Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (4 page)

You do not do this to look beautiful. You know you look like hell. You do it because you want to disappear. You don’t want to be looked at any more. You’re sick of being looked at and judged and found wanting. You don’t want to grow up and fill out and engage with sex in a way that’s healthy and positive. Above all, you’re sick of being watched. You’ve done everything you can to be good and you’ve still failed, and now you’re just another fucked-up white girl circling the drain.

Fucked-up white girls. The bookshelves and magazine racks in every major city are stuffed with stories about fucked-up white girls, beautiful broken dollies, unable to cope with the freedom and the opportunities they’ve inherited, poor things. We fetishise an idea of these girls, photograph them, airbrush out the distended bellies and jutting bones, add sparkle to the dull skin and glazed-over features, wash them out with the lights of clicking cameras as if all the old suspicions were true and those beetle-black machines were stealing their souls snap by snap by snap. Not coping has become a fashion accessory, an indulgence. It’s cool not to cope. The coke habit, the booze problem, the eating disorder, the paper-thin transcendent beauty of the young woman rich enough to know that there’ll be a support system in place if she ever reaches the point of total collapse: it’s become part of the neoliberal mythos of womanhood, and the consumption – the young girl driven to distraction until she starts consuming herself, bone feeding on muscle feeding on bad drugs and narcissism, gorgeous neurosis – is the apex and embodiment of what women are supposed to be, what modern life is supposed to be: we eat ourselves from within. We strive for perfection, and we are perfectly miserable. Having it all is no longer expected to include personal fulfilment. That’s what the shops are for.

Falling apart elegantly is a rich girl’s game, a white girl’s game, a fashion girl’s game. That’s what the celebrity magazines would have you believe. It’s all bullshit, of course. When you get down to the meat and snot and bones of the situation, precisely nobody seems interested in the interiority of the fucked-up girl, the unglamorous, everyday breakdowns, the real struggle to adjust to the pressures and contradictions and everyday humiliations that constitute female reality in the twenty-first-century West, not just in Chelsea and the Upper West Side, but for all of us. In real life, girls from all backgrounds, in suburbs and ghettos and rural backwaters and in the Global South, are just as likely to flake out, swallow their rage and take it out on their bodies, and everywhere it’s getting worse.
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There’s even a word for this now, a new clinical diagnosis, slapped on women far more often than men: adjustment disorder.
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 You have failed to adjust adequately to social expectations.

TAKING UP SPACE

Eight years later. It’s springtime in New York City. The girl at the table opposite me is doing something very strange with her sandwich. She has cut it into exact quarters and is slowly, gingerly dissecting each one as if it were a bomb about to go off, removing the bread, wiping off the mayonnaise with a paper towel, piling the meat and lettuce into precise piles with a tiny scrape of mustard and eating them hurriedly, her hands trembling. You might expect the other people in the café to notice, but this is New York, where the spectacle of hungry, pool-eyed young women ritually starving themselves has become routine.

I watch the girl reflected in the glass of the café window. I have nothing in common with her except that we happen to be the same person. Or rather, we were, a lifetime ago this week when I was admitted to hospital with anorexia. It’s three years since I made a full recovery, but now and then around this time of year, the old, weird habits creep back: food the enemy, every mirror a traitor. I don’t know quite what happened to the skinny, miserable seventeen-year-old I used to be. Over the long months of learning that it was all right to take up space, I suspect I may have eaten her. But I see people just like her every day on the streets of every major city, ghost people with mad eyes staring blankly ahead, spindly limbs pistoning with manic energy, wrapped up against a chill that can’t be fought, and they include women of all ages, and at least 15 per cent of them are men.

Eating disorders are still seen as diseases peculiar to pretty young white women, which perhaps explains why years of ‘awareness raising’ have led to a great deal of glamour and mystery surrounding this deadliest of mental illnesses and precious little understanding. After thousands of histrionic articles conveniently illustrated with pictures of half-naked models looking upset, the number of people with eating disorders is still rising, and we are no closer to solving one of the great mysteries of modern life – namely, why so many of our brightest and best young people are starving themselves slowly to death.

The best answer we seem to have come up with is ‘magazines’. This says rather more about what society thinks goes on in the minds of teenage girls than it does about the cause of an epidemic that kills thousands of young people every year, and leaves countless more living half-existences with the best dreams of their single lives shrunk to the size of a dinner plate.

The most important thing to understand about eating disorders is that starving, bingeing, purging and puking are not causes of distress. They are symptoms of it. The diseases are replete with contradictions, at once about denying hunger for food, for rest, for fun, for sex, for freedom while the sufferer starves for it all to the point of death.
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Most curiously, these pathologies involve an intricate interplay of aggression and compliance. Eating disorders are what happens when youthful rebellion cannibalises itself.

And they’re easier to conceal than most mental illnesses, especially in a visual culture where we’ve got used to images of extremely undernourished young people. Those that do not necessarily cause extreme weight loss, like bulimia nervosa and compulsive over-eating disorder, are easier still to keep secret – for a while. All of these illnesses take a frightening toll on the brain and body, both in the long and short term, as sufferers turn to all kinds of dangerous and grotesque methods to control their weight, from bloodletting, drug abuse and frantic over-exercise to vomiting until the cheeks swell and teeth rot from spewing stomach acid. It’s not pretty. It’s the ugly little open secret behind much of modern beauty culture, and the biggest secret is that it’s no secret at all.

None of it is. So many young people are doing ritual violence to their own bodies. Diagnosis of eating disorders, chronic cutting and other, more arcane forms of self-injury has mushroomed over the past decade, especially among girls, young queers, anybody who’s under extra pressure to fit in.

Maintaining order on the surface is important, even if underneath you are a seething wreck. We know that looking ‘good’, for a woman, involves sacrifice, weakness, hard work, illness, even death. The rituals of beauty and conformity demand hard labour, and if a woman happens to be born looking like a catwalk model, she is assumed to have cheated. The thin, miserable woman who sacrifices health, wealth and happiness to keeping her body in control has more social capital than the fat woman who has more important things on her mind.

Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings. We do not need food: in many ways, we are food, trainable meat, lambs queuing up in line for gravy. We consume only what we are told to, from lipstick to life insurance, and only what will make us more consumable ourselves, the better to be chewed up and swallowed by a machine that wants our work, our money, our sexuality broken down into bite-sized chunks.

Men experience body policing too, of course, and there are real penalties for being overweight. The penalties, however, tend to be less existential; one can still, outside a very small range of professions, expect to be judged as a soul first and as a body second. Men’s physicality is not assumed to be everything they have to contribute. Men who are overweight or ungroomed are rarely told that they will inevitably die alone. ‘Beauty’ for men, despite the best efforts of the cosmetics industry to persuade them otherwise, still involves little more than a shave, a slick of hair-gel and a clean T-shirt. ‘Beauty’ for women, by contrast, involves hours of pain and expense just to make it into the ballpark. Our bodies are the most important thing about us, and left to themselves, they will betray us, become fat and unmanageable: they must be controlled.

In Italy, there is a tradition called ‘
sciopero bianco
’ – the white strike. In English-speaking countries, it is known as work-to-rule. Workers who are not permitted to strike fight their bosses by doing only what is required of them – to the letter. Nurses refuse to answer phones that ring at 17:01. Transport workers make safety checks so rigid that trains run hours behind schedule. Eating disorders and other forms of dangerous self-harm are to riots in the streets what a white strike is to a factory occupation: women, precarious workers, young people and others for whom the lassitudes of modern life routinely produce acute distress and for whom the stakes of social non-conformity are high, lash out by doing only what is required of them, to the point of extremity. Work hard, eat less, consume frantically; be thin and perfect and good, conform and comply, push yourself to the point of collapse. It is no accident that eating disorders are often associated with obsessive overwork and perfectionism at school, in the workplace or in the home. We followed all the rules, sufferers seem to be saying – now look what you made us do.

In school and at work, girls are easier to control than boys. We’re more willing to memorise exam systems, more willing to take orders, more compliant,
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and our reward is the perennial picture of ourselves or girls just like us on the front of the local paper jumping the air in low-cut tops, with good grades and pert arses, waving diplomas that will get us those coveted jobs in marketing. 

Girls don’t get to rebel in quite the same way that boys do. There’s simply too much at stake. We know that we will not be indulged if we flame out, we have been taught to turn our anger inwards, to turn our rage inwards, to hurt ourselves rather than hurting others. According to the stereotype: where rebellious young men hurt other people, out-of-control young women hurt themselves, compulsively, dangerously. Eating disorders and self-harm, bingeing and purging and starving and cutting and burning, it all becomes a silent rhetoric of female distress. If you didn’t grow up doing it yourself, you almost certainly knew someone who did. We experience this trauma on our bodies. It is a physical thing. It fucking hurts.

WORK IT, BABY

A great deal of what used to call itself ‘new feminism’ – before the word itself became too dicey for everyday women’s magazines – used to devote itself to reassuring women and girls that they could be empowered, independent political women and still be beautiful. Or, at least, if they weren’t beautiful, they could indulge in socially prescribed rituals of beauty. Articles and programmes like this are still based on the most prosaic, intimate type of questions: is it all right for empowered women to shave their legs? Can I be a feminist if I love to wear lipstick and twirly dresses? A lot of this nonsense is a response to the tired old stereotype of feminism as unbeautiful, and being unbeautiful – being ugly – is the very worst thing a woman can ever be.

That stereotype harks back to the Second-Wave feminists of the 1970s or 1980s, some of whom, yes, did wear trousers and go unshaved – but alongside Andrea Dworkin in her overalls, there was Gloria Steinem, whose classic bombshell looks allowed her to go undercover as a Playboy Bunny in Hugh Hefner’s original club to write an excoriating exposé of how women were treated in that weird world; and there was Germaine Greer, with legs up to her earlobes posing half-naked on the cover of
Oz
as a new kind of sex symbol, all cheekbones and lean spread thighs and unashamed libido.

What the stereotype of the bra-burning, hairy-legged feminist is really supposed to suggest is that feminism, that politics itself, makes a woman ugly. That women’s liberation is a threat to traditional ideas of femininity, of a woman’s social role. Which, of course, it is, and always has been.

Women’s fear of not being considered beautiful is well founded. Recent studies have proven what most of us have grown up knowing on a deep and painful level: that there is a cost, for every woman and girl, to departing from the norm of whatever her particular society considers ‘beautiful’.
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Women and girls who deviate from current beauty norms in physical appearance, weight, style, race or gender presentation face discrimination at work and quantifiable obstacles in terms of pay and promotion. These days the definition of ‘beauty’ has become narrowed, heightened and Westernised to the extent that it’s almost impossible for any woman to attain in her everyday life, even if she is lucky enough to be born with a face and figure that fits her out for a modelling career. That, of course, is the point.

Participation in beauty culture, moreover, is not optional for a great number of women – particularly those of us who work precarious jobs where we are expected to devote more and more of our time, effort and energy to flirting, to service, to making customers feel warm and safe and snuggly. Right now, because I work from home, I’m sitting at my desk with my hair scraped back and my face bare, but if I’d turned up looking like this when I worked as a shopgirl in Camden market, I’d have been fired quicker than you can say ‘professional double standard’. On the other hand, it’s best not to be too pretty if you want to be taken seriously at work, or outside it.