Appetites. Caroline Knapp
are the things that propel us forward, that ignite craving, that guide and often dictate our behavior and choices.
Today, at the turn of the most accelerated century in history, a woman’s appetites are (theoretically at least) under her sole control, hers to indulge or satisfy at will, for we live at a time when our most compelling hungers are almost wholly divorced from their essential purposes. Thanks to the sexual revolution, to widely available forms of contraception, and (for the time being) to access to abortion, a woman’s decisions about sex may have little, if anything, to do with reproduction; separated from procreation, sexual appetite becomes both less rule-bound and more personal, less socially and physically threatening and also more confusing. So do her appetites in other life-defining realms. Liberated, at least to an extent, from her economic dependence on men, a woman today exercises an unprecedented degree of control over such matters as what and how much to eat, what to do with her time, how to look, where to live, and what objects to acquire. More important, thanks to the period of abundance that has characterized national life almost without interruption for the last eighty years, those decisions are rarely matters of sheer survival. For the bulk of middle- and upper-middle-class American women today, even in our current economic downturn, questions about diet, material life, livelihood, and relationships have far more to do with individual striving and self-definition than they do with basic subsistence. In short, the things we once needed in order to survive—food, shelter, intimate partnerships—have become the things we want in order to feel sated.
But satiety is itself a tricky subject, in large part because our culture—visual, commercially rapacious, oriented toward quick fixes and immediate gratification—both fuels and defines the wish for it at almost every turn, on almost every front. To the internal voice that whispers, I want, I want, consumer culture offers the reassuring, seductive words, You can, you can; it’s right here, within your grasp. And it does so relentlessly, so much so we may barely be aware of its persistence and power. In 1915, the average American could go weeks without observing an ad; today, some twelve billion display ads, three million radio commercials, and 200,000 TV commercials flood the nation on a daily basis—most of us see and hear about 3,000 of them a day, all of them lapping at appetite, promising satisfaction, pulling and tugging and yipping at desire like a terrier at a woman’s hemline. This is true for both genders, of course, but women in modern consumer culture are in the odd position of being both subjects of desire—people who are encouraged to desire things for themselves—and desire’s primary object, mass imagery’s main selling tool, sultry and thin and physically flawless. Thus, women are told not just to want but what to want. And the unstated promise here—that to want properly will make you be wanted—can create a powerful feeling of discord: Although in theory we may have the freedom and resources to satisfy our own appetites any way we choose, we have comparatively little freedom in determining, for ourselves, what those appetites should be, what true satisfaction might look or feel like. In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they’d rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite?
In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one’s true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied. That a lot of women lack both sensations in sufficient measure is evident not just in the numbers on dieting and preoccupation with weight (which are stunning) but also in the kinds of gnawing sensations that can keep a woman up at night, worrying over questions of balance and perspective and priorities: There’s the awareness, sporadic perhaps but familiar to many, that we spend entirely too much time trying to suppress appetite instead of indulging it; there’s the sense that a lot of us waste precious energy worshipping false gods, trying to get fed in ways that never quite seem to satisfy (if losing ten pounds won’t do it, maybe that job will, or that house or that lover); there’s an ill-defined but persistent feeling that on the whole this is a painful way to live, that it leaves us more anxious than we ought to be, or more depressed, or somehow cheated, as though somewhere along the way our very entitlement to hunger—to want things that feed us and fill us and give us joy—has been stolen.
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