Welcome to this week’s edition of wordcloud, a newsletter by Nicole Fallert about the space between reality and ideas. If you enjoy this content, please consider sharing and subscribing.
Content Warning: The following newsletter contains discussion of an eating disorder. If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please feel free to reach out to me for support or check out The Emily Program for professional resources.
I first identified as a feminist around the same time I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. 2016 was a year that felt like a cake walk for out-of-the-box feminism: Hillary Clinton’s power suits reminded us to be bossy like white men; then-presidential-candidate Trump’s resurfaced Access Hollywood tape brought “grab ‘em by the pussy” into the lexicon; and Bill Cosby faced criminal charges for sexual misconduct, foreshadowing what would become the celebrity-driven #MeToo social media campaign a few months later.
As a college student during this time in the U.S., I was specifically concerned with getting things right — friendships, grades, the clubs I joined, where I partied, who I voted for. Part of that “rightness” involved absorbing article after article charging me to to be the bossiest, most politically-correct, protest-attending, woke-est white woman I could be.
I wasn’t politically active in high school and knew few women who had political ideas I could look up to. So, instead, the same magazines, TV shows and books that told me to follow my star (ahem, American Girl) or run a business like a #girlboss or save for college were also suddenly telling me to be a feminist.
And the proliferation of feminist messaging around my early college days was because of an inherent truth Koa Beck best explains in the introduction to her book White Feminism:
“It’s a type of feminism that takes up the politics of power without questioning them — by replicating patterns of white supremacy, capitalistic greed, corporate ascension, inhumane labor practices, and exploitation, and deeming it empowering for women to practice these tenets as men always have. The mindset is seductive, as it positions the singular you as the agency the change, making your individual needs the touchpoint for all revolutionary disruption.”
While the realization of my anorexia and my entry into being a feminist occurred around the same time, I always treated these like parallel experiences. And it’s not until recently, I mean, like, THIS WEEK, that I connected how falling for mainstream feminism is like being served the body positivity movement, and it’s these voices that have dictated the “right” and “wrong” in my womanhood for years.
This week I read the Refinery29 essay How Could I Be A ‘Good Feminist’ & Have An Eating Disorder? by Gabrielle Korn, author of Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes. Korn writes:
“In our newly woke world of marketing based on “positivity,” the blame is once again placed on women — but this time, it’s not our bodies that are wrong; it’s our feelings about our bodies. And my feelings about my body were definitely wrong, creating a vortex of shame. “
This paragraph feels earth-shattering, like the words I’ve been trying to find for years to understand my diagnosis. I didn’t lose 25 pounds in six months because I stood in a mirror and hated myself, as health class taught us to imagine eating disorders. I shed myself because I was so jam-packed with everyone else’s messages there was no room for my own. I had none of my own right or wrong, just theirs. I became an empty glass that just poured out whatever filled me.
And my replication of these “patterns,” physically looking thin, as well as my attitude, acting girl-bossy, gave me power. To be fat would mean loosing this physical and social capital, to be a bad feminist. This power catapulted me into a higher echelon than I had ever experienced before — and I was the agent of my own revolution.
When I weighed 83 pounds I had an internal “I’m better than you” complex, which is a common psychology among people with anorexia, and I felt above those around me because of my ability to trick nature.
I didn’t need the silly advice of those magazines, I’d done it all by myself and even better, I was winning at the game. People would say the weirdest things to me when I was thin, but their comments gave me am extra sense of elitism. They would give me gracious permission to eat whatever I wanted because “you’re so thin anyway” or pick outfits out for me in stores or told me how “lucky” I was.
This same privilege bled into how I thought about my gender, a sort of “feminism positivity,” where I felt I could absolutely do no wrong because I CARED ABOUT WOMEN and I had the sorority membership, RBG magnets and Instagram captions to prove it. My actions, my thoughts could do no wrong for my gender (perhaps this why I often cry when receiving feedback from other women).
What I didn’t recognize was that my thoughts and my body had fallen for the so-called empowerment Beck describes in the passage above. Eating disorders are a byproduct of this seductive patriarchy, concocted at some level, inherited on another.
Korn captures this: “The misogyny that says women need to be skinny has infiltrated your brain until you believe it, until it feels like it’s a belief system you organically hold. It’s oppression at its most sinister: so pervasive that it becomes part of you. By starving yourself, or making yourself throw up, or otherwise doing whatever you can to keep your body small, you are in effect working to uphold the values of a system built on keeping you down.”
Believe it or not, wanting to be thin felt like an original thought for me at the time of my diagnosis. So did aspiring to be the perfect feminist. I didn’t realize these ideas had been served to me, and they were designed to never be attainable.
I remember when a doctor first diagnosed me with anorexia she told me that it was a life-long diagnosis. This is where Korn’s essay really spoke to me— as Korn also shares, I felt so relieved in the moment the doctor told me this. Like someone finally understood how it would take a lifetime of small, daily battles to divest myself from mainstream messages about womanhood. I didn’t have to keep up anymore. I could just live my life. I could simply be and that was all I needed to do to look and think like a woman.
Later in 2016 I attended a three-month outpatient recovery program, and I’m still paddling through that life-long recovery process. Some days are easier than others, but I know one thing to be sure: I have never felt more human, more woman, than any other time in my life.
Today’s Prompt
How do oppressive systems manifest in our bodies?