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The Fat Jesus
Christianity and Body Image
By LISA ISHERWOOD Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2008 Lisa Isherwood
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-094-7
CHAPTER 1
The big question is: who let the skinny girls in?
'Man aspires to clothe in his own dignity whatever he conquers and possesses.'
We appear to be at a time in history when medical advances have made it possible for us in the West to be more optimistic about the fact of embodiment, yet we fail to fully celebrate this new reality Rather we trivialise our new embodied possibilities through the 'thinness religion which bankrupts us'. It bankrupts us as it makes us despise our bodies because they are not perfect and not indestructible. Of course the bodies that are despised in this way tend to be female bodies since man, like God, is not represented, he represents, he is not gazed at, he gazes, and if he does not like what he sees then culture emerges to please his eye and his psychological needs, to guard his psychic fears – and as always the female body pays the price. These claims will be examined as the book progresses. In size as in other matters that feminist theologians have turned their gaze to it seems that we need to move towards a more generous, dignified and realistic way of living in the body, living in harmony with our flesh and not in a battle against it. This may be in danger of giving us a broader (yes, pun intended) world-view, and where would patriarchy be then?
Those of us who have been considering matters of embodiment for some time will even by now be hearing some familiar sounding ideas, the control of women's bodies being one central theme. Seid and others have wondered if the nineteenth-century obsession with controlling female sexuality has been replaced by the desire to control female size in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Certainly we can understand that the female body as a signifier of the state of the nation, the culture, the clan, which we now accept as one way in which it is seen, has to be controlled. It has to show that civilisation is central to any particular group of people; this is why so many bodily behaviours that are not acceptable in women are tolerated in men, indeed at times almost seen as part of 'manly' behaviour, for example belching, spitting and farting. It is the female body that marks the boundaries of a decent society, which is why rape is so common in war as it breaks down the boundaries, insulting and defiling the society, not just the woman, and as such those boundaries have to be policed by patriarchy. The interesting question for feminists today, then, is why it is the slender almost anorexic body that signals the edges of a decent society. The 1960s saw Twiggy introduce us to the girl/woman, the body that at 5 foot 7 inches weighed just 5 stone 7 pounds. We have to wonder how this body replaced Marilyn Monroe in her size-16 glory or before her the rounded bodies of one hundred years ago. We know what has happened: the ideal body is one that is actually only inhabited by about 5 per cent of the female population, which means that the other 95 per cent feel too fat. It is curious, though, that this ideal body is in many ways not a female body at all – to be as slender as that means that all the female secondary sexual characteristics are suppressed; when a person weighs so little there is not much spare for hips, thighs and breasts. This is indeed where plastic surgery comes in and we are given a strange creature, a body that does not have enough natural flesh to signal its femaleness, with large false breasts attached which declare its sexual attractiveness. There is much here for feminist analysis to work with and perhaps for feminist psychologists to have a field day.
We live in a world where female fat is considered to be expendable flesh while we add silicone to women's bodies in order to make them sexy. The reality is that female flesh is sexy, and historically there has been a linking of fatness and fertility which has some medical basis, since fat regulates reproduction. Over one-fifth of women who exercise to shape their bodies have menstrual irregularities and diminished fertility; this kind of hormonal imbalance can lead to ovarian cancer and osteoporosis. The battle against female flesh is in so many ways a battle against nature itself, and this will be familiar ground to feminist theologians who long ago identified the dualism of the Fathers as the ground that diminishes us, in this case literally. The medics who join the war are quick to talk of damage and slow to tell the other side of the dieting culture that we are all part of. In India, for example, even the poorest women eat some 1,400 calories a day while women in the West on the Hilton Head Diet eat 600 calories less then that. This puts them on a lower calorific intake than was calculated by the Nazi regime as necessary to sustain human functioning in concentration camps such as Treblinka. Further, during the war in Holland emergency rations were released when people lost more than 25 per cent of their body weight. This is particularly worrying when we realise that many average-sized women in the West are actually trying to lose that amount of body weight. Even today the UN Health Organisation calculates that a diet of 1,000 calories signals semi-starvation and with it many characteristics of famine such as tension, irritability, preoccupation with food and loss of libido. The famine literature provided by a range of agencies identifies these behaviours as signals of bodies in crisis, yet diet industries associate them, as lack of willpower on the part of individuals, with some kind of psychopathology. Further, there is compelling evidence emerging that links dieting with the development of eating disorders that, as we know, are ravaging the bodies of our young women. Despite the certainty with which we are told fat is unhealthy, the reality is far from certain and many of the additional factors that we find connected with weight have to be calculated in too, such as poverty, class and race. However, it does appear to be arguable that dieting can cause many of the illnesses we are told it prevents, such as hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes. There is compelling evidence that those who diet and then regain weight have a much higher mortality rate than those who never lose weight. In addition, with the mounting anti-fat feeling in the West fat people are suffering more stress than ever before. This is beginning at an early age with children as young as nine believing they are too fat, and indeed actually hating their bodies.
Skinny girls and fat cats
We should not be surprised at this body hatred by young girls since they are bombarded with images from the media of models and actresses many of whom are already anorexic and surgically altered. Models are now 23 per cent lighter than average women, whereas a generation ago that differential was 8 per cent. This certainly means that these women are not healthy and that they create a very unhealthy image for our young girls. In addition to being of less weight than is healthy their photographs are also air-brushed and computer-altered to enhance their looks. However, people do not take the time to explain to the young that these are not real women at all, but computer and surgical composites of what were once flesh and blood women. They may no longer be real in any meaningful sense but they nevertheless fuel the body images of the young and the not so young, they become the unattainable by real women, role models of feminine beauty, just as the Virgin Mary was the unattainable role model before them. Just as the Virgin created a tension in us that left us vulnerable to the Church and the ways of male-inspired spiritual direction and the mutilation of body and psyche that often ensued, so these 'not quite women' leave us vulnerable to manipulation by another great phallic patriarchal power, the big business. The more tension we feel, the more we consume in order to ease that tension and the better the market likes it. Our circle of self-destruction is their circle of assured markets and captive psyches. Keeping women in a state of dis-ease with their bodies may be good for the markets but it is very bad for the women and girls. Naomi Wolf comments that the obsession with thinness is not about beauty at all but about female obedience. I wish to argue that this can be understood as both obedience to patriarchy, undermining female confidence and neutralising women's power in society, and also obedience to the markets, as the cult of thinness works on many different levels and unsurprisingly none really advantage women. It may not be too great an exaggeration to say that for many women being a woman is about believing oneself to be too fat and spending time and energy to monitor that situation. This is certainly a great distraction from taking one's place as an equal in society!
A 1990s survey carried out with girls aged between 9 and 13 in Minnesota found that 64 per cent of them were unhappy with their bodies, but more disturbing still was the high correlation between poor body image and psychological distress. It is interesting to consider why this may be – certainly there will be a level of distress because they do not appear to conform at a time when that is important, but feminist theorists have also suggested that it may be because it is easier to live within the safety of an ideal image than the vulnerability and vitality of female flesh. Living within an image is much easier as an image creates a 'no body' and so we do not have to deal with emotions, desires and passions, since the image has already dealt with this for us and decided what we think and feel. It is fascinating that those who work with young girls are putting this forward as a concrete reason for the rejection of their real bodies – fascinating, because Christian feminist theologians can trace just such a pattern through the history of women and sexuality, one in which the image of ideal women is based on the dispassionate living of the women in those bodies. In the arena of sexuality we have discovered how intrinsic passionate living is to being fully incarnate, and this is no less true in matters of food than it is in matters of sex – it is after all about owning and expressing our joy in life and our desires.
A survey for Bliss magazine carried out with 2,000 girls between the ages of 10 and 13 found that one in five of the girls hated their bodies so much they were anorexic or bulimic, while over 25 per cent said they would consider plastic surgery. Of those questioned only 19 per cent were at all overweight, while 67 per cent thought they were, with two out of three of the under-thirteens saying they had already been on a diet. This is particularly alarming when we think that these young girls have not yet fully matured but are already, if the UN Health Organisation figures are to be believed, starving themselves. Will this lead to an eating disorder? Well, it has in the UK where 1.1 million women between the ages of 14 and 25 are affected. One-fifth of those affected are seriously ill and at risk of premature death. While the media is telling us that we are in the middle of a childhood obesity outbreak we also have millions of young girls starving themselves in our midst. And they are communicating with each other through a wide array of websites which encourage their disorder. These sites are not sites to help people understand and overcome this killer condition but rather to encourage and celebrate this slow suicide. Although, as one site tells us, the successful anorexic is the one that does not die, she is the one who embraces the lifestyle and refers to her condition as 'Ana', or 'Mia' if she is bulimic. These pet names hide a terrible truth which is that emaciated bodies are a lifestyle for millions of young women and girls and one that allows them to be part of a group. It is obvious from the websites that these women and girls can not imagine a life without this eating disorder. The sites carry 'inspiring' pictures of celebrity anorexics and other pictures of fat women as a warning to people of how they may become if they do not keep at their regimes. It has to be noted that once these sites were discovered in 2002 there was pressure on servers not to provide space. Some responded, but this simply meant that the sites changed server or went more deeply underground with more secretive descriptions. There is ambivalence as to whether they wish others to join or not – some say they would not wish anorexia on their worst enemies while others talk of how to become a good anorexic and advocate it as a worthy way of life. There appears to be an underlying message about being strong and in control which pervades much of the web material.
A large percentage of the girls questioned in the Bliss survey, 86 per cent, believed that they would be more attractive to boys and more popular with girls if they were thinner. Of course we know that girls do not live in their bodies in the same way as boys and this is because they are indeed looked at by boys. This seeing of themselves as images in boys' eyes sets up an observing rather than an experiencing of their own bodies, and in this way their bodies become Other to them. They become things to mould and chastise in order to be pleasing to the external gaze. Girls learn at a very young age that the power lies with the one who looks, which leads to a vain effort to regain that control and power through policing of the body. A vain effort, because this is not how it is done – the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, as Audre Lorde told us, and exerting desire-denying control over one's flesh is the master's main tool. The question of what can be considered 'normal' and, further, what can be seen as empowering for girls growing up in a world aimed at the power of weakness for women will be discussed in a later chapter.
It is worth mentioning at this stage that research carried out in the USA shows that there are race, class and cultural variables in attitudes to size. African American girls are more positive about big bodies but this positive attitude is affected if they are in predominantly white schools. The research appears to show that the anorexic model is a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ideal since American Catholic children and Jewish children are less affected by the diet culture. I wonder if I am on to something when I mention cultures of the disembodied Word versus enfleshed and sensuous liturgical cultures. It is also interesting to note that the positive appreciation of a large African American body is shared by African American men, although both African American and white men say they prefer petite white women. There is some evidence emerging that lesbian children are less affected by the diet culture too. There may be a number of reasons for this, ranging from an embodied rebellion against heterosexist norms, to an outsider experience that sits happily rejecting gender expectations and does not crave the male gaze. Of course the media also exerts less pressure since it is not at all obvious that the women being targeted through advertising and so on are lesbian. Since the huge success of The L Word, which features thin, young, glamorous and successful lesbians, there is a concern that the world that young lesbians have been shielded from is creeping up on them. Research suggests that 30 minutes of television is enough to establish negative body images for young girls. The show has been criticised for not in fact representing the lesbian community in its embodied entirety.
It has been strongly argued that it is the sexualisation of the anorexic body that is affecting girls at a younger and younger age. When three-year-olds are being targeted for strapless bras and shiny lip gloss it is no wonder that by the age of nine or younger these girls are over-conscious of their bodies as candy for the male gaze. Fashion has always been a way to present women in a passive way to an active gaze and it is alarming that this is now the case for three-year-olds. These young and developing bodies are under pressure to conform, and that may include a mutilation of their bodies as well as an adorning. We are teaching our young girls obsession with the body rather than passionate embodiment, but then heteropatriarchy does not want passionate embodiment in women – it thrives on women dwelling insecurely in their skins. Capitalism also requires the kind of discontent that disembodied living generates in order that it may generate what makes it happy, bigger and bigger markets for more and more unnecessary goods.
The anti-fat prejudice that is sweeping the nation is also having an effect on social mobility for fat people in a way not known to date. It is more correct to say 'for fat women', since men appear to be less affected by this prejudice in terms of jobs and university entrance. It appears that obesity, which was once thought to be the result of poverty amongst other factors, is now emerging as the cause of poverty. As a feminist liberation theologian I have to be concerned when the quality of life of women is being affected by how they wish to manifest in the world. As always then we begin to see that questions of embodiment carry with them economic and social questions too. They also carry questions of self- esteem and the love that women need to feel for their embodied realities if they are to have life in abundance. What we also see is that women are not encouraged to live in their bodies, and with this disembodiment comes a rupture in our psyches, believing as we do that we are burdened with flesh that is not our friend. The feminist theological issue of women and size is not an easy side swipe at culture and fashion alone. It is a sincere and heartfelt challenge to the way in which women have been cast out from home, the home of their bodies, and placed in combat with themselves. It is a challenge to the notion that the bodies of women are commodities either to be dieted or to be paraded and adorned.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Fat Jesus by LISA ISHERWOOD. Copyright © 2008 Lisa Isherwood. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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