The piece of this post that interested me the most was the end, linking anger and hunger; when I worked in a small residential program for women with eating disorders, I found my feminist anger was kindled on a daily basis and I would come home and eat more than I wanted — as if I could feed these women by taking in more calories. Or to prove something — I can eat whatever I want with this imperfect body and nothing catastrophic will happen. It didn’t help that I didn’t get supervision at that job and had to carry a lot of shit around with no outlet for that year or so.

Lately I’ve been feeling pressure to diet and coming here is really helping me recommit to taking care of my body and loving it for what it can do, not what it might look like to advertisers. Thank you!

As I mentioned before, I am reading Anthony Synnott’s “The Body Social” for my diss, and I came across this bit (1996:93) today in his chapter on Beauty and The Face which I felt loosely related to this thread:

“Thonstein Veblen in 1899 offered the first sociological theory of beauty, suggesting that ‘the utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the article’ (1953: 94)…Of the ideal feminine beauty, he observed:

The ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender waist. These features…go to show that the person so affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. (1953: 107)

This relates to the idea that the thin ideal is not only a way to distract us from usefulness, it is a way to render us useless or inanimate, like an object to be owned, supported, and maintained and used by a man.

On another related note a sex blog I read made a note of how sex-positive articles always throw in that sex burns calories. I commented that it’s occurs not only because people are obsessed with weight loss and calorie burning is *always* considered a perk, but because both food and sex are considered pleasurable, sinful, and bodily desires to be disciplined. If by partaking in sexual pleasure, you are also disciplining your body (by burning calories), it’s like the pleasure/guilt conundrum evens out. This is particularly the case for women, who are held most accountable to keep their bodies pure of sex and food, to discipline themselves. Oh, the way the system works to control our bodies is endless.

Ow, ouch.

“Particularly disturbing are indications that the quest for perfection is reaching into younger age groups. Kids form their body images almost as soon as they can form words, and girls are now thinking negatively about their shapes in grammar school. Today, 42 percent of first- to third-grade girls want to be thinner, while 81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of getting fat, according to a 2004 global study by the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign. “What we’ve seen more and more is an increasingly narrow image of beauty, not just completely defined by physical appearance, but a particular body type–tall, thin, maybe blond, with very little diversity,” says Nancy Etcoff, a Harvard psychology professor and author of “Survival of the Prettiest” (Random House). The effects of that are striking. The Dove study found that just 2 percent of women and girls said they would describe themselves as beautiful, while two thirds said they avoided basic activities on days they felt unattractive. Those activities ranged from going to the beach or a party to showing up for work or school–even voicing an opinion.”

Just goes to show what the media is cramming down our throats from the minute we’re born. This sucks to see that the effects start at such a young age. How about we forget “No Child Left Behind” and go for “No Child Feels Like Shit About Themselves”!

In the US, at least, there was a shift somewhere between the Puritans and the eighteenhundreds from a position where men and women had equal sex drives and were equally expected to exercise self-control (with maybe a slightly greater burden on the man to hold the line) to the idea that “proper” women have little to no sex drive and thus are responsible for controlling, not just themselves, but the male sex drive.

I have seen it argued that this shift was related to the frontier, where societies were more fluid and it was easy for a guy to be gone before it was clear he’d fathered a child. Women were held more responsible for sexual restraint because they were the ones who gave birth and over the years this imbalance was “justified” by the idea that women’s sex drives are lower than men’s. I meant to track down the book that explored this theory (all I’ve read was an interview with the author), but unfortunately I seem to have lost the title and author info, which is most aggravating.

Supposedly this led to confusion in WW II, when American men who expected the woman to “hold the line” discovered that English women were far more willing to have sex with them – but the English women were often having sex under the assumption that this meant marriage, since in England it was the man who was expected to hold the line, and any man who didn’t was expected to marry the woman he’d had sex with.

Ancient Jewish law also put the responsibility for restraint on the man when it came to courting couples, while the Medieval Christian attitudes were that women were the more sexually driven sex, so I have often wondered how it got flipped around. I am guessing that the idea that women should be controlled and restrained eaters followed on the idea that women should be more controlled and restrained when it comes to sex, but I really have no idea.

Sara Moslener, I have some non-expert thoughts regarding where the great gendered double standard originated: I think the split came when the idea of personal ownership was introduced into human culture.

At some point, human beings realized that, while you could verify a child’s maternity so long as somoene was present for its birth, paternity was something nebulous and impossible to prove or see beyond a reasonable doubt. Once defending one’s own land and resources became an issue, making sure you’re working for your own offspring becomes really important. Since you can’t see it or prove it, it’s easier to restrict the movements of those whose parenthood you *can* prove (the women).

I think this is how most cultures turned from worship of the earth (feminine/mother) to worship of the sky (masculine/father), and in turn, where all the control-the-women ideas of patriarchal religion came from. So long as you can control the females of a species, you’ll know exactly who they’ve had sex with. While this does mean you know you’re protecting your own offspring (not someone else’s), it also has the charming side effect of allowing people to take motherhood completely for granted. If maternity is easily seen, just as the earth is easily *stood on*, why would you value it above (or equal to) something that’s impossible to see but obviously necessary for the formation of life?

When that shift came (and I’m sure it came over time), the normal habits of male and female humans came to be seen in completely different lights. Especially if you’re trying to find ways to bully women into following The Rules that protect the paternity of one’s offspring.

Okay, that was rambly and possibly made no sense.

In other news, this post completely blew my mind, too.