On Identity
Content warning: This piece makes reference to eating disorders and discusses disordered eating. Please take care when reading, or feel free to skip this piece if this kind of content isn’t helpful to you right now.
I’m 12, wearing a new outfit that my Mom and I put together. It is cute, but different than what I would normally wear. I felt confident leaving the house, but on the school bus among my peers, I feel out of place in my light blue chelsea jacket styled with a soft pink tee and violet cords. The effect is immediate. I can feel my confidence waning as I step foot onto the bus, my strut up our long gravel driveway transformed into an awkward shuffle down the aisle of the long yellow school bus. When I take my seat near the back of the bus, I instinctively grab my lower stomach - the newest feature on my changing body. I cling to it, seeking to hold the entirety of its fat in my hands. This continued action is so noticeable that my classmate comments on it, asking what I’m doing. I tell her that I just want my belly to go away. She sought to comfort me by assuring me that most women really struggle with that part of their body. I instinctively let go of the fleshy part of my lower stomach, resigning myself to the lifelong battle that she is still describing.
I’m 17, trying to make sense of a long answer question on my physics exam. I only know how to solve the problem up to a certain point. I can determine the velocity of one of the trains, but I don’t understand how to factor for the extra weight that the second train is carrying. I begin kneading at my stomach. As I sit and stare at the problem in front of me, this action escalates to grabbing and pulling, treating my stomach like an in-built stress ball. As I recall my study session of completing practice questions on the floor in front of the TV, my stomach grabbing becomes more forceful, and my frustration grows as I realise that I can’t take hold of all of the fat in my two hands.
I’m 20, sitting in the lobby of the Students’ Union building of my university. I’m waiting for my best friend. She’s here to console me because I’ve just ended a significant romantic relationship. I’m not even sure if I’ve ended it, or if I was just a passive passenger in the conversation. As I replay the few moments of the long conversation that I can remember, I pass the fat of my stomach back and forth in my hands. That’s how my friend finds me when she arrives - my hands as deep into my skin as I can possibly make them, overtop of my black leggings, hidden under my bulky grey sweatshirt. “I’m okay, " I assure her when she greets me on the bench in the busy lobby. “You don’t look okay” she replies.
I’m 25, and a few months into my dream job. I jump at the sound of my phone ringing. It breaks my focus from the analysis that I’ve been doing on a memo that is due tomorrow. The voice on the other end of the phone is my boss. It is her fourth call this afternoon. The purpose of the previous three had been to point out all of the errors in the work that I submitted weeks ago, but that she is only reviewing today. When I hang up from our fourth call, I feel deflated and defeated. I turn back to the memo that I’ve been waffling about all day. As I deliberate how to move forward, my hands drop to grab the pouch that sits beneath my simple black dress. As I weigh my options, I grab and knead that fat, trying to push it back and forth to follow the flow of my thoughts. I settle for that movement though what I really want is for it to disappear.
We are sold the idea that we are only a perfect body away from happiness, success, love, or any other desire of our heart. Subconsciously, I learned to blame my fat for my failure. When I look back on my life, specifically the most challenging moments, I can see that I believed that if my body got smaller, my troubles and felt inadequacy would melt away with my unwanted fat.
This idea that the life of my dreams will only become accessible if my body is the right size and shape is socially constructed. It reflects the media that we consume which, for many of us, is the only model of womanhood, aside from our own mothers, that we are regularly exposed to at any length.
Much of what we learn about womanhood is aesthetic. As we explored in On Conformity, the most prominent feature of the Western standard of beauty is thinness. We are taught that the reward for our conformity to that standard is a blissful life. In Fat is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach outlines what we are told that we will have if we are thin: “...that we will be healthier, have more energy, be less restricted, and have greater [satisfaction]... We can buy nice clothes …We will be the woman in the advertisement who lives the good life. We can project a variety of images - athletic, sexy, elegant. We will be beautiful. We will be admired. We will never have to be ashamed of our bodies.” Implicit in that is the idea that all of these things are inaccessible to us unless or until we achieve our society’s standard of thinness.
My pursuit of thinness was predominantly about my grasping for these attributes. I wanted to be perceived to have the many positive attributes that we ascribe to thin women in our society. My thinness was about portraying a particular image; it was about how I was seen, not what I weighed. It was about the size and shape of my body communicating my worth in a way that I didn’t feel that my substance could.
Thin bodies were the ones that I saw celebrated. I associated seeing bone beneath flesh with discipline. A protruding collarbone was a sign of excellence. A flat stomach a sign of self-worth. A small woman was a woman fulfilled. That was the identity that I wanted. I wanted my body to speak volumes about my value. I thought that if I committed to thinness, if I achieved it, I would be insulated from judgment. That if I met the mark, if I was thin enough and met that standard of beauty, I would finally be safe. And that if I stood out for anything, it would be as outstanding and remarkable. That I would reap the social benefits of conformity.
What I learned too late was that the cost of conformity was my individuality; the identity that I had but didn’t value because it was louder and less refined than the images of model womanhood with which I had been inundated. The thinness that our standard of beauty demands is naturally un-achievable for most of us, but uncompromising. This makes its pursuit, for most of us, all-consuming. Most women can only meet it by severely restricting their food intake. Hunger is presumed. Intense exercise is compulsory. Calculating calories in and calories out occupies every free moment. Meeting and then maintaining a level of thinness that conformed to social expectations and awarded me the image that I sought left me with time and energy for little to nothing else. My peers considered me disciplined, but I neglected my friendships. I was academically successful, but I often cried myself to sleep. The people around me seemed to value my intellect and appearance, but I had no self-worth. The feat of conforming my body to earn the social value associated with thinness was so exacting that it left me with no other identity.
This is not simply a by-product of the Western standard of beauty. It is, rather, a sign of it working effectively. In her book, the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf discusses her concept of the “one stone solution”. Stone is the main measurement used for weight in Ireland and the UK. One stone is 14 lbs or 6.35 kgs. For most women, those who are not overweight but don’t meet the thinness threshold dictated by our standard of beauty, one stone is the quantity of weight standing between them and our standard of beauty’s model of thinness. This is no coincidence. Wolfe explains that the standard of beauty was intentionally dropped one stone below the natural weight at which most women sit without intervention or restriction. Making thinness just beyond reach but making that standard the key to unlocking social power and personal fulfilment keeps women spending their time, money, and energy on attaining it. The ever-present promise keeps women engaged in a futile battle with the 14 lbs that our bodies need, but that our society has told us we can’t keep if we also want the limited social power that it offers women.
This dynamic, this exchange of time and energy for the allusive promise of fulfilment through social value and praise, is political. We know that it is political because these demands originate with women’s access power and autonomy and have deepened with each incremental step towards gender equality. Thinness became all the rage only after, and in quick succession to Western women’s enfranchisement. We saw women’s bodies be subject to higher scrutiny when women entered the public sphere. More recently, as women have been increasingly rejecting the institution of marriage and gendered expectations, anti-aging treatments and surgical intervention to keep women thin and young longer have become prolific and expected. The standard of beauty which encourages women to make this exchange, while simultaneously masking its consequences, exists to limit women’s access to true social power.
This broken system is so pervasive that many women, myself included, didn't even realise that their conformity is propping up a system which is designed to limit their power. We pay for a Beachbody coach, enriching its shareholders who profit off of the decades of advertisements that have instilled and enforced the low self-esteem that motivates our purchase. We pay twice the price for olive oil spray, to ward off the shame that we feel when we delight in rich, decadent foods. We deprive ourselves in the hope of turning heads - the height of a woman’s power - which the media has taught us to pursue at all costs. We’re too hungry to recognise that what it offers is not power at all. We’re too focused on the fat on our own bodies to see that we’ve been set up to fail. We’re too tired to see that they have sold us self-harm and called it beauty.
Thinness is not just about making women’s bodies small. It is about making women themselves small and compliant.
Thinness is not just about making women’s bodies small. It is about making women themselves small and compliant. In demanding a degree of thinness that requires deprivation, thinness creates in women the demeanour that our patriarchal society wishes them to have. Naomi Wolf explains that “[d]ieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history”; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” She goes on to say that “[c]oncern with weight leads to a virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness … prolonged and periodic caloric restriction resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are passivity, anxiety and emotionality.”
When I say that thinness became my identity, this is what I mean. My hunger sedated me. I was in law school when my disordered eating was at its worst. I entered an institution with longstanding traditions on how to introduce students to a lauded discipline, and the means of introduction were demanding. We each had to prove ourselves worthy of the study of law. In this setting, where I didn’t feel worthy, I did what I had done throughout my life - I attributed my failure to my fat and set out to rid myself of that failure once and for all. I can now see how that response was rooted in my conditioning.
I made myself smaller. For the first time since middle school, I wasn’t involved in student politics. I didn’t march to Take Back the Night. I didn’t launch or join protests. I didn’t challenge power. I studied hard and counted calories. I exercised only my muscles, not my rights. I became quieter, more docile. My inaction maintained the status quo. I unknowingly became the perfect woman, by our society’s definition. The woman that advertisements and crass jokes and unimaginative television had groomed me to become. A passive participant in my own life. An active player in their system.
Thinness is cunning. It lures us in with a promise of power and fulfilment so long as we comply, so long as we conform. It promises the identity that we have each been conditioned to desire. The life that many of us have pictured. The body that we see when we close our eyes. But it also demands our undivided attention, our unadulterated devotion. It requires that we prove our allegiance to our personal detriment. That exchange seems obvious. We don’t think twice about our self-denial because we have been groomed. We have been conforming for so long that this feels like just the next step in our lifelong initiation. We’re confident that the pain of our self-denial will pale in comparison to the fulfilment that we will feel when our tiny waists turn heads. But the glimmer of that promised fulfilment, if it ever comes, is dimmer than we had expected. Rather than supplemented, we’ve come to realise that our identity has been supplanted. It is only after we’ve sacrificed greatly that we realise the cost. It is only once we’ve exchanged the light inside for a superficial glow that we learn that life was brighter on the other side.
I used to want the identity that I believed was only available to me beyond the fat. Now I want to claim the self-determined identity that I believe is only accessible to us beyond thinness.
