Almost every woman, and even men,
will admit to the fact that their lives often revolve around food. We need it to survive and it nourishes our
growth, but it also causes us to become preoccupied with our weight and
appearance. When analyzing eating
disorders (EDs), it is not only important to view the typical symptoms of
sufferers, but to relate those symptoms to causes by many sociocultural
factors. Not only are EDs physical
illnesses, they are largely mental illnesses.
EDs start with vulnerable individuals who cannot find a balance in their
lives or do not feel they live up to the standards of others, or their
own. The media has a detrimental
influence on EDs, especially in women, and rarely do we see the media depicting
celebrities with EDs. It is not all that
glamorous to look emaciated with your eyes sunken in, so the media just leaves
that out of its reports. Psychologists
have their views on why EDs develop, but feminists also have their own. However, there is some overlap between these
two academic disciplines. In this paper,
I will provide an overview of the diagnostic criteria of EDs (namely Anorexia
Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa), epidemiology in the United States, as well as
theories to etiology. I will then go on
to discuss three films: Girl Interrupted,
The Woman in the Moon, and Eating: A Very Serious Comedy about Women
and Food and how these aspects of EDs are manifested or inaccurately
portrayed. In addition, I will offer
some feminist perspectives from Helen Mason, Susan Bordo, and Naomi Wolf that
help to validate the portrayal of EDs in these three films. Although much of this paper will focus on a
clinical slant, it is important to include and analyze cultural and feminist
perspectives to paint a full picture of EDs .
The most common EDs are Anorexia
Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. When people
think of anorexia, they see women with their bones sticking out who refuse to
eat. With bulimia, the common vision is
of a woman throwing up constantly after eating voracious amounts of food. There is much more to these disorders and how
they develop, but it is important to put these illnesses into perspective within
western culture. An estimated 0.6
percent of the adult population in the U.S. will suffer from anorexia and 1.0
percent from bulimia (Hudson, 350). The most
updated mortality rate among people with anorexia is estimated at 0.56 percent
per year, or approximately 5.6 percent per decade, which is about 12 times
higher than the annual death rate due to all causes of death among females ages
15-24 in the general population (Sullivan, 1074). These numbers may not seem that high, but in
a large population, like the United States, they do raise concern.
When diagnosing EDs, a clinician
must pay attention to certain key factors.
The most noticeable symptoms are an intense fear of gaining weight and a
negative or distorted self-image (Sandstrom).
This has to do with the idea that many women have high body
dissatisfaction. They are three times as
likely to develop anorexia (0.9 percent of women vs. 0.3 percent of men) and
bulimia (1.5 percent of women vs. 0.5 percent of men) during their life (Hudson,
350). Those of Caucasian descent,
heterosexuals, and those with high socioeconomic status are at a much higher
risk for developing EDs for the simple reason of cultural values within their
ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation (Sandstrom). Women who have genetically larger body types
and more fat in their hips, thighs, and buttocks are also more prone to being
dissatisfied with their bodies. However,
it is obvious that not every woman who highly dislikes her body will develop a
full blown eating disorder. People need
to also have self-regulatory and emotional problems in combination with body
dissatisfaction (Sandstrom). This means
when a women hates the way she looks, she cannot work through or control her
emotions and her obsession with her image and weight spirals out of control (Sandstrom). Going
through puberty at a young age also causes much stress because the young girl
is confused about her body and that it is not like those around her and she
often gets teased for being “fat”, when it is simply her body changing. This is another high risk and adds to body
dissatisfaction greatly.
Aside from cognitive defects with
self-image and body, there are a plethora of sociocultural factors that may
cause EDs to develop. These are what
feminists are especially interested in.
Even as young children, girls typically play with Barbie dolls, which already familiarize them with a body impossible
for any human. The average model is 5’11
and weighs 117 lbs,
meaning she is over 20 percent under a healthy body weight (Barlow, 272). We see airbrushed pictures that make models
and celebrities seem flawless. This
“perfect” body and appearance is impossible for real women and unfortunately,
the perceived “perfect” image of a woman has gone under severe changes since
many centuries ago. During the Victoria
era, the “ideal” woman was plump, fleshy, and full-figured (Barlow, 273). Since then the “ideal” body has fluctuated
from really thin flapper’s binding their breasts, Marilyn Monroe bringing
curves back in style, to today where boyish, prepubescent celebrities are
trendy or very thin women with enormous fake breasts (thesite.org). Women are bombarded every day with these
messages from the media, as well as men, which makes for many highly disappointed
individuals.
With these nearly unattainable body
images circulating constantly in our society, it makes many women vulnerable
and dissatisfied with how they measure up to everyone in popular culture. But, imagine being critiqued on every aspect
of your body by your mother, or someone very close to you. When family members are intrusive, the victim
feels she has no real control over her life.
When this happens, there are often other numerous personal problems building
up such as depression, feelings
of ineffectiveness,
extreme self-criticism,
impulsivity,
and emotional reactivity or getting upset, angry over little things (Barlow,
277). There is not one magical formula
for diagnosing EDs, but I think all of these symptoms and causes need to be
taken into account when assessing a patient.
To some, this may all seem fascinating, yet bewildering, but to others
grotesque and masochist for a woman to do this to herself. Therefore, how do directors portray such mental
illnesses in their films without turning audiences away?
The most mainstream of the three
chosen films, with big names like Winona Ryder, Brittany Murphy, Angelina
Jolie, and Whoopi Goldberg, is called Girl,
Interrupted. Directed by James
Mangold, this film is an adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of her
experience in a mental hospital. Ryder’s
character attempts to commit suicide, Jolie’s character is a sociopath,
Goldberg’s is a nurse in the ward, and Murphy’s has been sexually abused and
has an eating disorder. Overall, the way
the disorders are portrayed is as if the writers read the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and based their characters off of
the main symptoms listed. From a
clinical perspective, no one patient is the perfect instance of for example, being
anorexic or depressed. Each patient has
her own combination of symptoms and often multiple disorders, referred to as
comorbidity. For example, Susanna is a
depressed patient, in which the film depicts her trying to kill herself with a
bottle of aspirin and vodka. She is
shown like she has a flat affect and no interest in life. Not every person with depression may look
like Susanna, some may seem happy on the outside, but could have strong suicide
ideations that nobody knows about. Also,
the treatment facility is a very traditional mental hospital, yet patients are
able to escape and freely go into each other’s rooms, which is very
contradictory in such an institution. From
the very beginning of the film, I cannot say it portrayed most of the mental
illnesses accurately.
However, Brittany Murphy’s
character, Daisy, does a decent job of manifesting an eating disorder. Obviously, she is painfully thin, but she
also isolates herself from pretty much everyone by staying in her room. She will not eat in front of anyone, which is
another common symptom, and alludes to the fact that she is highly concerned
about how others perceive her and doesn’t want to look like she eats a
lot. She is addicted to laxatives and
will only eat chicken, and only in her room.
Excessive laxative use is another typical part of the routine of
anorexics and bulimics and is an alternative to throwing up constantly. They feel it gets rid of the few calories
they consume, when in actuality, the calories are basically absorbed once they
reach the stomach. Although it is never
said explicitly, it is implied throughout the movie that Daisy has been sexually
abused by her father, who visits her often in the hospital. This goes back to the point about family
enmeshment and being intrusive on their children’s lives. If the father is abusing her sexually and
continually doing so, he is really messing with her mind. She has no way out and feels a lack of control
over her own body as a result of it.
Therefore, she rarely eats most likely because it is one thing nobody
else can make her do and for once she feels she has some control. Also, it is evident that she has many
problems with accepting herself as she is and has severe emotional
regulation. For instance, when Lisa
(Jolie) verbally attacks her by saying she is having incestuous sex with her
father, Daisy cannot handle the emotional distress of this confrontation. It is thought that the confrontation causes her
to hang herself that night. EDs cause
death either by victims withering away or by killing themselves because they
often get so depressed with themselves and their lives and lose their identity. Daisy’s eating disorder may not have been the
forerunner of the mental illnesses in Girl,
Interrupted, but of all the disorders in the film, this one seemed to
capture the truest essence of the complexities eating disorders entail.
Unlike Girl, Interrupted with every character having her own disorder, the
film, The Woman in the Moon, tells a
story of three women each dealing with EDs in her own way. The main character, Spider, represents the
director, Ariadne Kimberly, and her battle through an ED and treatment. Like Daisy, Spider cannot eat in front of
people and says that she “likes vegetarian food”, but is “just not too hungry”,
when a fellow patient asks her why she is not eating. She is having painful withdrawal from what
seems like a dependence on sleeping pills, which also sheds light on the issue
of comorbidity. Spider used to be a
ballerina and speaks of how competitive it was.
She was also kidnapped at a very young age, which is evident from
recurring flashbacks. I believe that her
eating disorder is the result of a combination of sociocultural factors of having
to be thin as a dancer and of the early trauma of being abducted. In both situations she felt a loss of her
sense of control and therefore, the development of her ED is similar to Daisy’s
in that she desires some control over her life and body. There are also numerous scenes of Spider
talking to an image of herself where she tells the image to stop controlling
her. This actually shows one step to recovery:
examining her own thought processes via introspection, or looking into
herself.
In contrast to Spider, Portia de
Rossi’s character, Shawna is feisty and has a whole different history. She denies that she has a problem. When the therapists attempt to counsel her
she is reluctant to say anything honest or really think about the problem. For her, it seems easier to just say that
food is “disgusting”. Another common
feature of EDs is denial and still believing one is fat when she is painfully
thin. Shawna admits that she still
thinks she is fat to her counselor. This
shows a cognitive disconnect from reality that consumes an anorexic or
bulimic’s mind.
Randi is the least “girly” of the
three by her deep voice and personality.
She talks about how she could not “act like a sissy in front of Dad” and
that she wanted to show him that he “couldn’t break her.” It seems that Randi comes from a very
intrusive family that is over-involved, so much that her dad is able to control
her emotions and make her feel like she could not cry when she got run over at
one point. The underlying reason for her
bulimia may be that she, as most of the women mentioned, has control for once,
and can use it to rebel against her controlling father. Randi also makes a great deal of jokes about
everyone’s EDs and tries to lighten up the situation, but this does not go over
too well with the others or herself. When
Shawna antagonizes her with ice cream by shoving it in her face, Randi gets
extremely upset and belligerent because she feels she has done well in
treatment by only throwing up once since she got there. In this particular film, early experiences
seem to be the main trigger in each of the women’s EDs and that they define themselves
by past experiences rather than who they truly are.
As I began touching upon in this
paper, many American’s lives revolve around food. We wake up and eat, we tend to socialize at
lunch while eating, and then we have the largest meal of the day, dinner, with
our spouses or friends at night. Some of
us have snacks throughout the day and at parties and get-togethers food seems
to be the driving force for guests to come and have a good time. In Eating:
A Very Serious Comedy about Women and Food, directed by Henry Jaglom, young
and middle-age women gather for a friend’s birthday and converse the entire
time about food and what it means to them.
Helaine is celebrating her 40th birthday by having a party at her home. Helaine's French houseguest, Martine, is
filming Californian women's attitudes about food and it is later revealed that
she is motivated by an eating disorder in her own past. There are some notable quotations from the
film to set up the discussion about how this film pertains to EDs and the
effects perceptions about food have on them.
"I'm no longer involved with food”, as if she and food had a
relationship, and “I wear clothes to conceal it", says Nancy. Comically, Jennifer says, “It's the safest
sex you can have: eating", but I think this is a somber joke because
eating does have repercussions just as sex does. If you eat too much of something or have
unprotected sex, your health and emotions will be severely affected. You will feel guilty for indulging or in
extreme cases become obese from eating so much.
I feel that the main message of this movie is that food can be analogous
to an abusive relationship. These women
feel themselves to be at the mercy of food.
It’s supposed to be enjoyable, but has so many strings attached to
it.
It is interesting that Helaine
decides to do this film considering she had an eating disorder herself. She obviously has not recovered completely
because everyone keeps complimenting her on her figure and she keeps saying she
is not that attractive and does not think she has a great body. It seems she still has self image issues and
negative cognitive attributions to the way she looks. The other women show some similar thinking
patterns to that of victims of EDs. An
example is when Nancy says she wears clothes to conceal it. She feels guilty for eating as much as she
does and feels she has to cover up her overindulgences, which she believes are
shown by her appearance. These women
seem to define themselves by what they eat or what they don’t eat. They are clearly obsessed with food. There is a scene where they are passing a
piece of cake around and no woman wants it.
This is a perfect example that women cannot be comfortable enough around
each other even to enjoy food, which is characteristic of anorexics and
bulimics. This is because everyone in
the group has competition engraved into their minds by society that they need
to be skinnier than everyone else, so here we see cultural factors playing a
major role in these women’s feelings about food. Eating is a basic human function that gets
taken too far in how it is done and analyzed in our society.
The basis of these films certainly
makes them feminist films, but how do feminist perspectives fit into the whole
realm of EDs? Helen Malson, a social
psychologist and editor of Feminism and
Psychology, claims that eating disorders are a way for women to be
controlled by patriarchal society. She
explains how women’s ‘natural needs’ are obstructed by cultural prescriptions
of thinness and passive femininity and goes further to say, “While such
prescriptions are undoubtedly oppressive, their analyses rest upon a false
dichotomy- the natural female body versus its social oppression in which ‘the
body’ is understood outside of (rather than as constituted in) culture”
(97). She thinks that women need to eat,
but feels they cannot do so to the amount they biologically should because they
quarrel with social oppression and women having to listen to men and look
physically appealing for them.
Patriarchy wins out over nature and basic functions of living. She also says that masculinity is defined
independently of physical appearance, while femininity is highly dependent on
being thin (106). This is clearly shown
in Eating, where the women’s lives
are centered around food and the way it makes them look physically and as
people. What I mean is that they feel
they are judged by others on their personalities, for example, based on their
decisions about what they eat. Malson
would say that there is an underlying principle that eating great amounts of
food reflects badly on a female and shows that she is selfish and not following
her role in society. Also, EDs are a
sickness and being sick is considered weak, therefore it contributes to women’s
fragility and them not being able to handle things like men can. In general, Malson feels EDs develop as a
result of men emphasizing thinness as attractiveness.
Similarily, Virginia Wolf provides
a theory where patriarchal society sees the anorexic woman as how all women
should be. Wolf explains that "the
anorexic may begin her journey defiant, but from the point of view of a male
dominated society, she ends up as the perfect woman. She is weak, sexless, and voiceless, and can
only with difficulty focus on a world beyond her plate" (197). Patriarchy does not want to see women who
speak their own minds and make their own decisions. Anorexics and bulimics are completely overtaken
by thoughts of food and their weight.
They cannot stand up for themselves nor even confront their own
problems. They let the media, which is
mainly governed by men, tell them they should look extremely thin or they will
not be successful. Daisy rarely leaves
her room and cannot deal with any pressure or confrontation. Spider, Shawna, and Randi all seem to have
problems with the way their fathers treat them or run their families, but have
not stood up to them. And, of course, in
Eating the women all speak about how
they try to hide their imperfections and that eating a piece of cake would be a
horrible thing to do. If none of these
women cared about society and how women are “supposed” to be, food would be
something enjoyable without so many thoughts and negative feelings attached to
it.
This concept of women taking up
less space is also a major theme in Susan Bordo’s book, Unbearable Weight, where she claims that the fear of women's fat is
actually a fear of women's power. In
other words, as women gain power in society, their bodies must suffer to make
up for it. She states that "female
hunger-for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification- [must] be
contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be
circumscribed, limited... on the body of the anorexic woman such rules are
grimly and deeply etched" (171).
Women have come a long way in society, but they still have many
limitations as to what they can do. According
to Wolf, in order for them to have higher power status, women have to trim down
their bodies and thus, calories. You do
not see too many overweight women as CEOs, Program Directors, or department heads
in academia. With power comes a price
for women. This is again portrayed in Eating where some of the women seem to
be well off and have decent jobs, but still feel guilty about eating a piece of
cake! However, in Girl, Interrupted and The
Woman in the Moon, the women do not seem to be independent at all. They are sent to a treatment facility because
they cannot take care of themselves and show no power over any of the men in
their lives, especially Daisy. As much
as this theory sounds interesting, these movies as well as the nature of the
disorders do not provide any evidence in favor of it.
Consequently, what should we take
from these films and the discussion they have sparked about EDs and feminism? Living in a male-dominated society and with
so much technology, the average woman has a lot to compete with. The three films discussed do portray some
aspects of EDs accurately, but my biggest concern is the fact that the EDs themselves
are minimized and not taken that seriously.
The Woman in the Moon shows
women who seem pretty light-hearted about their disorders despite going through
the toughest time in their lives. They can
still form normal relationships through the process of anorexia or bulimia,
which may be inspirational, but is not typical of someone suffering such a
severe disorder. Even though it is based
on a true story, a little more struggle would have pulled more at viewer’s
heartstrings. Girl, Interrupted glamorizes psychological disorders and makes them
dramatic and sometimes even “fun” for cinematic reasons, not for
awareness. Daisy’s death is not taken
solemnly- some of the patients are sad, but they seem to move on fast to
another crisis and forget about her. Eating just shows women kind of joking
about their concerns with food and dieting, even though deep down it haunts
them all each day and runs their lives completely! These movies all send negative messages about
EDs in a way that they are not all that serious and that the way in which women
are expected to consume food and look is satirical. But it is something due to many factors of
our society and can be extremely dangerous when it becomes a full-blown
disorder. From a clinical psychology
perspective, these films could have made their EDs more realistic and rough or
at least having more clear reasons as to why the characters each developed an
ED. It worries me, and probably all the
theorists mentioned, that some people may watch these films and completely
disregard the women’s problems with eating or not find the messages the directors
and writers may want to convey. To
further this point of increasing awareness of EDs, a recent empirical study
showed that simply teaching women feminist theory who are being treated for EDs,
without any explicit mentioning of how they are connected, has shown these
women have more successful recoveries and less relapses (Carolan et al.) This gives light to the idea that eating
disorders are more than a mental disorder placed outside of culture and the
environment; external factors seem to be key.
By: Stephanie
Steele-Wren, M.S.
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