Anorexia, an investigation into the idea of femininity

A young girl of fourteen and thirty kilos. Almost starving and very hungry. Obsessed with food and unable to put it in her mouth, even to touch it, as if there was 'an inverted magnetic force'. This is how Hadley Freeman, writer and journalist for the 'Sunday Times' remembers herself. "It was a warm spring day in London when I went completely astray and my mind and body ended up possessed by a stranger. It was the transformation of a minute, a gruesome loss of innocence; all it took was a single comment and my view of the world changed forever,' she writes in Good Girls. A History of Anorexia. The memoir traces her illness, which broke out in 1992, and that of some of the women she met in the nine long hospital stays that ate away at her youth. The memoir is interwoven with journalistic work that includes an analysis of recent scientific studies and interviews with anorexia specialists, including the one who finally cured her, an analysis that ends up identifying our idea of femininity as one of the root causes of this illness for which there is no medicine and which appears during adolescence, affecting 90% of females. Freeman describes herself as a child always seeking approval: 'In conversations, I used to wear myself out from the effort of guessing the answer that the interlocutor expected from me rather than saying what I really thought, to the point that I no longer knew what my real thoughts were'. Not popular, but friendly to everyone, because accommodating. "I was complacent, cheerful and completely incapable of expressing my true feelings. Apart from the terror of sex, I was the dream sweetheart,' she recalls.Good at school, precise, conformist, didn't displease anyone. To calm the anxiety and anger that sometimes beset her, she would touch herself when she was little. "One day a teacher noticed, followed me - I'm afraid it happened often - and caught me in the toilet with my slim, restless little hand between my legs. "Good girls don't do such things!" she exclaimed in a gasp" taking her to the nurse's office. 'Here's another lesson learned: pleasure was scandalous'. One of the lessons that almost all young girls learn at some point: 'their emotions always come after those of others and sexuality must only be denied (quite a different thing is telling them that they should radiate eroticism for the pleasure of others, a warning they constantly receive). All needs, desires and appetites must be repressed: this is the founding tenet of femininity' even before St Vilgefortis, daughter of the king of Portugal who lived between 700 and 1000 and opposed marriage to the man of her father's choice by stopping eating.Freeman and her hospital companions had a horror of women's bodies: 'Carla said during a group therapy session that she had stopped eating after a relative had called her feminine; the very word made us wince, imagining round hips, pendulous breasts, a sagging bottom. So many fat reserves! What could be more allusive to the lust and greed of a female body?' she recalls. Fear of a world perceived as hostile was another common factor. A world that anorexia knows how to reduce to the single imperative of not eating and which it challenges with a furious will. "If the disease emerges during adolescence - as in my case - it is because girls have not yet become adults, and do not want to become adults. We refuse to bleed and squeeze our breasts against our bony chests. Sex? No way. Fear has a lot to do with it. Along with pure rage. We look at the choices modern mothers have to make - they call them compromises, but we know they are sacrifices - and we don't want to know about them. Would the end point of so much effort in studies, of all that perfectionist dedication be the domestic dimension? We are told that the world has changed, yet it seems that the only consequence is that now our mothers have to get a job and still continue doing everything they have always done: cooking and cleaning and blowing their children's noses and flattering their husbands all day, every day. Over the years, it has been women's work as a profession that has changed, not their emotional work'.Outside the home it is no better either: 'Outside the home we see what it means to be a woman: to be scrutinised, to accept less, to let our intelligence be subsumed by the egos of mediocre males, to resign ourselves to invisibility once we turn forty. We see the unattainable standards imposed on women: be smart, but not too ambitious; show yourself to be perfect, but don't give in to vanity; don't age, but no plastic surgery; stay slim, but don't fixate on diets; be brilliant, but no more than the men around you; be accommodating, and no personal demands. And it is frightening. We are witnessing the hypersexualisation of women, that claim to always find ourselves as ready to use as blow-up dolls,' observes the author, who also considers the role of fashion, social networking and porn, finding them secondary and in any case a by-product of the idea of femininity rooted in our culture.

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Hadley Freeman

Good girls.

A story of anorexia