Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism Read Online Free PDF

beautiful: “Anorexia has nothing to do with wanting to look pretty. In fact, I knew I looked worse at lower weights. I wanted to look disgusting and ugly. I wanted my heart to sputter and stop and my bones to thin, my organs to give up on me. If I had a heart attack caused by starvation, maybe that wouldn’t really count as suicide.”
     
    There is something paradoxically feminist about the violent inverted logic of eating disorders – a desperate and deadly psychological stand-in for the kind of personal and political freedoms we have not yet achieved. Women and girls who have been denied their own autonomy find a measure of that autonomy in the physical and psychological self-destruction of eating disorders: a rebellion by self-immolation, by taking society’s standards of thinness, beauty and self-denial to their logical extremes. Hundreds of thousands of women, as I write, are destroying themselves in pursuit of this pyrrhic victory – and Western society, fostering a deep loathing for female flesh, applauds them for doing so.
     
Saintly starving sisters
    In 1991, Naomi Woolf described in The Beauty Myth how the epidemic of eating disorders plaguing the women of the west had been ignored by the media and governments, rightly identifying the omission as evidence of the sexist priorities of healthcare and strategists across the world. This is no longer the case.
     
    Two decades on, the same culture is saturated with films, books, documentaries, plays and endless harrowing newspaper articles all claiming to ‘expose’ eating disorders – chiefly anorexia, the more glamorous and alien sister in the toxic family of deadly gendered disorders. Open any magazine, click on any gossip website, and you’ll find speculations on the latest celebrity’s suspected bulimia running alongside columns on what Madonna doesn’t have for breakfast these days. The media has turned anorexia and bulimia into the diseases of the moment – gruesome and disgustingly cool, evidence of the supposed fragility and incompetence of successful women in the public eye.
     
    Concern for the mental and physical health of the youth of tomorrow is clearly not the priority here. In fact, recent attempts by the international media to ‘raise awareness of the dangers’ of eating disorders have looked less like a genuine campaign than a series of mad, gory collisions between a famine relief documentary and a porn movie. In the promotional posters for the 2008 ITV documentary Living With Size Zero, a model with rake-thin limbs stands with one leg cocked on a set of scales, wearing nothing but skimpy underwear and pouting provocatively at the camera, aping a sexual attraction her emaciated body appears to bechemically unable to produce. A tape measure is wound tightly around her torso. This is not ‘raising awareness’ – this is idolatry.
     
    The ‘size zero’ woman is a capitalist fantasy of subsumed femininity, a media fiction spawned in the twisted imaginations of fashion editors and tabloid shysters – and a dangerous fiction, at that. It’s a fiction that perpetuates tired gender stereotypes and feeds back into the cannibalistic ethos of the fashion industry. It’s a fiction that centres upon the degrading idea that women are stupid, frivolous and impressionable. And it’s a fiction that undermines the seriousness of the real epidemic of eating disorders that is devastating the lives of women across the world.
     
    The ‘size zero debate’- referring to the American clothing size 0, the equivalent of a UK women’s dress size four or an European 32, indicating a body-mass index typical of a severely underweight young woman- has been raging since August 2006, when two South American models, Luisel Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston, died from the effects of starvation-diets designed to keep their weight horrifically low. In response to the tragedies, Madrid Fashion Week 2006 banned models with a body-mass index lower than 18 from the