Heavenly anorexia/ Men without women

January sale, 2-for-1 on deranged takes. Feminine body image and the fascism of masculine fantasies. How do those relate?

Jan 09, 2022

Part one: Heavenly anorexia

Anorexia mirabilis, or Holy anorexia, was a “miraculously inspired loss of appetite”[1] that occurred among religious women in the Middle Ages. Some particularly devoted Christian women (usually aristocrats) starved themselves as proof of their commitment to God. Fasting or abstaining from food is a historic aspect of Christian worship, as it is in most religions: consider Lent, Yom Kippur, or Ramadan, then Brahmin vegetarianism or Buddhist temple food. Emptiness is analogised as close to Godliness.

Holy anorexia differed from standard religious fasting in its gendered nature (there are only records of heavenly anorexic women) and its extremity. St Catherine of Siena refused to eat anything except the Eucharist[2] (otherwise she would vomit by sticking a twig down her throat if as “much as a bean remained in [her] stomach”[3]). She died of starvation at 33, the same age Christ died on the cross. Academic Cristina Mazzoni proposes that Holy anorexia was a response from women to the prevalent cultural idea that masculine identity was associated with the soul, while feminine identity was associated with the body. Rather than emulate men by attempting to demonstrate a lofty, cerebral spirituality, Saintly and mystic women of the Middle Ages made the body the site of their religious observance instead[4]. Emaciated frames became evidence of Godliness. Margaret of Cortona said: "I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor"[5] as a facsimile of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

When Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, he told the Devil that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”[6] The religious fanatics among Mediaeval women committed to living and dying only on God’s word.

“how can i trust joan didion if she writes about EVERYTHING except her anorexia?” iconic New York it-girl Annie Hamilton tweeted on August 13th, 2021[7]. Nerds online got angry at this but I loved it. Didion made her name with her fearless moral condemnations of every sloucher in her path; I sympathise with the desire to see her unpick herself the same way she does everyone else, but that’s because I unravel as much as I weave.

One of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnostic criteria for anorexia is loss of menstruation. If a woman starves herself but doesn’t lose her period, she technically does not have anorexia. Masculine and trans anorexia sufferers literally lack the biology to meet this diagnostic criterion, no matter how thin they get.

Once on the eating disorder subreddit r/safefood, a poster complained that the posters on r/1200isplenty (as in, only 1200 calories a day is enough) are as disordered as those with eating disorders, but are just in denial about it. This take has played on my mind because it hits on the truth that what ultimately distinguishes the sufferer of an eating disorder from a dieter is choice. Dieters commit to starvation to perfect their physique; eating disorder sufferers feel that they have no choice but to starve. Eating disorder sufferers acquiesce that they’re victims of the sad passions, whereas dieters are fighting a battle of wills and refuse to be pathologized. What disrupts this analysis is that the dieters’ choice is potentially illusory, like all free will.

Women who always diet today are usually pretty discreet about it. No one fesses up to eating just two small meals a day or exclusively eating apples as snacks until you travel or live with them and see for yourself. Thinness is inherently a pretty competitive space; you want to look better than those around you. In My Hungry Hell, Kate Chisholm’s memoir on her experience of anorexia, she writes that “Pride is the besetting sin of the anorexic: pride in her self-denial, in her thin body, in her superiority.”[8] Where others lack self-control, the anorexic and dieter have it in spades. If the obese person is the Nietzschean Last Man, who lives only for pleasure, comfort and security in passive nihilism, the anorexic and dieter have the concerned physicality of the Übermensch – they affirm the necessity of suffering as they strive for greatness. They’re the artist-tyrant whose body is the art and who tyrannises themselves.

The post-2008, post-racial, curvaceous austerity body looks on its way out while thinness/whiteness is coming back in. The Kardashian Klan had their BBLs removed and dumped their black boyfriends while Ariana Grande’s abandoned the dark fake tan. Maybe it’s not whiteness that’s coming back, but ‘authenticity’ – which with its conservative, nationalist allusions is tantamount to the same thing. An early herald of the changing tide was the social media hubbub around ‘hot girl food’ in summer 2021. The trend – which originated on New York TikTok – seemed to piggyback off of Red Scare’s small plates/tinned fish/thinspo-alt-account content, even if Red Scare’s Anna and Dasha only discussed it by name post-Vice article.

Joan Didion’s diet of “Coca Cola, salted almonds, soup and cigarettes”[9] certainly falls under the hot girl food category. Hot girl food is stylised as dinky and cute – little uncomplicated plates. Only enough at one time to keep you going until the next. Tinned fish was the hot girl food of the summer, with pickles a close second. As Dasha said on the aforementioned pod, hot girls don’t have time for sit down meals. Diligently preparing something to eat is a bit lame; you should probably be fucking or drinking instead. So, a Crunchwrap supreme or nuggets are also hot girl foods. They satiate enough to keep you on your feet between the events and activities that occupy your time as an urbanite hot girl (there are no hot girls in the countryside). The calories of hot girl food are either empty or inconsequential; the size and the infrequency mean they’ll maintain the desired hot girl aesthetic.

Let’s reflect on when thinness became the feminine ideal. Healthful plumpness was considered most attractive at the beginning of the 20th century (consider Modigliani’s nude beauties, lounging with small tits, wide hips and little bellies) and pretty much remained the standard until the 1950s, although Coco Chanel and flappers made thinness more widely desired. It wasn’t until the 1960s when thinness really became the dominant mode of feminine beauty.

Anorexia or even extreme dieting cause a whole host of negative symptoms that render a person less capable. Headaches, confusion, dizziness, low mood, nausea, bad breath, excess body hair growth and general physical/mental incapability are all caused by extreme caloric deficits. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the trend for feminine thinness became dominant during the era of the women’s liberation movement, that is, when women entered the workforce en masse for the first time. Emaciated women with brain fog, who lack mental or physical stamina, can’t effectively compete with their masculine colleagues for well-paid roles.

Part two: Men without women

A world of men without women is an enduring masculine fantasy that the gangster film and the war film rely on. These worlds without women are violent, but also rich in masculine virtues like honour, kinship, and comradery. In contrast, the worlds of women without men are hellscapes of an opposite type. Whereas worlds of men without women look barren and hostile, their appearance belies a surprising warmth, but worlds of women without men look good but conceal a rotten core, like the women-only workspace the Wing. The Wing was once valued at $365 million for its $3,000-a-year, pastel-toned coworking girl boss utopia until allegations from its staff, mostly women of colour, that they were underpaid, overworked, and subject to manipulation and psychological abuse caused a massive decline in market value. Although the Wing still exists, its obituary was written by New York Magazine, so it’s over as a cultural force. Most women who aren’t spiritual lesbians shudder at a vision of a world with only women as an abomination; something that appears nice, but is really a highly charged, loaded political environment. Many women find solace from their feminine friends with their masculine partners.

Masculine visions of womenless worlds often have an erotic appeal for women, which is likely due to their inherent homoeroticism. I miss the fascist Bronze Age Pervert on Twitter (banned for being a fascist) who would tweet about his love of masculine prostitutes next to his alt-right ‘raw egg nationalist’ followers’ sculpted physiques while delineating the outlines of his white supremacist political project. BAP was explicit with what many misogynists and fascists attempt to conceal; that worlds of men without women are one in which masculine desire is liberated from the destabilising, fluid, seductive capacity of women. Men can preserve their essential masculine dignity, their reticence to emote, and their soldierly order without engaging in the constant negotiation of power that women’s society entails. The boys just get to be with each other and do fascist bits, no girls allowed. Lacanian Mike Crumplar described Bronze Age Pervert’s project as a “male-on-male porno parody of the fascist warrior”[10] but all fascist warriors have that male-on-male desire at their core, as Klaus Theweleit brilliantly illuminates in Male Fantasies, his essential work on European fascism and sexual desire.

Men can imagine beneficial societies of men without women easier than women can imagine societies of women without men because women have historically been constructed as an afterthought. Men were the grand design; women were a bit of rib. I subscribe to the French deconstructivist perspective that all Western cultural thought is Phallogocentric, as in, it prioritises the masculine principle of determinateness (reliant on binary logic – masculine/feminine, right/left) over a non-binary indeterminateness[11]. Phallologocentricism goes all the way to the top, but one of its most grievous consequences on women is that the phallic construction of language defines women as ‘not all’. “When women speak, when women take up subject positions, it is not as women, but as imitation males… Women’s own representation is by silence, absence, lack, or hysteria.”[12] Women are configured as a lack or deficiency in masculinity. Women cannot imagine societies of women without men because they are acutely aware (often unconsciously) that they do not exist without men. Men know it too. Cue Thom Yorke mocking the Ingenue:

You know like the back of your hand:
“You got me into this mess
So you get me out”
…
I'm always before you, come what may.
And you know it.

Everyone is getting cancelled these days, including Haruki Murakami, who has fallen foul of the mob for his masculine characters only desiring women to the extent that they serve the masculine figure’s own development, although at least these women have some sort of productive purpose. In light of this, I’m surprised that David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight has not been cancelled, but instead has been universally praised in feminist and film circles for being overtly “erotic, surreal, and gorgeous”. I thought it should have been named Sir Gawain and the Oedipal Nightmare rather than The Green Knight. If you haven’t watched the film, be advised I’m going to spoil it.

Gawain leaves Camelot with his witchy mother’s belt tied around his waist – a belt that he believes, as his mother has told him, will protect him from his fated beheading under the sword of the Green Knight. His quest takes him through strange lands, where he’s dwarfed on a hillside under towering, nude feminine giants, who are indifferent to him. Gawain loses his mother’s magic belt, but it’s restored to him when he has a clandestine affair with a Lady (or vision) who is the doppelganger of his lover Essel. The Lady claims she made the belt for Gawain, but we know his mother made it. When Gawain fucks the Lady, he cums on the belt rather than inside her. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the temptress-double of mother and lover, who serves to distract Gawain from his heroic quest, who renders his desire unproductive (in a procreative, generative sense) speaks a lot to the film’s conception of women’s roles in men’s lives. The film’s finale includes a fantasy sequence in which Gawain keeps the belt diligently tied around his waist, runs from the Green Knight’s sword, and returns to Camelot as proxy King, dominated over by his mother first and then his wife, ultimately condemning himself and Camelot to ruin. When Gawain foresees this, he removes his mother’s charmed belt, faces the Green Knight’s sword, and survives on his own terms as his man who is no longer subject to the influence of women. The film implicates that this is the key to Gawain’s liberation. In removing the belt, Gawain literally cuts the figurative cord.

Gawain’s success as a man on a heroic journey is predicated on him relinquishing his concern for women; his internal psychology is one where men exist free from the force of women’s will. Gawain’s relation to women at the end aligns with terrible old pervert Slavoj Žižek’s depressing perspective that heterosexual men can only desire women in two ways. Like Gawain, man can experience desire for woman by denying the reality of feminine desire, pretending it is less complex and forceful than his, and rendering it inconsequential to his own. Otherwise, man can “stage his own servitude” in a masochistic dynamic, where the woman is in charge as a dominatrix[13]. Where does that leave women, according to Žižek? “Active agents of their own ‘objectification,’ manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including reserving the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous ‘signals.’”[14] Fun. Overt, passionate desire from women is a mood-killer at best and something both parties typically conceive as an embarrassment.

The Green Knight is the classic masculine bildungsroman, for which women have no equivalent. If women do achieve liberation from men, it’s usually through a brief foray into lesbianism (Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Carol) or death (The Virgin Suicides). Men get their worlds of men without women, whereas women inherit a – curiously provocative – empty space inside the real world.