the message becomes clear. rape has something to do with our sex. rape is something awful that happens to females: it is the dark at the top of the stairs, the undefinable abyss that is just around the corner, and unless we watch our step it might just become our destiny.

rape seeps into our childhood conscoiusness by imperceptible degrees. even before we learn to read we have become indoctrinated into a victim mentality. fairy tales are full of a vague dread, a catastrophe that seems to befall only little girls.

sweet, feminine little red riding hood is off to visit her dear old grandmother in the woods. the wolf lurks in the shadows, contemplating a tender morsel. red riding hood and her grandmother, we learn, are equally defenseless before the male wolf's strength and cunning. the wolf swallows both females with no sign of a struggle.

but enter the huntsman - he will right this egregious wrong. the kindly huntsman's strength and cunning are superior the the wolf's. with the twist of the knife red riding hood and her grandmother are rescued from inside the wolf's stomach. 'oh, it was so dark in there,' red riding hood wimpers. 'i will never wander off into the forest as long as i live.'

red riding hood is a parable of rape. there are frightening male figures abroad int he woods and females are helpless before them.

better stick close to the path, better not be adventurous. if you are lucky a frindly male may be able to save you from certain disaster. ('funny, every man i meet wants to protect me,' says mae west 'i can't figure outy what from.')

those who doubt that the tale of red riding hood contains this subliminal message should consider how well peter fared when he met his wolf, or even better, the survival tactics of the three little (male) pigs. who's afraid of the big bad wolf? not they.

the utter passivity of red riding hood in the teeth of the wolf is outdone by sleeping beauty, who lay immoblie for one hundred years before she was awakened by the kiss of the prince. as a lesson in female sexuality, sleeping beauty's message is clear. the beauteous princess remains unresponsive until mr. right comes along.

snow white in her glass coffin also remains immobile until her prince appears. cinderella, too, needs a prince to extricate her from her miserable environment. thus is female sexuality defined. beautiful passivity.

wait, just wait, prince charming will soon be by; and if it is not prince charming but the big bad wolf who stands at the door, then proper feminine behavior still commands you to stay immobile. the wolf is bigger and stronger than you are. why try to fight back?  

susan brownmiller

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'every summer, my mother would set jam jar traps for wasps near the dustbins in our driveway. baited with smears of stickiness and primed with water and a drop of detergent, the poor insects would be tempted, tumble in and drown. but not if ...i was there. i would sit among the buzzing throng and offer my little fingers as lifelines to the doomed creatures. soon i learned that wasps would never sting their rescuer, just climb up, clean up, shake off the water and buzz off. my reward was to meet a little animal that no one else seemed to want to know. black and yellowin simple but startlingsymmetry, so neat, so purposeful - a triumph of form and function, a beautiful piece of deco design. with a face of fury and superlative predatory prowess, it performs essential duties, creates a nest of extraordinary delicacy and yet is universally loathed and ruthlessly persecuted because of complete ignorance. but the common wasp, vespula vulgaris, is one of my oldest and best friends. in saving those doomed individuals i learned to love wasps. and i learned to love life - all life.
it was much later that i learned why life has a collective value; why each and every organism is implicitly important to the community and ecosystem that it has evolved a niche in.'

c. packham

 a post taken from http://www.2ndcouncilhouse.co.uk/blog/

It was Germaine Greer who said that women never really know how much men hate them. Thanks to the internet we’re starting to find out, as “banter” comes out of the backrooms and spews itself over the web. Unilad has just been shut down after it pointed out approvingly that rapists have rather good odds, with the “lads” blaming humourless feminazis for spoiling their fun. A week or so ago, a friend posted up a list of the things that Mens Rights Activists quote out of context to demonstrate how nutty feminists are. Among them was a quote attributed to Marilyn French stating “all men are rapists“. This statement as a view of how feminists see men is often given as evidence of the misanderous nature of feminism and how ludicrous it is, but the full quote, given below, which comes from “The Women’s Room” and is spoken by Val – a radical feminist character in the novel, bears further inspection. Over the years, I have argued many times with (primarily male) comrades as to the meaning of this statement, with many taking considerable offense at the implication that I consider them individually to be rapists/potential rapists. Frequently accompanied by denials of individual responsibility and/or temperament to commit something which is – at least in name – so transgressive and stigmatised.

‘…all men are rapists and that’s all they are: they rape us with their eyes their laws and their codes.’

The contextualisation given in the full quote above demonstrates the structural nature of male sexual violence, and it is well worth unpacking the eyes, laws and codes which entrap men to this role. Mere denial, is simply a refusal to see, yet the gaze lives on; assertions of legal behaviour does not negate the judicial structure which enables violation, and a cultural stance in opposition does not challenge the codes which sustains it. Only by a careful examination of the power structure which sustains patriarchal heterosexual relations is there the opportunity to destroy it. The concept of “the Gaze” originates with Satre. Satre explore the concept of “The Other” – that which is not us. That when we are alone, we are a self-contained active subject, but when we share space with someone else we become aware of ourselves as an object in the Other’s environment. Because we objectify the world around us, we are aware that “The Other” as a sentient being, does likewise, and we view ourselves no longer as purely an active subject but as an object which is gazed upon. Lacan took this concept further, Lacan’s gaze does not require the physical existence of another, as the gaze is not something which belongs to the other, but is within ourselves, as a perception of being viewed. Thus it is not the act of being seen which creates the gaze in our heads, but the epistemic knowledge that it is possible that we may be; and from that there is no escape. Laura Mulvery coined the term the “Male Gaze” in the context of film studies, exploring how film makers produce narrative from the point of view of male subjects. Yet it has a broader application to all forms of media. Men are the primary producers of media, and the texts they produce primarily for a male audience while women are the spectacle to be gazed upon. When women consume male orientated media, they must adopt the gaze as intended, yet at the same time identify with the female. They see themselves as Others see them, this gift given not by a theological God, but by the omniscient patriarchy, eradicating the foolish notion that they may be active subjects in a world controlled by men. Women internalise the Male Gaze, everywhere they go and in everything they do they are subject to the knowledge that they are the objects viewed through a patriarchal lens which dictates their behaviour and the limits of their agency. Until the Male Gaze is castrated, free and genuine consent is impossible in a world where the agency of the subject is constrained.

‘because penetration by males is what women are for, if we are raped we have to prove not just that we didn’t say yes, which is impossible to prove, but that we specifically and emphatically said no, which is also impossible to prove..’

Women exist in a legal state of permanent consent. Consent is an automatic defense to a charge of rape and unless there is sound evidence that consent was withdrawn, it is frequently assumed that it was not. If a woman did not actively withdraw her consent, there is no case to answer – the legal status of a woman is that of consent to sexual intercourse. Furthermore, the presumption of innocence over guilt in effect means that it is insufficient for a conviction to be upheld purely on the basis that a woman asserts that she withdrew her consent in the absence of such evidence. For some women, the withdrawal of consent becomes in effect a legal non-option. Crimes of sexual violence against sex-workers are notoriously difficult to prosecute, as the assumption is that they payment has brought the agreement not to withdraw consent. Any evidence that a woman may not have withdrawn consent, is evidence of the innocence of the accused. Such evidence may include payment; sexually arousing dress; prior sexual activity; drug or alcohol use; being asleep; being sexually unattractive, or being insufficiently aware of danger. Up until 1991 the majority of women lived within a formal legal state which denied her the right to remove her consent: a woman could not withdraw consent to sexual intercourse from her husband; marriage was an automatic defense. Although that has thankfully been repealed, most married women today, entered into a legal contract which removed their right to say “no”. Within such a legal framework, consent is compromised. If you are a sex worker and you know that there is little chance of obtaining retribution because you were paid, there is equally little point withdrawing it. In circumstances where you know that what will be done to you will be seen as quite acceptable in the eyes of the law, resistance is futile. When your consent is irrelevant, why bother withdrawing it. Until the legal state of permanent consent is revoked, free and genuine consent is impossible in a world where that consent is a legal irrelevance.

‘A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm… This violence, however, is neither biologically nor divinely ordained. Much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change.’

The term “rape culture” was first coined in the mid-70s, but has gained a new popularity recently as feminists have looked to the cultural modes which sustain and perpetuate sexual violence. Much of the money devoted to popular campaigns to prevent sexual violence has focused on what women should or should not do to avoid becoming victims – seeking to impose limitations on their dress, behaviour, alcohol consumption and travel arrangements. By implication transgressing these rules implies a recklessness which has invited attack and any public sympathy or support for such transgressive women who meets with such violence is tempered with an “I told you so” undertone and restatement of how important it is to follow the rules. Related to this is the sexual epithets, “prude” and “slut”. Two sides of the same coin they seek to define women’s sexuality in reference to the patriarchal power structure – they are not opposing descriptions of womens sexual behaviour, but demands upon it. The “slut” challenges patriarchal norms which consider women to be the gatekeepers of sexuality, that sex is something done to women. The slut, as an identified sexually active woman is [an] easy [victim]. The “prude” challenges patriarchal norms which considers the purpose of women as being for fucking. The prude, as an identified sexually inactive woman is [a] frigid [bitch]. The effect of rape culture is to deny women control over their sexuality in combination with excusing male violations of female sexual boundaries; to reinforce the patriarchal definition of the purpose of women as being for fucking while simultaneously reinforcing the patriarchal definition of fucking as something done to women. Until rape culture is overcome, free and genuine consent is impossible in a world which indoctrinates women to be the objects of male sexuality. This combination of the male gaze, the permanent legal state of consent and rape culture conspires to produce an unhealthy sexual environment within which all individual sexual encounters take place. When McKinnon said “In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent”, it is the weight of the eyes, laws and codes which bear down on each interaction, shaping its direction.