Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

of prolonged starvation. But this is the state to which a culture saturated with dieting imperatives, rake-thin role models and liposuction adverts on bus hoardings attempts to reduce its most powerful women and an increasing number of its young men. The perverse and pervasive rhetoric of thinness is an enforced surrendering of personal power – the shame and discipline of the patriarchal capitalist conception of women forcibly enacted on the body in the cruellest and most insulting of ways.
     
Personal/political
    Making rhetorical points which start with the phrase “when I was anorexic” is always fraught with difficulty. How can I talk about the real, messy human pain of disintegration and recovery without making myself sound attention-seeking? It’s almost impossible, so I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am not proud of my anorexia. When I look back at the years I wasted starving myself to the point of death, what I feel is anger, resentment and shame. It was a miserable time. No pictures of me remain from that time, and if they did you still wouldn’t be getting to see them, because they would show you nothing new: by now we all know what anorexia looks like. I was not a special and fragile princess. I was a stupid, suicidal child, and I nearly broke my family’s heart.
     
    I say this not out of masochism, but because somebody needs to tell the truth. The trivialisation of women with eating disorders in the popular press – painting us at once as helpless victims and as silly little girls obsessed with celebrity – does a great disservice to women and to people of all genders who struggle to feed themselves. Women are not powerless beings without agency, even in this circumscribed culture, and only by acknowledging that fact will we ever achieve full adult emancipation, or ever save ourselves from the hell of narcissistic self-negation. We need to take responsibility for our part in the cruel machine of enforced feminine starvation psychosis. To do anything else would be to accept our own victimhood.
     
    I can’t remember the precise moment when I became addicted to avoiding food. At 16, I was unhappy at school, my parents were getting divorced, and I was sickened by the urgency of the desires I felt, not just for food but for love, sex, work, excitement — normal human needs that I had learned were dangerous and wicked.
     
    I decided that it would be simpler to train myself not to want anything at all. At first, I cut out chocolate and treats; then it was carbohydrates and dairy, then breakfast, lunch and dinner.
     
    As my adolescent puppy fat began to pour away, friends and family complimented my new figure, reinforcing the message that good girls don’t eat. I felt light, pure and virtuous. It felt good; I wanted more. I started to spend hours doing strenuous exercise to burn off extra calories after school, and kept the supermodels’ motto “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” scratched into my hand to remind me that giving in to the terrible hunger pangs I felt was a sign of weakness. By the time I was 17, I was in hospital, so malnourished that I weighed less than a four-year-old.
     
    Because eating disorders are associated with fashion, it’s easy to believe that anorexia is a glamorous illness, a lifestyle choice made by rich or famous women whose only concern is to be thin enough to fit into next season’s tiny frocks. But there’s nothing glamorous about spending every waking second so hungry that you can barely stand. At no point, in the depths of my illness, did I crouch over a service station toilet bowl with two fingers down my throat, forcing myself to vomit up slimy lumps of the cracker I’d eaten for dinner and think, hey — I’m living the dream.
     
    The reality of life with anorexia is very far from a catwalk. The daily squelch and grind of an eating disorder is not only disgusting — it’s also deeply boring. My little sister, who was 12 at the time, told me: “You were no fun at all when you were ill. You were always talking about food, and even when you didn’t it was obvious you were thinking about it. It was just miserable to be in the same room as you, to be totally honest. You just weren’t you.”
     
    When you are anorexic, your world shrinks to the size of a dinner plate. You withdraw from your friends and family, you forget about the music and books and politics you used to love, you can’t concentrate on anything except where your