God, how much I love Rachel Cusk’s writing. This is from Cusk’s brilliant, recent essay, “The anorexic statement” in New Statesman.
The female form is inherently susceptible to this duality, but the difficulty with the anorexic statement is that once it becomes open to other readings it breaks down. At some point in the journey a line is crossed: the slim body becomes the freakish starved body, and one by one the anorexic’s grounds for superiority are discredited and revoked. She is not beautiful but repellent, not self-disciplined but out of control, not enviable but piteous, and, most disappointing of all, she is publicly courting not freedom and desire but death. Even she may find these things difficult to believe. How to go back, on that journey? How to retrace one’s steps? For in getting where she needed to go the anorexic had to sacrifice the concept of normality. In a manner of speaking she sold her soul. She can never be “normal” about food or flesh again. So, how is she meant to live?
If the anorexic arouses irritation, even anger, it may be this quitting of normality that is to blame, because the female management of normality is a formidable psychical task from which most women don’t feel entitled to walk away. By quitting it she exposes it, she criticises it as a place to live, and moreover she forces each woman who passes her way to choose between denial and recognition of her statement, disgust.
Is it disgusting to be a woman? Menstruation, lactation, childbirth, the sexualisation of the female body – in recognising these things as her destiny, a girl is asked to forget everything that her prepubescent instincts might formerly have suggested to her. In becoming female she must cease to be universal, and relinquish the masculine in herself that permitted her as a child to find the idea of these things disgusting indeed. Likewise that masculine is now embodied for her in men, so the question becomes – do men find women disgusting? The anorexic statement dispenses with that perspective. It returns the woman to the universality of the child, and from that fusion formulates itself: I find myself disgusting.
Thank you to Jen for this link, too.
Wow. This was a topic of much entirely negative discussion on Twitter this week – the general feeling was that Cusk was using other people’s suffering and a condition she admits she knows nothing about, as an extremely crass if purple metaphor. This is one response that was later printed by the New Statesman, following so many complaints; Shades of Anorexia.
Ugh, I can’t read this article.
It’s all very well for her to want to write about people who suffer from eating disorders, but the writer seems to want to speak for them. As a person with an embarrassingly complicated relationship to “food and flesh” I feel indignant about that.
Her writing is also so self-conscious, it feels as though she would describe it as “lyrical” but it comes across as off-puttingly pretentious. And I looooooove some pretentious writers. But this is all form and no content, boring.
I much prefer the response piece that the previous commenter posted, so thanks, The Goldfish.
Hmm, Cusk is becoming a very divisive writer for audiences. I completely agree with the criticism that Cusk’s piece homogenised people with anorexia and think that is a significant weakness.
However, I also think a lot of what she wrote was fascinating analysis about women and our relationship to food and flesh and her own personal reflections on how that is all complicated by ageing.
Perhaps if she’d framed this fascinating analysis in terms of how women respond to anorexics, rather than how anorexics themselves function? It just seems so offensive to discuss sufferers of this illness as if they’re staging a complex, subversive but thoroughly narcissistic power play.
I have to say, I’m uncomfortable with her calling finding the mature female body and how it works “disgusting” part of prepubescent “instincts.” First of all, I don’t think it’s true–plenty of prepubescent people don’t seem to find anything disgusting about lactation at all, for example–and second of all, it helps to prop up the idea that the female body and how it works is inherently disgusting. But it’s not. Finding menstruation/lactation/etc. disgusting is a learned, misogynist response.
Something you learn young though.
http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/11/its-arrogant-say-anorexia-personal-choice-rather-mental-illness
Thanks for the link demmi – it is raising some good points.
Wow…I found this article thought provoking and it raised memories for me, of my own anorexic journey from ‘popular young girl doing so well’, to reviled and ostracized crazy girl, yes having decided to depart from normality, definitely regarded as disgusting, especially by my own loving mother, provoking irritation to rage to jealousy in women and repulsion/hatred or pity from most men, having no self worth at all until I found it again during treatment in an adult psyche ward at the age of 14. Cusk may have no experience of eating disorders and yes it is hard to acknowledge that as early as pre-pubescence,, girls are learning that to be a woman is to be subject to bodily functions that are ‘disgusting’ and to be sexualised without any control of those projections…..but there it is….it’s so true…at least in my experience…
http://kingstribune.com/index.php/current-issue/item/1635-if-life-gives-you-lemons-don-t-eat-them This is also well written.
I have never been anorexic myself but anorexia has defined a huge chunk of my adult life. This article reeks of pro-ana romanticism. The thing is, anorexia is a reaction to trauma, a drawn-out suicide. Not a fucking empowerful rejection of femininity.
My reaction to my sister’s anorexia (also self-mutilation) was irritation, anger, desperation, obsession. Her frailty was never ‘ugly’, it was always ‘attractive’. Thanks to the conditioning of a million glossy images, her thinness always looked elegant. Women were envious, and those who knew the trauma she had been through were just very very sad. My mother was obsessed with feeding her and would buy her anything she showed the slightest interest in. She would also buy her gorgeous clothes in impossibly small sizes (something I absolutely hated). Men loved her when she was thin, listless, etc. Superfemme I suppose.
Jess – I’m sad and infuriated reading about your sister – it must have been soul destroying watching her self-destruct and make your mother crazy, at the same time being rewarded with admiration and attention-
I hope she eventually got help and that you also had some time and space to heal – I just wanted to clarify in case I was read as being pro-Ana?…. I certainly do not see anorexia as a powerful rejection to femininity!!! Gawd no!! Powerful or romantic, no #$%@ing way! …but rejection of femininity…hmmmm I do think so. I am probably labouring a hackneyed idea, sorry, I don’t get to come to this blog often, but I wanted to make my point clear…
I went from being ‘ultra thin’ to being unable to control my own bodily functions and I mean this is the most unappealing way…also was covered from neck to pubic bone in downy brown hair, (Lanugo) – and not a natural hormonal response to a beautiful pregnancy bump, but a bodily survival response, covering all bones and skin (yellow scaly, skin), my hair turned grey (at 13) my smile was a skeleton’s grin…and I had ‘the smell of death’ on me (not my words, a nurses)….I was told I was at serious risk of making myself infertile….I really couldn’t be described as being attractive or ultra-femme…I don’t think!!??
Perhaps if I had stopped at the ‘Ultra-femme’ stage, which obviously so many women do and therefore are not considered to be unhealthy ? ….I would never have gotten treatment or recovered…who knows… I am interested in how Tusk depicts that crux point where a girl/woman (or boy/man – as boys do become anorexic even though it is such a ‘feminine’ disorder…).goes from controlling their behaviour in a way that is considered desirable and socially rewarding, to determinedly continuing that behaviour despite it making them an outcast and physically repulsive- because I’m sure that the majority of women at some point,…maybe continually, struggle with the desire to control their behaviour to manipulate their flesh and I am not talking about doing it for health reasons I am talking about aesthetics… because I have many more memories of evoking rejection and fear in people than of praise for my ‘discipline’…..it hurt- a lot- but I had to keep doing what I was doing.
All of those Pro-Ana sites are there it seems, to keep the anorexic in that twilight world of being able to ‘pass’ for normal while continuing their behaviour and hiding the very very ugly, sad, starved body – (that is regarded by a Pro-Ana as beautiful), from the outside ‘healthy’ (ha ha!!) or mainstream world.
I really don’t think that if as a young girl I had been taught that menstruation was natural and powerful, as with lactation and sexuality and that I could talk to my mum about her boyfriends’ actions and how I felt about tnem…that my instinct may not have been to starve myself, it might have been to fight hard, scream blue murder, embrace my adolescence, with anticipation and connect with other women rather than run headlong into insanity…and I wonder if Cusk is just redefining this idea?
Btw…anorexia has been documented for hundreds of years throughout Western civilisation…I have read about nuns starving themselves to ‘purify their spirit’ and ‘falling in love with their bones’…this phenomenon is so much broader than one person’ experience and I hope I haven’t offended anyone by being so detailed.
oops, just re-read your post Jess, you used the term “Super-femme” not Ultra-Femme…. sorry about the mistake…I maybe mixed it up because Super-femme has almost positive connotations to me whereas Ultra-femme sounds like the name of one of those awful vaginal “hygiene” products, maybe that’s why I got it wrong!
OK, now I’ve been able read the New Statesman article and see what everyone was so upset about….the section that was posted in BlueMilk apart from the preceding paragraphs reads quite differently away from the discussion about Cusks friend who simply sounds to me like a burnt out therapist who needs to stop what she is doing, get some treatment of her own and let someone who has a full life and compassion, take her place. Yes this article is highly offensive. Parts are rich and interesting but Cusk really has no idea. I came across so many crass and cruel health professionals during my teenaged years and I can say that NONE of the girls I was friends “inmates’ in the various hospitals, would DARE to treat the nurses like “Josie”….the power dynamic was definitely them on top….the Psychiatrist above them…the police to bring you back if you ran away…the orderlies to hold you down and drug you if you became psychotic…the psychologists to take away your personal possessions as punishment if you lost weight…..ahhh its over and I want to forget it but just had to put my two hundred cents worth in. Thankyou Bluemilk for the opportunity.