Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

consuming as little as possible, our most drastic retaliation is to undertake our own consumption: to consume ourselves – and so we do, in ever-increasing numbers.
     
    One in every hundred women and girls and one in every thousand men in the West suffers from a serious eating disorder: a private, violent expression of the cultural trauma whereby the female body is appropriated as a market resource, where women themselves are fashioned as industrial inputs. Since 1999, there has been an 80% rise in the number of teenagers admitted to hospital with anorexia nervosa; across Europe and America, one in every hundred young women and one in every thousand young men has the disease. Roughly double those numbers suffer from bulimia nervosa or other pathologically disordered eating patterns. One in ten young sufferers will die from the direct effects of the disease, and over half will never recover, living with years of complications and, in many cases, choosing to take their own lives. 8 That women suffer from eating disorders in overwhelming numbers is evidence not of the fragility of the sex but of the toxicity of patriarchal capitalist standards of femininity after nearly a century of political feminism. Every day it is made clear to us that we are hungrier, messier, uglier, needier, angrier, more powerful and less perfect than we ought to be. It is far harder to challenge that culture of criticism and the low self-esteem it promotes than to simply starve away the shame. Eighty years after universal suffrage was granted in most of the developed world, in a generation which has seen women’s power and stature and opportunities grow and grow, we have been persuaded in greater and greater numbers to slim down, to take up less space, to shrink ourselves.
     
    The triumph of self-starvation represents a major defeat of feminism in the West. All aspects of the phenomenon are gendered – from the everyday campaigns of self-hatred embarked on by up to 75% of women daily in the name of dieting, to the thousands of women and men worldwide starving themselves to death in the midst of plenty. The unbearable, contradictory pressures of gender weigh particularly heavily upon women and on queer, homosexual and bisexual men and women, which may account for the fact that an estimated 25% of women and 50% of men who have eating disorders are not heterosexual. 9 The idea of eating disorders as a by-product of celebrity culture is belied by the cruel and radical complexity of the mindset. Jo, now 23, became anorexic at sixteen: “My mother thought I wanted to be thin so I could get a boyfriend. Ha! In fact, reason number one behind my drive to be thin was that I didn’t want to look like a real girl; I didn’t want to be looked at by men in the street; I hated my breasts and my soft round curvy girly parts because that just didn’t feel like me. It still doesn’t. The anorexia…that was me wanting to be as sexless as I could possibly manage to become.”
     
    Tradition has it that women do everything, including starve themselves to death, in an effort to look good and attract a man – but the idea that eating disorders are solely an effect of beauty culture is disingenuous and demeaning to sufferers. The pain is visceral, it is political, and it is as much a reaction against the insistent labour of beauty fascism as submission to objectification. Hannah, a ferociously bright 22-year-old studying Economics at Cambridge, did not starve herself because she wanted to be beautiful: “Anorexia has nothing to do with wanting to look pretty. In fact, I knew I looked worse at lower weights. I wanted to look disgusting and ugly. I wanted my heart to sputter and stop and my bones to thin, my organs to give up on me. If I had a heart attack caused by starvation, maybe that wouldn’t really count as suicide.”
     
    There is something paradoxically feminist about the violent inverted logic of eating disorders – a desperate and deadly psychological stand-in for the kind of personal and political freedoms we have not yet achieved. Women and girls who have been denied their own autonomy find a measure of that autonomy in the physical and psychological self-destruction of eating disorders: a rebellion by self-immolation, by taking society’s standards of thinness, beauty and self-denial to their logical extremes. Hundreds of thousands of women, as I write, are destroying themselves in pursuit of this pyrrhic victory – and Western society,