Our culture often tries to distance itself from the ways that media encourages a disordered relationship with bodies and food by emphasizing how the anorexia narrative is a necessary kind of activism. It’s this same type of culture that also tends to minimize the intellectual worth of women who write honestly and fiercely about the female body and the weight loss industry, from Roxane Gay’s recent memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, to the absolutely underrated experimental 2000 novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus. It’s this culture that sees actor Lily Collins’s body as evidence that she is still in the throes of the disease, even when she says she isn’t, and that contends that being young and pretty precludes her ability to be seen as anything other than the “vulnerable anorexic girl”: beautiful, but infantilized precious, but voiceless.
In this narrative, women who have suffered from anorexia are seen as repulsive evidence of a corrosive culture of body shaming and compulsive weight-loss, and are thus viewed as not very trustworthy, either in terms of their own personal motivation, or how they can contribute to our cultural understanding of disordered eating. While many people have rightly pointed out that recent films depicting anorexia like Marti Noxon’s To the Bone and Troian Bellisario’s Feed reinforce the narrative that anorexia is a disease that primarily impacts white, young, upper-class women, I think there is also another single story that predicts the response to any new media depicting eating disorders: the idea that women who have survived a disorder are too vulnerable, sad, or attention-seeking to be taken seriously. In her now famous TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which I teach every year in my College Writing class, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes how a culture can reinforce a stereotype by only allowing a single depiction of it. So many of the comments I received came from people who thought that they understood what I was going through because they had seen a few Lifetime movies and Karen Carpenter specials.
It didn’t fit the cultural narrative I was raised with where women were meant to have luscious curves, not obvious bones. I didn’t feel pretty and it was surprising to me that others saw me that way.
To be thin enough to be noticed meant that I had lost control. In my teens, being obviously anorexic was deeply embarrassing.
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Still others express concern that skeletal bodies are already glamorized enough-that the anorexic bodies of models are worshipped in the media, and that a film about how to get “model skinny” is always going to provoke, rather than heal. Many are annoyed at seeing another white, thin female as the “poster child” for anorexia others worry that depicting calorie counting, various purging behaviors, and weigh-ins might trigger these behaviors in vulnerable populations. Since Netflix’s To the Bone’s trailer was released, I’ve watched with interest as viewers and critics have waxed on about the responsibility of depicting the anorexic body, while simultaneously erasing the human being inside of that body. She didn’t understand why a young woman wouldn’t want the fleshy beauty of hips. She grew up drinking sugar water in order to gain just the right curves. To my Cuban mother my rapid weight loss was not only dangerous, but strangely foreign. Starving and starving.” The girl who told me I was her thinspiration: “I want a picture of you on my fridge.” There were boyfriends who didn’t know what to do with me and my parents who couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to eat. The woman in my brother’s karate class who looked at me and told me she knew what us dancers were like: “I’ve seen the movies-all of you pretty girls. Almost all of my memories of being anorexic are based on how other people saw me.