Appetites Read online

  It could be argued, of course, that women (and men) should lie awake nights worrying about appetite: More than half of all Americans between the ages of twenty and seventy-four are overweight, and one fifth are obese, meaning they have body-mass indexes of more than thirty; obesity, which has been called a “national epidemic,” is linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, and neurological disorders; the cost of obesity-related illness is expected to reach into the hundreds of billions within the next twenty years.

  But obesity’s relationship to appetite (specifically, to the inability to curb it) is hardly clear. Morbid obesity in many cases may be genetic in origin, and the expanding American girth has at least as much to do with contemporary lifestyles as it does with restraint (or lack of it). Innovations in food processing and agriculture have made food cheaper, more abundant, and much higher in calories than it was fifty years ago, while technological changes (labor-saving devices that have left us more sedentary) have decreased the collective caloric expenditure: We live, in other words, in a fat-fueled and fat-fueling age. Obesity also appears to be a class issue: Cheap (and fat- and carbohydrate-rich) fast food is much more plentiful and accessible in poor urban areas than free-range chicken and fresh vegetables; health care, fitness facilities, and preventive education are far less accessible; not surprisingly, the poorer you are, the higher your risk for obesity and obesity-related disease.

  But appetite is not just about eating and weight gain, and in a sense the national hand-wringing over obesity distracts from a more nuanced emotional consideration of indulgence and restraint, particularly as they’re experienced in women’s lives. Our culture’s specific preoccupation with weight—particularly women’s weight—has a lot to do with our more general preoccupation with women’s bodies, not all of which is benign or caring, and a woman’s individual preoccupation with weight often serves as a mask for other, more intricate sources of discomfort, the state of one’s waistline being easier to contemplate than the state of one’s soul. More to the point, when appetite is framed narrowly—as a matter of proportion and calories and fat—the larger constellation of feeling aroused by a woman’s hunger is eclipsed. How a women reacts to cultural mandates about beauty and sexuality, how much self-acceptance she does or does not possess, how much pleasure she feels permitted to have, how much anxiety or guilt or shame her hungers arouse—these are the kinds of issues a woman may bring to the scale (or to the bedroom or the shopping mall or the workplace), and as the female preoccupation with dieting and body image alone suggests, they can generate an exquisite amount of pain and confusion.

  Granted, these are not (or not always) life-and-death issues; to an extent, the brands of unease I’m interested in can be seen as colossal luxury problems, the edgy blatherings of women who have the time, energy, and resources to actually worry about their thighs or their wardrobes or their relative levels of personal fulfillment. And to an extent, that view is entirely correct. The women I describe and address in these pages are primarily white, affluent, and highly educated; they belong to one of the most privileged populations in modern history. While I won’t speculate here about how race affects a woman’s feelings about appetite (an African American or a Latina woman’s experience of the body, her conceptions of beauty, power, and entitlement may be subject to forces beyond my scope), I do recognize the defining power of class and social context. My own battle with hunger is wholly different from that of a single mother living below the poverty line in my own city, or an Afghani woman living under the Taliban, or a Kurdish woman trudging across a mountain, child on her back, in flight from her war-torn home. Worrying about losing a few pounds is not at all the same as worrying about survival.

  But the struggle with appetite, even in its “luxury” form, is important, at least in part because it gets at complicated questions about female entitlement and freedom, the psychic qualities that one might have expected to spring up alongside the legal entitlements and freedoms that this population of women now enjoys. Divorced from issues of basic sustenance and freed from legal restraint, appetite becomes a largely internal phenomenon, its capacity for satisfaction wrapped up in an emotional framework rather than a physical or political one, and so a woman’s relationship with hunger and satisfaction acts like a mirror, reflecting her sense of self and place in the wider world. How hungry, in all senses of the word, does a woman allow herself to be? How filled? How free does she really feel, or how held back? Feeding, experiencing pleasure, taking in, deserving—for many women, these may not be matters of life and death, but they are certainly markers of joy and anguish, and they may have much to reveal about where the last four decades of social change have left us, and where they’re leading us still.

  By all accounts, I should feel as free and entitled on the appetite front as anyone. I came of age in the 1970s, in the progressive city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and like many women of my generation and the generation behind me, I had the luxury of believing, in a not-very-politicized and no doubt naive way, that the battle on behalf of women had been fought and won, the munitions stashed away in the great cupboard marked Feminist Change. Women my age were the heiresses of the women’s movement, of the sexual revolution, of relaxed gender roles, of access to everything from abortion to education, and to a large extent, that legacy blasted open female desire: We had more opportunities and freedoms at our disposal than any other group of women at any other time in modern history; we could do anything, be anything, define our lives any way we saw fit. And yet by the age of twenty-one, I’d found myself whittled down to skeletal form, my whole being oriented toward the denial of appetite. And at forty-two, my current age, I can still find myself lingering at the periphery of desire, peering through those doors from what often feels like a great distance, not always certain whether it’s okay to march on in.

  That story, with its implicit conflict between the internal and external worlds, is in essence the story of appetite. It’s about the anxiety that crops up alongside new, untested freedoms, and the guilt that’s aroused when a woman tests old and deeply entrenched rules about gender and femininity. It’s about the collision between self and culture, female desire unleashed in a world that’s still deeply ambivalent about female power and that manages to whet appetite and shame it in equal measure. It’s about the difficulty a woman may have feeling connected to her own body and her own desires in an increasingly visual and commercial world, a place where the female form is so mercilessly externalized and where conceptions of female desire are so narrowly framed. And it’s about the durability of traditional psychic and social structures, about how the seeds of self-denial are still planted and encouraged in girls, about how forty years of legal and social change have not yet nurtured a truly alternative hybrid, one that would flower into feelings of agency and initiative, into the conviction that one’s appetites are good and valid and deserve to be satisfied in healthy and reasonable ways.

  Evidence of the female struggle with appetite is everywhere. Five million women in the United States suffer from eating disorders; eighty percent of women report that the experience of being female means “feeling too fat.” More than forty percent of women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine report some kind of sexual dysfunction, from lack of interest or pleasure in sex to an inability to achieve orgasm. Estimates on compulsive shopping range from two to eight percent of the general female population, fifteen to sixteen percent of a college-age sample. Something is wrong here, and it’s not anything as simple as Low Self-Esteem, that great pathologizing scrap heap onto which so many female behaviors (our obsessions with weight and appearance, our apparent proclivity for self-destruction) tend to get tossed. That’s always felt like very thin gruel to me as a rationale, about fifteen ingredients missing from the soup. A woman who is actively hurting her body or beating it into submission, a woman who is clinging to a relationship that hurts her or who’s shopping her way into stupor and debt is suffering from a good deal more than a poor self-image: The ph
rase captures none of the sorrow and emptiness that leaches up alongside a thwarted appetite, and little of the agony that accompanies a displaced need, the anguish of truly not knowing why desires get channeled in so many wrong directions, of not knowing how to live—and feel—a different way.

  Today, nearly two decades into my own battle to live differently, I can’t quite say I resemble a woman out of Renoir; whether individual or collective, change is glacial in nature, progress charted not in victories but in inches and slight degrees, and I imagine that for me, as for many women, the challenges surrounding appetite will be both lifelong and life-defining. But I can say, in a grudging nod to victory, that I’ve redefined both the holy grail and the effort to reach it, a process that’s internal and deeply personal and bound up with the extraordinarily slippery concept of well-being.

  Once upon a time, a “good day” for me meant eating fewer than 800 calories in a twenty-four-hour period: case closed, well-being measured by its absolute inaccessibility. Today, a good day might mean several different things. It might mean that I start the day sculling along the river near my home, an activity that makes me feel competent and strong and alive. It might mean that I put in a solid day’s work, that I spend some time laughing on the phone with a friend, that I eat a good meal, that I curl up at night with the two beings I love most in the world, one human and one canine. A good day usually means successfully resisting my worst impulses, which involve isolation and perfectionism and self-punishment; it means striking some balance, instead, between fun and productivity and connection. Finding my way toward good days, and toward a more sustaining definition of well-being, has meant creeping, gradually and often painfully, in Renoir’s direction, a sixteen-year crawl toward a kind of freedom to be filled.

  What liberates a person enough to indulge appetite, to take pleasure in the world, to enjoy being alive? Within that question lies the true holy grail, the heart of a woman’s hunger.

  1

  ADD CAKE, SUBTRACT SELF-ESTEEM

  ANXIETY AND THE MATHEMATICS OF DESIRE

  THE LURE OF STARVING—the baffling, seductive hook—was that it soothed, a balm of safety and containment that seemed to remove me from the ordinary, fraught world of human hunger and place me high above it, in a private kingdom of calm.

  This didn’t happen immediately, this sense of transcendent solace, and there certainly wasn’t anything blissful or even long-lived about the state; starving is a painful, relentless experience, and also a throbbingly dull one, an entire life boiled down to a singular sensation (physical hunger) and a singular obsession (food). But when I think back on those years, which lasted through my mid-twenties, and when I try to get underneath the myriad meanings and purposes of such a bizarre fixation, that’s what I remember most pointedly—the calm, the relief from an anxiety that felt both oceanic and nameless. For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times. I devoted a monumental amount of energy to this endeavor—thinking about food, resisting food, observing other people’s relationships with food, anticipating my own paltry indulgences in food—and this narrowed, specific, driven rigidity made me feel supremely safe: one concern, one feeling, everything else just background noise.

  Disorders of appetite—food addictions, compulsive shopping, promiscuous sex—have a kind of semiotic brilliance, expressing in symbol and metaphor what women themselves may not be able to express in words, and I can deconstruct anorexia with the best of them. Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body—waiflike, angular—that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone. It is a form of silent protest, a hunger strike that expresses some deep discomfort with the experience of inhabiting an adult female body. It is a way of co-opting the traditional female preoccupation with food and weight by turning the obsession upside down, directing the energy not toward the preparation and provision and ingestion of food but toward the shunning of it, and all that it represents: abundance, plenitude, caretaking. Anorexia is this, anorexia is that. Volumes have been written about such symbolic expressions, and there’s truth to all of them, and they are oddly comforting truths: They help to decipher this puzzle; they help to explain why eating disorders are the third most common chronic illness among females in the United States, and why fifteen percent of young women have substantially disordered attitudes and behaviors toward food and eating, and why the incidence of eating disorders has increased by thirty-six percent every five years since the 1950s. They offer some hope—if we can understand this particularly devastating form of self-inflicted cruelty, maybe we can find a way to stop it.

  I, too, am tempted to comfort and explain, to look back with the cool detachment of twenty years and offer a crisp critique: a little cultural commentary here, a little metaphorical analysis there. But what recedes into the background amid such explanations—and what’s harder to talk about because it’s intangible and stubborn and vast—is the core, the underlying drive, the sensation that not only made anorexia feel so seductively viable for me some two decades ago but that also informs the central experience of appetite for so many women, the first feeling we bring to the table of hunger: anxiety, a sense of being overwhelmed.

  There is a particular whir of agitation about female hunger, a low-level thrumming of shoulds and shouldn’ts and can’ts and wants that can be so chronic and familiar it becomes a kind of feminine Muzak, easy to dismiss, or to tune out altogether, even if you’re actively participating in it. Last spring, a group of women gathered in my living room to talk about appetite, all of them teachers and administrators at a local school and all of them adamant that this whole business—weight, food, managing hunger—troubles them not at all. “Weight,” said one, “is not really an issue for me.” “No,” said another, “not for me, either.” And a third: “I don’t really think about what I’m going to eat from day to day. Basically, I just eat what I want.”

  This was a cheerful and attractive group, ages twenty-two to forty-one, and they were all so insistent about their normalcy around food that, were it not for the subtle strain of caveat that ran beneath their descriptions, I might have believed them.

  The caveats had to do with rules, with attitudes as ingrained as reflexes, and with a particularly female sense of justified reward: They are at the center of this whir, an anxious jingle of mandate and restraint. The woman who insisted that weight is “not really an issue,” for instance, also noted that she only allows herself to eat dessert, or second helpings at dinner, if she’s gone to the gym that day. No workout, no dessert. The woman who agreed with her (no, not an issue for her, either) echoed that sentiment. “Yeah,” she nodded, “if I don’t work out, I start to feel really gross about food and I’ll try to cut back.” A third said she eats “normally” but noted that she always makes a point of leaving at least one bite of food on her plate, every meal, no exceptions. And the woman who said she “basically just eats what she wants” added, “I mean, if someone brings a cake into the office, I’ll have a tiny slice, and I might not eat the frosting, but it’s not like a big deal or anything. I just scrape the frosting off.”

  Tiny slices, no frosting, forty-five minutes on the StairMaster: These are the conditions, variations on a theme of vigilance and self-restraint that I’ve watched women dance to all my life, that I’ve danced to myself instinctively and still have to work to resist. I walk into a health club locker room and feel an immediate impulse toward scrutiny, the kneejerk measuring of self against other: That one has great thighs, this one’s gained weight, who’s thin, who’s fat, how do I compare? I overhear snippets of conversation, constraints unwittingly articulated and upheld in a dollop of lavish praise here (You look fabulous, have you lost weight?), a whisper of recriminating judgment there (She looks awful, has she gained weight?), and I automatically turn to look: Who looks fab
ulous, who looks awful? I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert business of collective monitoring, in which levels of intake and restraint are aired, compared, noticed: What are you getting? Is that all you’re having? A salad? Oh, please. There’s a persistent awareness of self in relation to other behind this kind of behavior, and also a tacit nod to the idea that there are codes to adhere to, and self-effacing apologies to be made if those codes are broken. I’m such a hog, says the woman who breaks rank, ordering a cheeseburger when everyone else has salad.

  Can’t, shouldn’t, I’m a moose. So much of this is waved away as female vanity—this tedious nattering about calories and fat, this whining, shallow preoccupation with surfaces—but I find it poignant, and painful in a low-level but chronic way, and also quite revealing. One of the lingering cultural myths about gender is that women are bad at math—they lack confidence for it, they have poor visual-spatial skills, they simply don’t excel at numbers the way boys do. This theory has been widely challenged over the years, and there’s scant evidence to suggest that girls are in any way neurologically ill-equipped to deal with algebra or calculus. But I’d challenge the myth on different grounds: Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balance, traded, assessed. These are the mathematics of desire, a system of self-limitation and monitoring based on the fundamental premise that appetites are at best risky, at worst impermissible, that indulgence must be bought and paid for. Hence the rules and caveats: Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.