‘Creep not upon the earth, my brother, like an animal. Put on those wings which Plato says are caused to grow on the soul by the ardour of love. Rise above the body to the spirit, from the visible to the invisible, from the letter to the mystical meaning, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the involved to the simple… If with all your might you strive to rise above the cloud and clamour of the senses He will descend from light inaccessible and that silence which passes understanding in which not only the tumult of the senses is still, but the image of all intelligible things keep silence.’ (Erasmus)
Mass Consumption: Asceticism meets Consumerism
Ascetic Ideal Of Femininity = Anorexia
+ Consumer Ideal = Bulimia
When ascetic ideals clash with the status symbols of consumerism it gives rise to contradictions; wo/men should be faithful but also sexually rapacious, wo/men shouldn’t diet, in fact ideally they should eat a lot, yet they should be exceptionally thin and athletic; women should be child-like and submissive to patriarchal views yet independent and intelligent, women who wear make-up are vain yet women should have porcelain skin, long lashes and live up to the airbrushed fantasies in magazines; men should be both sensitive yet strong, emotionally open yet independent, complete in order to be a completion for others yet suffering well-timed moments of weakness for the complete modern woman who needs to be needed. Both sexes are still too preoccupied trying to make the everything they are supposed to be work to know how to help the other. Bulimia can be seen as an extreme reaction to, even an embodiment of, such contradictions. Binge in the consumer mode, purge in the ascetic. Both ideals, extreme asceticism and extreme possession (a post-modern avarice, self-possession) are incompatible, unsustainable and destructive.
A different form of consumption has taken hold of men and women alike. Not a huge surprise that modern ideas of anorexia emerge most evidently in the industrial metropolis. Advice pages of Victorian Ladies Magazines are full of mother’s panic about their hitherto bright daughters cutting off their circulation with corsets to get the desired figure. No wonder sensation novels are full of girls having fainting fits.
Feminism never got rid of corsets, society merely internalised them. And, to pre-empt the burning bras corollary, women need them for comfort and feminism always knew it. Burning bras was a media invention to disparage a 1969 No Miss America march. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with corsets for that matter, they can accentuate that pelvic curve; rather the insidious cultural restrictions that impel a singular figure that’s the problem.
The media doesn’t cause anorexia or bulimia any more than a drug dealer causes addiction. Yet society doesn’t allow dealers to hang out in the school playground without a fight. Images of perfect bodies throughout culture must an atmosphere in which eating disorders thrive. Disordered eating may begin as an unconscious attack of unacceptable social ideals, but if forced conscious it may become a reaction against. The patient is not a model of the ideal; their behaviour is symptomatic of the reasons for objecting to such generic standards. At a certain point of recovery, the stand-up and saying ‘My name is… and I am a bulimic’ stage, unconscious reaction to society becomes a conscious reaction against. That is when the madperson can become the radical, lobbying for reform.
Cultural expectations control passion to the point of screaming. The individual fights against it, striving for compromise equilibrium. Forced into conscious thought, even locker room jokes are spoilt, male desire is as tangled up as female desire ever was. Every romantic comedy shows a prohibitive standard of perfection tying the knot of attraction. Beauty is only skin deep but the gaze depends on cultural expectations, and so does sexual love.
In the earliest extant law book, which biologically speaking is not that old, a charter myth of patriarchy follows fast on the Word’s Creation. Si[g]n came into the world through that original woman eating knowledge. Peace plucked into bits when she shared that food for thought with her other half. The punishment, to be shamefully aware of flesh and painfully aware of Bloody childbirth (the spiritual origin of community). Beauty and shamefaced ugliness, those binary opposites, are the apple of every communities eye; cultural standards that frustrate natural energy. The story of Adam and Eve is a piece of art, sign or symbol, that naturalises intellectual standards of beauty as opposed to instinctual attraction. These aesthetic social ideals crafted the psyche as soma, naturalised intellect as sympathetic flesh and communities Blood as Spirit. And so Eve ate the apple. Natural matter imbued with Si[g]n, so says the Word, decayed humanity. Si[g]n is frustrated instinct, natural Passion becomes unnatural appetite. The woman, functional as a ribbed and ribbing body to birth man, is coiled in her own brain tissue by reaching beyond her caged maw. So, rebellious, Eve need submit to more suffering during childbirth. The body as community as culture; much like the Tower of Babel story it is society, connections between two, that moral codes go between. Associated then is woman’s submission to her own leaking body and her desired physical and mental submission to man who submits to God. This may be verified by Lilith, who in some popular versions of the myth, refuses to submit to Adam and is punished with eternal barrenness; the natural state of woman’s Blood without violence translated to vicious nightmare, vampiric miscarriages of maternal instinct. Women out of control are morally repugnant. Unsubmissive sexual appetites belly crawl outside acceptable social functions, and are as such connected with indulgence of the senses; libidinous, gluttonous, curious. A questioning mentality is translated physically.
Although biological functions have defined her as a slave to instinct, the New Testament has it that woman shall be ’saved by childbirth’. Through childbirth the female form can be thought of as a creative not just a sensual canvass. Motherhood is dissociated from Passion (from the virgin birthing a human saviour born of Blood yet conceived free of sexual ‘sin’. His Passion translated to self-sacrifice through the body, a violent blood letting). That Biblical mother’s (i.e. the birth of Samson) need to refrain from eating unclean things may be significant as part of this trend. A nurturing woman’s needs must be under control. Marriage as a financial appropriation of emotion submitted body and Passion to un/comfortable social definition, containing her procreative capacity within functional economic bonds. Tied by apron strings, or more atavistically the umbilical cord, to the duties of preparing meals social definitions of femininity are forever entangled in food. In this respect gluttony is a reader’s digest of instinct twisted by social definitions of gender.
Divorced from reality, traditional moral restrictions no longer go between human thought and action. Post-modern mental rot has enacted umbilicus decay. Dissociate from spirit, blood is clogged with transfat. Dissociate from control, people sleepwalk into ambien eating. Dissociate from comfort, bodies coil brains. Women, no longer desired for their procreative abilities, should be girls with slight pelvis; their breasts apparently not required for feeding babies can be plasticity pumped full of toxic chemicals, to satisfy the mechanised gaze rather than natural hunger. Irresponsible perhaps to have cosmetic surgery. Still nobody is directly responsible; peer pressure is fatal and fitting in remains perhaps the least worst reaction for that bullied individual. Haggard from birth by distant-screaming guilt, our aging society is determinedly youthful in its search for comfort. Perhaps the only way an anorexic feels they can reject such frustrated pleasure pursuit is a distracted unconscious writhing that mortifies the flesh, as never being good enough gets depressed into self-destruction rather than being transcribed into useful creation. So consumerism runs rampant, pooling stagnant milk lakes and steeping bread mountains, while, counterbalancing industrial horizons, Romantic views idealise childhood. Naturally, we want to be young, fresh faced, lithe, and carefree; not responsible for any of this. This is perhaps where female images diverge from male. Men are still signposted towards worker’s brawn and muscle, consummately responsible for good work, although a trilling boy power is catching on, cause celebre style. The only responsibility empowered girls are weighed down with still tends toward shame for not being what they should, even if such blame is laughed off with a ‘zigiziga’ and a ‘what a wanker’ gist of the wrist. Instead of defining ourselves based on natural talent, live action, definition continues to be mistranslated by fleshed senses. Sexbomb successes. Fat failures. How sexually attractive is that fifteen/fifty year old? The twenty-five year old is now the ideal youth, lithe and carefree, that actual adolescents defer childhoods to be, and older people botox reason to become again. Our lives, our identities, are determined by distracted sensation. Associated with moral codes, unreasonably valorised, that only result in senseless guilt.
So what is the compromise equilibrium for cultural si[g]n, for men and women, sexuality in equality, for identities, bodies, eating? Disorder, at the moment, as the wor[l]d is deconstructed. Those decaying binary oppositions of beauty and ugliness need to be, now fragmented yet figmented, re-imagined beyond cathexis. Shame is a reaction against pride. Without pride there is no shame. Without singular beauty there is no shamefaced ugliness. Without forbidden knowledge, maggot bit by an absolute Word, associate bodies need not be riddled by self-consuming self-indulgent guilt, that pride of shame over comfort men and women might find an equilibrium, and live together even on this compromised earth without Passion becoming appetites. If and when gluttony is no longer profitable to mass produced culture, disordered eating might move beyond bloated self-negation and create out of individual upheavals a motion against consumptive social definition.
by eleventhetter
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