Appetites. Caroline Knapp
taking things in, indulging in bodily pleasures—these are not easy matters for a lot of women, and I suspect my own troubled relationship with food merely reflects the extreme end of a long continuum, and one venue among many others.
Food, sex, shopping: Name your poison. Appetites, particularly as they’re experienced by women, have an uncanny shape-shifting quality, and a remarkable talent for glomming onto externals. One battle segues into the next, one promise proves false and another emerges on the horizon, glimmers, and beckons like a star: Follow me, this diet will do it, or this man, or this set of purchases for body and home; the holy grail as interpreted by Jenny Craig or Danielle Steele or Martha Stewart. In my case, starving gave way to drinking, denial of appetite—which made me feel highly controlled and rather superior and very safe—gradually mutating into a more all-encompassing denial of self, alcohol displacing food as the substance of choice. For others, the substances may be somewhat less tangible, but they’re often no less gripping, and no less linked to the broader theme of appetite: Obsessive relationships with men; compulsive shopping and debt; life-defining preoccupation with appearances; “isms” of all kinds—all of these are about emptiness, about misdirected attempts to fill internal voids, and all of them tend to spring from the same dark pool of feeling: a suspicion among many women that hungers themselves are somehow invalid or wrong, that indulgences must be earned and paid for, that the satisfaction of appetites often comes with a bill. Eat too much, want too much, act too sexual or too ambitious or too hungry, and the invoice will arrive, often delivered with an angry hiss of self-recrimination: You’re a pig, a sloth, you suck. Desire versus deprivation, indulgence versus constraint, nurturance versus self-abnegation; these are the constants on this stage, the lead players in a particularly female drama.
This, of course, is a profoundly human stage—the clash between the desire to satisfy appetites and the fear that they may overwhelm us, control us, lead us astray is as old as the story of Adam and Eve—but the female journey across it can be experienced and expressed in particularly painful and confounding ways, women being the gender born and raised on the notion that the female appetite is limited and curtailed to begin with, that female hungers should be reined in, permitted satisfaction in only the most circumscribed, socially sanctioned ways. “Eat to survive.” A thirty-six-year-old television producer who’s wrestled with weight for most of her adult life was raised on that mandate, spoon-fed the admonishment by her mother, who believed that anything beyond subsistence-level consumption was greedy, dangerous, unfeminine, wrong. “Don’t be such a smarty pants; it’s not becoming.” A fifty-two-year-old scientist still has bad dreams about that one, which came from both parents and carried a similar warning: Good girls (interchangeable with desirable, deserving girls) have limited appetites for knowledge, limited brain power, limited aspirations. “So you really do wear high heels.” A forty-two-year-old architect, just out of graduate school at the time and quite pleased with her new professional identity, recalls being met by those words nearly twenty years ago, when she picked her mother up at the airport for a visit; the statement was contemptuous, laced with disappointment, and still stings two decades later: “The implication wasn’t that I was trying to be sexy by wearing high-heels and failing. It was that I was sexy, and therefore I was disgusting.” These are tales from the World of No. The messages may be delivered far less directly, or they may be mixed and contradictory, but if you’re a woman who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, you’ve no doubt heard them in one form or another: Don’t eat too much, don’t get too big, don’t reach too far, don’t climb too high, don’t want too much. No, no, no.
That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women’s lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women’s troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite—specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it’s submerged and rerouted—is the thread that binds them together. One woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another’s maxed-out MasterCard; one woman’s soul-murdering love affair is another’s frenzied eating binge. The methods may differ, but boil any of these behaviors down to their essential ingredients and you are likely find a particularly female blend of anxiety, guilt, shame, and sorrow, the psychic roux of profound—and often profoundly misunderstood—hungers.
With anorexia, I merely elevated to an art form what so many women do with their appetites all of the time, whether or not the behavior blossoms into a full-blown disorder. Weighing, measuring, calculating, monitoring. Withholding and then overcompensating. Reining in hunger in one area, letting go in another. The female appetite moves in guilty, circuitous ways, and although my own relationship with food is probably as normal today as it ever will be, I still carry around a flickering awareness of hunger’s pushes and pulls all the time, a chronic tug between the voice of longing and the voice of constraint that feels like a form of heightened alert, something that can make its presence felt in any arena where taking something in is at issue. A woman I know determines exactly how much she will eat from day to day based on the amount of exercise she gets: If she runs two miles, she gets second helpings at dinner; three miles, she gets dessert; no workout, no extras, no goodies. She understands that this is irrational (“It’s crazy,” she says, “Who’s keeping score?”), and she can’t say when or why she developed the system, which she recognizes as completely arbitrary, but she adheres to the rules every day, and has for so long she can’t fathom living any other way. Another woman, an economist who’s been craving recognition in her field for years, found herself glaring at her reflection in the mirror the day after she was nominated for a major award. She was at the gym, pumping away on the StairMaster, her face tightened into a scowl, and she was thinking: You fucking fraud; who the hell do you think you are? “Where does that come from?” she wonders, unable to answer. “Why is it so hard to just take the good stuff in?” Appetites for sex, for beautiful things, for physical pleasure—all of these can feel baffling, and all of them can leave a woman confused about the most ordinary daily decisions. Are you eating that second helping because you’re hungry or because you’re sad? If you work out for an extra thirty minutes, are you heeding the call to health and well-being or engaging in a bout of self-punishment? If you spend $600 on a fabulous jacket you don’t really need, are you permitting yourself a little well-earned luxury or are you spiraling out of control? Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?
Despite its common association with food, the word “appetite” has a fairly broad meaning. Webster’s Third New International dictionary defines it as: (1) a natural desire; (2) an inherent or habitual desire or propensity for gratification or satisfaction; (3) an object of desire. I take a similarly wide view, using the word to refer to the things we take in and to the activities we engage in when we feel empty or restless or wanting, to the substances and behaviors that we imagine will make us feel full, satisfied, complete. In this sense, appetites differ from “needs” or “instincts” in that they’re not necessarily matters of life-and-death (an unsatisfied need for food or drink will, in due time, kill you; an unsatisfied appetite for chocolate probably won’t; a flight instinct that malfunctions in the face of a predator can be lethal; in the face of a destructive relationship, it will merely make you miserable). Instead, appetites inhabit the murky middle ground between survival needs, which are concrete and unambiguous, and desires, a more general and all-inclusive term. Appetite is desire in the “drive” gear, more revved up and goal-oriented than generalized wanting, a destination always on its agenda. Appetites give specificity to the inchoate and shape to the formless; they’re the feelings that bubble up from within and attach themselves to the tangible and external, turning elusive sensations (longing, yearning, emptiness) into actions, behaviors, substances, things. This meal, those shoes, that lover. The most obvious appetites, of course, are the physical ones, for food and sex, but I also consider material goods, ambition, and (perhaps above all) recognition by and connection with significant