- Bodies by Susie Orbach
- July 2009
“The notion of the empowered consumer along with the workings of the diet, pharmaceutical, food cosmetic surgery, and style industries have made us view or bodies as something we can and should perfect. ... Something new is happening ... The body is turning from a means of production to the product itself” (Bodies © Susie Orbach)”
In a recent interview with the Guardian Susie Orbach author of the 1978 classic, Fat is a Feminist Issue, talked about her new book Bodies. Fat is a Feminist Issue, was basically a self help manual, aimed at helping women manage their food intake and weight by following the simple rule of eating when hungry and stopping when full.
Bodies states Susie is not a follow on from Fat is a Feminist Issue, it's more than a continuation. It's about looking at “bodies today … and the place of bodes” Where Fat is a Feminist Issue was about eating and eating disorders, Bodies is focused on ‘embodiment and disembodiment … our engagement with transforming bodies”.
When asked whether the issue of eating disorders is being made less of a concern due to the modern focus on appearance, the inference being that eating disorders are now seen as just another way of maintaining the media/model look, Susie replies that there "is a complex link". As "you can’t say that all of a sudden you have a generation with severe eating disorders which we now do have, without it being something to do with changes in the social structure and the role of the media and the role of visual imagery”.
Imagery that can distress mothers and negatively impact how they relate to their daughters and bodies (both their own and their daughters). Susie continues “What were considered serious eating disorders 30 ..20 years ago are now not considered serious …. they are far more the norm”.
As an aside, in an interview in this weeks Sunday Telegraph she expands on the mother daughter theme. “You can help by saying ‘I’ve had enough to eat, I want that, but I’m not hungry’. Those kinds of casual things“. Don’t’ ignore, but actively relish her body. “ ‘You have this lovely squidgy tummy, and one day you are going to get breasts and we don’t know what they are going to be like’. Even if they are perfectly OK with it and have a good mother at home, they will get it from their peers. What you can do is inoculate… that’s all you can do”.
The problem Susie believes, is how to deal with a) "the extreme end where it is not volitional at all" … where women are completely caught up in a very harmful activity, even risking death and b) low "medium grade distressed eating that has become women’s mantra”.
- The discussion then moved on to the role of the media especially fashion related media and how it appears to "condone" eating disorders. Susie states ‘it is not beyond the capacity of an editor to style fashion in different sizes, but they just haven’t put their mind to it because they are inside that aesthetic....If they take a large women, that doesn’t do it. That is completely the opposite of what I’m taking about in terms of diversity, variety " and "democratizing beauty".
Some interesting facts:-
- - The contemporary preoccupation with thinness is restricted to the
- Western countries that do not appear to have food shortages.
- - We are exposed to digitally enhanced images 2000 - 5000 times a week.
- The March 2008 Vogue (American Issue) had 144 digitally retouched
- images, (107 adverts and 36 fashion pages including the cover).
- - The beauty industry is worth £98 bill per year.
- - The US diet industry is worth £60 billion per year. £366 per adult citizen
- per year.
- - 1in 3 Americans are considering Cosmetic Surgery.
On celebrity culture she states. ."By creating internationally recognisable iconic figures, it appears to be inclusive and democratic," she says. But it's not. It "sucks out variety". It makes us all want to look like the same few people.
“Body hatred,” Susie writes, “has become the West's hidden export.” In Korea, women have operations to create western eyelids; in China, they have their legs extended by 10cm; in Iran, behind the hijab, there are 35,000 nose jobs a year; in Fiji, within three years of the advent of television in 1995, 11.9% of teenage girls began to make themselves vomit in an attempt to resemble western TV characters. The problem is no longer that fat is a feminist issue, but that body dysmorphia has become a global enterprise.