Force-fed Self-Loathing

I've been channel surfing a little during the day while I'm waiting for prospective employers to call me back and I surfed into a creepy episode of Tyra Banks this a.m.

What was creepy about it was that the show, which is hosted by a black woman who used to be a super model, was about teenage girls and bulimia. That's the variation of eating disorder where the kid stuffs her self and then sticks her fingers down her throat to "purge."

According to Bill Maher, the man who thinks the coked-out Olsen Twins and Anne Coulter are hot, this problem is over-rated. On his show, Maher has said he thinks women who do this are achieving some sort of physical ideal, not dangerously sick.

The woman who caused a largely NeoCon-hyped furor over euthanasia last year, Terry Schiavo, was in a permanent vegatative state because she was bulimic most of her life and suffered a massive stroke and heart attack while trying to make her self puke. As Randi Rhodes astutely pointed out, "This is someone who would rather die than be fat."

Anyhow, during a pause in the Tyra Show, the commercials came up. The very first commercial was an ad for chocolate M&Ms. The motif of the advert was this weird sorta retro-70s, acid-trip theme with M&Ms swirling in a kaleidoscopic way, as though the Mars Corporation was trying sell the sugar "high", not just the candy.

The very next commercial was for Slim-Fast diet drinks. Apparently there's a new, better Slim-Fast that helps women "control" their cravings. Note that it was aimed specifically at women, not obese men. Just women.



I've been reading a lot of Naomi Wolf lately. She is a former Rhodes scholar and the co-founder of the Woodhull Institute. Wolf made a name for her self with "The Beauty Myth", which came out in 1991 and "Promiscuities" printed in 1998. Wolf has a lot of very insightful stuff to say about women and obesity:

Female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. The nations seize with compulsive attention on this melodrama because women and men understand that it is not about cholesterol or heart rate or the disruption of a line of tailoring, but about how much social freedom women are going to get away with or concede. The media's convulsive analysis of the endless saga of female fat and the battle to vanquish it are actually bulletins of the sex war: what women are gaining or losing in it, and how fast.
-- from The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf, copyright 1991.

-- Mz M.