Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism Read Online Free PDF Page B

catwalk, and since then many fashion houses, celebrities and designers have made statements opposing the use of unhealthily underweight models in the industry.
     
    It’s a story with all the classic ingredients of a good scoop: it has the glamour of high fashion, the tantalising whiff of institutional conspiracy, and, of course, the tragically premature deaths of gorgeous young women. Conveniently, it also cries out to be illustrated with ogle-worthy shots of stick-thin, half-naked teenagers.
     
    The ‘size zero’ myth is largely irrelevant to the vast majority of sufferers from eating disorders who are not catwalk models or fashion heiresses. Meanwhile, the number of women and, more invisibly, of men with the disorders continues to grow. The charity Beat estimates that there are 165,000 people with serious eating disorders in the United Kingdom alone, and they are outnumbered many times over by the millions who, whilst not technically eating disordered, live their lives in a permanent state of shame, self-denial and yo-yo dieting; by the thousands of harassed middle-aged women who have gone hungry for decades as the imperative to hate their own beautifully aging bodies grows ever louder; by the thousands of teenage girls who would rather cut short their lives by years and risk painful death by suffocation than chance the weight gain associated with quitting smoking. Schooled by the circumspective propaganda of the fashion, diet, beauty, music, media and pornographic industries, women in the early 21st century have learned to despise their own flesh. The discrepancy between the dogged models of erotic and social self-fashioning offered to us and the reality of our everyday lives and developing bodies can be almost unbearable. Celebrities and fashion models who are tacitly understood to be engaged in a prolonged process of self-starvation, seem to promise to teach us both how to be desired and how to disengage from our bodily desires. It is easy to ache for the perfect control they seem to embody, to yearn to be the ubiquitous object rather than an abject consumer. It is easy to learn not to want anything: easy to play the rules to their ultimate, tragic conclusion and refuse to consume anything, to punish the body and murder the sex drive with the artificial pre-pubescence chemically created by starvation. Easier to become a sign rather than attempt to signify anything. Easier, ultimately, to die.
     
The chemistry of control
    Enforcing thinness is an ideal way to control powerful women on the cusp of liberating themselves, because eating disorders are that rare thing: political and cultural disorders with deep physiological effects. It would be disingenuous to discuss the political ramifications of eating disorders on our gender ideologies without acknowledging the medical basis for these conclusions.
     
    Anorexia nervosa is the most lethal of all mental illnesses precisely because its physical and psychological effects are so profoundly entangled. It has been conclusively proved that prolonged starvation can actually provoke many of the symptoms of anorexia nervosa, causing sufferers to obsess over food and become depressed, self-destructive and suicidal. In 1944, for instance, researchers at the University of Minnesota enlisted and systematically starved 36 conscientious objectors – all healthy adult men with no psychiatric problems. Over the course of a year, the men lost 25% of their body weight, and were then fed normally again – with staggering results. All of the participants quickly began to display unusual psychological symptoms. They became highly distressed, agitated and bewildered, and developed bizarre rituals around eating, collecting recipes and hoarding food obsessively – not just during the experiment but, in some cases, for the rest of their lives. 10
     
    One of the participants, Harold, told researchers in 2006 that the experiment was highly distressing “not only because of the physical