diana Mackin, 1992
flirting coyly, declining its advances in
deference to the Feminine Ideal.
some women dance all night
and hate themselves in the morning;
others flee -- footsteps without rhythm cannot
be construed as passion.
some women objectify: a pornography of food,
culling the sweet from the austere; killing calories --
success measured on the kitchen scale first,
and then the bathroom's.
still others indulge before the point of sweet release,
to abruptly interrupt the act, honoring the Father
by denial of their love's true fulfillment --
or their own.
i dream of dances: women full in body and
of life; playing, swaying in the sunlight; daring,
sharing in the joys of sisterhood.
It occurred to me in listening to women's stories of self-denial with food, in deliberately avoiding satisfying their hungers, or feeding their bodies' needs, the conversations followed closely along surprisingly conservative sexual lines.
Women were attempting food-"abstinence"!
Good Women might partake in peripheral ways, but would avoid completing the act.
Cooking but not eating it seemed a form of food flirtation, as did endless discussions of recipes -- including low-fat and other "dieting" concoctions, or the countless women's magazines boasting the latest in weight-loss fads right beside the greatest in decadent dessert form.
Some women would relent, feeding freely, urgently, giving in to their bodies' carnal demands, then find themselves deeply ashamed in the aftermath, and even more fearful that soon it would show on their bodies how immoral they had been. They may as well have been branded with a huge scarlet letter, in this case an "F."
Some women distanced themselves from food, torturing it into pathetic little morsels, or abusing it in every possible calorie-removing manner, as if the despised food were in need of punishment for triggering the eater's need, much like pornography. Also paralleling modern pornography, which is more likely now to involve pain, humiliation, and death, calories are "tortured," often out of existence. Like the prostitutes a culture may opt to 'sacrifice to lusts,' the true nurturing value of food is removed, and artificial replacements for taste and color added.
Finally, it seemed to me that bulemia was the 'coitus interruptus' of the food world, an honoring of the Father (by not completing the act and so avoiding the risk of being caught) -- or an honoring of the husband, again by partaking of that which was forbidden, but evading the risk of bringing forth a child notably not his offspring.
The option I wanted to nurture was, of course, a woman's freedom to wholly *be* within her own sexuality as well as to *be* comfortably within her own nourishment-needing, flesh-and-blood body.