Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

next meal isn’t coming from. You tell yourself that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, but by the time you’ve made yourself that skinny, you’ve lost the ability to feel anything at all.
     
    Hospital was terrifying: the unfamiliar ward, the endless medical tests, the locks on the doors. The girl in the room next door, Lianne, was once a promising chemist; she used to spend her days cutting out pictures of fashion models for her scrapbook with an intravenous drip hooked to her wrist.
     
    At the end of my first week in hospital, Lianne ripped the feeding tube out of her wrist and ran away from the ward, determined to end her life. She was so weak that she collapsed on the bus into town. As I watched the ambulance pull up underneath my window, returning Lianne to hospital, I realised that I had a choice: I could either choose to stay ill and become like Lianne, living out a withered, damaged half-life of hospital stays and self-starvation, or I could dare to contemplate the possibility of a different life. That night, I ate my first proper meal in more than two years.
     
    Starting to eat again is extremely difficult when a part of you believes that you deserve to starve. It’s even more difficult when you’re surrounded by images of women who look just as scrawny and miserable as you do and told that this is the ideal to which you should aspire. The softer and curvier my body became, the more outsized I felt; compared to the perfect models on the cover of every magazine, the meat and stink of my new body disgusted me. But somehow, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I clung on. No matter how repulsed I felt, I kept on eating my meals with the joyless efficiency of a robot. I had decided to try to find something that tasted better than skinny felt.
     
    Recovery from an eating disorder is difficult to measure, because it involves so much more than putting on weight: you have to will yourself to believe that you deserve your place in the world, the whole mess and hunger of your flesh and brain and lust and ambition. Even when you hate your normal-sized body so much that you want to tear chunks out of it, you have to get up, eat your meals and get on with your day. You have to learn to say those two, terrifying little words: I’m hungry.
     
    These days, I’m always hungry — sometimes for a sandwich, sometimes for sex, or work, or travel, or a change; sometimes I just want someone to hug. I’ve learned that it’s OK not to be a good little girl, that it’s OK to break the rules, even when you are told that you ought to take up as little space as possible. I refuse to shrink myself to fit into the narrow coffin that society lays out for young women. From time to time, I still miss my eating disorder. I miss the sense of control that comes when avoiding food is your highest ambition. But today, after three years of recovery, I have a degree, a career and a huge appetite for adventure. I’m hungry, too hungry to go back, to ravenous and insatiate to submit and pare myself down again. I’m hungry, still hungry, and the flesh and disappointment of real life taste better than skinny ever felt.
     
Fear and loathing
    Fear of female flesh and fat is fear of female power, the sublimated power of women over birth and death and dirt and sex. In his essay The Roots of Masculinity, therapist Tom Ryan notes that “Most therapists have frequently heard complaints from men about fears of being dominated, controlled, swallowed up or suffocated. Underlying these fears…is a more basic fear about the disintegration of maleness. … Dave, a thirty year old professional man, wishes his partners to be ‘firm and sharp’. There must be no hint of softness or largeness, particularly in the breasts. On occasions when Dave has seen or been with a ‘fat’ or ‘large’ woman, he experiences a sensation of being lost or enveloped by their ‘layers of flesh’.” 11
     
    Over the course of the 20th century, escalating female emancipation has offset by a growing taboo against female corpulence – not just of women who are overweight, but of any female fat, anywhere. Cellulite, saggy bellies, fat around the arms, natural processes which affect all female bodies, even the leanest, after puberty, are particularly loathed. Where female bodies are permitted, they must be as small and as ‘sharp’ as possible. The threat that patriarchal birthright will be ‘swallowed up or suffocated’ by gender equality is made manifest in