Appetites. Caroline Knapp
does a woman allow herself to be? How filled? How free does she really feel, or how held back? Feeding, experiencing pleasure, taking in, deserving—for many women, these may not be matters of life and death, but they are certainly markers of joy and anguish, and they may have much to reveal about where the last four decades of social change have left us, and where they’re leading us still.
By all accounts, I should feel as free and entitled on the appetite front as anyone. I came of age in the 1970s, in the progressive city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and like many women of my generation and the generation behind me, I had the luxury of believing, in a not-very-politicized and no doubt naive way, that the battle on behalf of women had been fought and won, the munitions stashed away in the great cupboard marked Feminist Change. Women my age were the heiresses of the women’s movement, of the sexual revolution, of relaxed gender roles, of access to everything from abortion to education, and to a large extent, that legacy blasted open female desire: We had more opportunities and freedoms at our disposal than any other group of women at any other time in modern history; we could do anything, be anything, define our lives any way we saw fit. And yet by the age of twenty-one, I’d found myself whittled down to skeletal form, my whole being oriented toward the denial of appetite. And at forty-two, my current age, I can still find myself lingering at the periphery of desire, peering through those doors from what often feels like a great distance, not always certain whether it’s okay to march on in.
That story, with its implicit conflict between the internal and external worlds, is in essence the story of appetite. It’s about the anxiety that crops up alongside new, untested freedoms, and the guilt that’s aroused when a woman tests old and deeply entrenched rules about gender and femininity. It’s about the collision between self and culture, female desire unleashed in a world that’s still deeply ambivalent about female power and that manages to whet appetite and shame it in equal measure. It’s about the difficulty a woman may have feeling connected to her own body and her own desires in an increasingly visual and commercial world, a place where the female form is so mercilessly externalized and where conceptions of female desire are so narrowly framed. And it’s about the durability of traditional psychic and social structures, about how the seeds of self-denial are still planted and encouraged in girls, about how forty years of legal and social change have not yet nurtured a truly alternative hybrid, one that would flower into feelings of agency and initiative, into the conviction that one’s appetites are good and valid and deserve to be satisfied in healthy and reasonable ways.
Evidence of the female struggle with appetite is everywhere. Five million women in the United States suffer from eating disorders; eighty percent of women report that the experience of being female means “feeling too fat.” More than forty percent of women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine report some kind of sexual dysfunction, from lack of interest or pleasure in sex to an inability to achieve orgasm. Estimates on compulsive shopping range from two to eight percent of the general female population, fifteen to sixteen percent of a college-age sample. Something is wrong here, and it’s not anything as simple as Low Self-Esteem, that great pathologizing scrap heap onto which so many female behaviors (our obsessions with weight and appearance, our apparent proclivity for self-destruction) tend to get tossed. That’s always felt like very thin gruel to me as a rationale, about fifteen ingredients missing from the soup. A woman who is actively hurting her body or beating it into submission, a woman who is clinging to a relationship that hurts her or who’s shopping her way into stupor and debt is suffering from a good deal more than a poor self-image: The phrase captures none of the sorrow and emptiness that leaches up alongside a thwarted appetite, and little of the agony that accompanies a displaced need, the anguish of truly not knowing why desires get channeled in so many wrong directions, of not knowing how to live—and feel—a different way.
Today, nearly two decades into my own battle to live differently, I can’t quite say I resemble a woman out of Renoir; whether individual or collective, change is glacial in nature, progress charted not in victories but in inches and slight degrees, and I imagine that for me, as for many women, the challenges surrounding appetite will be both lifelong and life-defining. But I can say, in a grudging nod to victory, that I’ve redefined both the holy grail and the effort to reach it, a process that’s internal and deeply personal and bound up with the extraordinarily slippery concept of well-being.
Once upon a time, a “good day” for me meant eating fewer than 800 calories in a twenty-four-hour period: case closed, well-being measured by its absolute inaccessibility. Today, a good day might mean several different things. It might mean that I start the day sculling along the river near my home, an activity that makes me feel competent and strong and alive. It might mean that I put in a solid day’s work, that I spend some time laughing on the phone with a friend, that I eat a good meal, that I curl up at night with the two beings I love most in the world, one human and one canine. A good day usually means successfully resisting my worst impulses, which involve isolation and perfectionism and self-punishment; it means striking some balance, instead, between fun and productivity and connection. Finding my way toward good days, and toward a more sustaining definition of well-being, has meant creeping, gradually and often painfully, in Renoir’s direction, a sixteen-year crawl toward a kind of freedom to be filled.
What liberates a person enough to indulge appetite, to take pleasure in the world, to enjoy being alive? Within that question lies the true holy grail, the heart of a woman’s hunger.
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