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Created: March 11, 2003
Latest Update: March 11, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

The Haunting Image of Youth: Eating Disorders

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, March 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on a New York Times article by Ginia Bellafante on the recurrence of eating disorders in women's lives: When Midlife Seems Just an Empty Plate. Sunday, March 9, 2003. Read the article at Article Backup.

Shades of Karen Carpenter. I had thought most of that was behind us. I'm a sociologist, not a psychologist, so I don't follow eating disorders regularly. I know they're still a problem for young women, but I guess I thought we'd handed that problem over to the psychiatrists and psyschologists, and only a few serious cases recurred. A problem of the seventies and eighties. New things to worry us now. And then Ginia Bellafante's article stopped me cold. The issue has cropped up again, and now it's back in sociology's court.

Woman's quest to be beautiful, when that beauty is reflected through the male gaze. (Foucault, Dorothy Smith). When beautiful and desireable is always paired with skinny, tall, Giacometti-like figures, that's culture shaping our expectations. And when most of us reflect on these bodies that serve us normally fairly well, most of them don't pass as Giacometti-like. Most of us know that it's like a funny house, with silly mirrors, reflections of fantasy, so we sigh and enjoy our ice cream and slip into a larger size. But ideology counts. It repeats in some of the best circles that we're not perfect, not a 10. And when we're exhausted from the conflict of pressures we live with, in our worst moments, we sometimes let the ideology get us down.

I guess I thought this was mostly a coming of age issue. Something young people go through on their way to the many cares of adulthood. But that doesn't explain the ever-preent concern with diet, and it isn't all related to our doctor's fussing at us that we need to lose a few pounds. And now Ginia Bellafante's article alerts us to the pscyhological stress that really hasn't left us, even in maturity.

" 'Increasingly, our calls began to include a significant number of adults seeking help not for their children but for themselves,' Dr. Maine said. Some of those callers — women in their late 40's and early 50's — were relapsing after overcoming eating disorders in their youth, and others were experiencing them for the first time."
Link to appropriate section of article

Far from my lack of awareness, Ginia Bellafante assures us that eating disorders are spreading. This adds a new complexity to our concern with the fattening of America. If, in fact, weight is becoming a serious health concern, then we need to tackle it in very different ways from those we have used in the past. We labelled young women foolish for giving too much attention to the superficialities of fashion and popularity. We looked at the problem of their fear that their lives were "out of control," by trying to "fix" them.

"Starvation diets and the cycle of bingeing and purging have long been considered afflictions of affluent white females in their teens and 20's. Although medical literature in recent years has shown eating disorders spreading across class, race and gender lines and striking girls at ever younger ages, the next large group of sufferers, many experts predict, will be middle-aged women. The anxieties of midlife — divorce, marital strains, parental deaths, empty-nest syndrome and menopause — are powerful catalysts for older women's eating disorders, the experts say."
Link to appropriate section of article.

If the problem is spreading this seriously, and it does seem to be, juddging by the attention it is receiving from the medical establishment, then perhaps we need to view the problem from the perspective of our infrastructure. Maybe it's the way we commodify food and the way we advertise that commodification that is "out of control." Maybe instead of "fixing" women with eating disorders, we need to "fix" the way our culture deals with food.

"At its core, an eating disorder, whatever the age of the sufferer, typically results from feelings that one's life is "out of control," as patients tell clinicians, with compulsive food monitoring offering an illusion of emotional management.

"Like adolescence, the years before menopause can prompt fears about progressing to life's next stage. "The 12-year-old anorectic doesn't want to deal with the feeling of becoming a woman, and the 50-year-old doesn't want to deal with the idea of lost youth," said Dr. Ellen Schor Haimoff, a psychologist in New York and a former director of the Association of Bulimia and Related Disorders. She, too, has seen an increasing number of middle-aged patients with eating problems."
Link to appropriate section of article.

Because body image is interdependent with identity, and identity is impinged upon by cultural expectations as well as biological and physiological factors, it's hard to describe the cause of eating disorders. But we do know that it relates to the person's sense of control over herself, her life, what's happening to her. And we know that is certainly influenced by the definition of beauty in the culture, the definition of success in the culture, and the complex development of relationships within the culture. That tells us that this is an important sociological issue that we need to address. I just hope we'll choose to address it from the perspective of the infrastructure as well as from the perspective of the individual.

"Often, doctors and psychologists say, body-image disorder in an older woman manifests itself with compulsive exercising — days organized around hours of jogging, tennis and other calorie-burning activities.

"Overexercising is huge," Dr. Zerbe said. "It is a form of a midlife crisis, but it doesn't look like crisis — it looks adaptive. The exercise is a way of avoiding looking at what's going on internally. It's a way for these women to avoid mourning the things they haven't done in their lives."

The precise causes of eating and body-image disorders — cultural, psychological, biochemical — are unknown, and other experts and patients cite cases seemingly unrelated to fear of fading sex appeal."
Link to appropriate section of article.

Theoretical Concepts

• Self esteem and significant others: Georege Herbert Mead. Consider how significant others change over time, from the immediate family in infancy and middle childhood, to peers when school becomes a factor, to the general culture by the teenage years. Consider how different significant others approach food, as nutrition for growth, as commodities to gain status with - fun foods and tasty foods to exchange, and as commodities of status in approaching adult life.

• Core values, specifically success: You might consider Robert K. Merton's means-ends discussion of deviance. Merton says that when society's goals, based on shared core values, such as what "success" is, are out of reach, we seek deviant means to get those ends. Consider eating disorders as deviant means within the control of the individual. Does society have any way to alter some of this equation through changing its infrastructure?

• Infrastructure: The structural component of society. Includes looking at family, schools, corporations, government, etc. Remember that the individual is interdependent with the infrastructure. See Henry and Milovanovic's Constitutive Theory

• Tolerance of ambiguity: Tolerance for "not knowing" and having to make a best guess sometimes. Certainty gives us a sense of security from some perspectives. Having to deal with uncertainty means that we are a little less secure; we can't predict precisely what's going to happen; we can't control the outcome with assurance. Some of us have a higher tolerance for this lack of certainty than others. Those who dislike ambiguity generally prefer a tightly ruled structure. Those who are comfortable with ambiguity, and willing to tolerate less control generally prefer more freedom, less structure.
  * * * * *
  Discussion Questions

  1. Do you ever feel that your lived experience is "out of control?" Do you think that's unusual?

     Consider the multiple urban pressures of transportation, being "on time," work, school, and family. Consider how much many of us would be grateful for a day of quiet with nothing to do. Even my young students express sleep deprivation and exhaustion.

     Consider several approaches to the problem.

     1. You could study time management and use your time more effectively.
     2. You could pause and meditate and choose your priorities more carefully.
     3. You could do less. Drop school. Ignore family for a while. Quit work.
     4. Or you could rethink your position and say: "Hey, life in the fast lane feels a little "out of control" sometimes." And then you might discover something that works for you to release the stress and come back from the edge of "out of control." Maybe a day at the beach, maybe shopping, maybe sleeping to catch up, maybe hanging out with friends.

     Notice that in solution d above, you aren't blaming the problem on yourself. You're blaming it on the infrastructure. That's what we mean by re-interpreting theory and re-interpreting issues.

  2. What kinds of events can throw an individual's situatedness "out of control?"

     Consider adolescence, marriage, starting a family, work choices, conflict of expectations (work, family, peer group), divorce, death in the family, aging.

  3. Are our schools presently oriented towards a high tolerance for ambiguity?

     • Consider the tolerance of the school towards allowing students discretion to cope with time and place disruptions. Like traffic on the way to school. Like recognition of conflicting family demands that may cause absences. Like offices open at hours when jobs permit you to get to them.

     • Consider the trust that the school places in the students' integrity and desire to learn. Consider the inclusion of the student in substative decisions that affect the student.

     • Consider the flexibility of rules.