Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

pornographic industries, women in the early 21st century have learned to despise their own flesh. The discrepancy between the dogged models of erotic and social self-fashioning offered to us and the reality of our everyday lives and developing bodies can be almost unbearable. Celebrities and fashion models who are tacitly understood to be engaged in a prolonged process of self-starvation, seem to promise to teach us both how to be desired and how to disengage from our bodily desires. It is easy to ache for the perfect control they seem to embody, to yearn to be the ubiquitous object rather than an abject consumer. It is easy to learn not to want anything: easy to play the rules to their ultimate, tragic conclusion and refuse to consume anything, to punish the body and murder the sex drive with the artificial pre-pubescence chemically created by starvation. Easier to become a sign rather than attempt to signify anything. Easier, ultimately, to die.
     
The chemistry of control
    Enforcing thinness is an ideal way to control powerful women on the cusp of liberating themselves, because eating disorders are that rare thing: political and cultural disorders with deep physiological effects. It would be disingenuous to discuss the political ramifications of eating disorders on our gender ideologies without acknowledging the medical basis for these conclusions.
     
    Anorexia nervosa is the most lethal of all mental illnesses precisely because its physical and psychological effects are so profoundly entangled. It has been conclusively proved that prolonged starvation can actually provoke many of the symptoms of anorexia nervosa, causing sufferers to obsess over food and become depressed, self-destructive and suicidal. In 1944, for instance, researchers at the University of Minnesota enlisted and systematically starved 36 conscientious objectors – all healthy adult men with no psychiatric problems. Over the course of a year, the men lost 25% of their body weight, and were then fed normally again – with staggering results. All of the participants quickly began to display unusual psychological symptoms. They became highly distressed, agitated and bewildered, and developed bizarre rituals around eating, collecting recipes and hoarding food obsessively – not just during the experiment but, in some cases, for the rest of their lives. 10
     
    One of the participants, Harold, told researchers in 2006 that the experiment was highly distressing “not only because of the physical discomfort, but because … food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.” The men became extremely disturbed by the idea of weight gain, and their reactions included pathological self-harm. One participant amputated three of his own fingers with an axe.
     
    Unless you’ve been very hungry for a long time yourself, you can’t imagine what prolonged malnutrition does to your mind – never mind how obsessive you started off, you’ll soon start thinking in tiny repetitive circles about everything. You’ll become anxious, tearful, constantly on edge, and this is an evolved reaction – in response to what it perceives as famine, the lizard-brain becomes hyper-focused, wanting you to stay awake searching for something, anything, to eat. Little habits, distractions – smoking, gum-chewing, booze, caffeine, uppers – become addictions. You can’t sit still, you can’t concentrate. You become angry, irrational, paranoid, fearful. Your grades and work performance start slipping, you’ve lost all your hopes and ambitions, because all you can think about is food and how to avoid it. You can feel your thoughts moving more slowly, like in those dreams when you’re running through thick sludge away from some nameless terror. All the while, part of you feels invincible. You feel that you might perform any physical or intellectual feat, running a marathon or writing a symphony or hammering in railroad tracks – when in reality you have made yourself socially and functionally useless. You have taken the work of self-negation and under-consumption that promised to make you the perfect worker, the perfect student, the perfect wife, but in doing so you have destroyed your capacity to work or love or function in society in any sustained manner.
     
    All of these are merely the physiological effects