Tag Archives: eating disorders

Links for a New Year

Debbie says:

I spent the last two weeks of the old year, and the first week of this one, harvesting so many links I can’t blog them all. Here’s a selection of especially interesting ones.

jaden and three female models, all in skirts, with handbags

Gender fluidity crossed a major barrier very recently. Jaden Smith will be modeling traditionally female clothes for Louis Vuitton. John Boone at ET says,

Jaden dons a skirt and fringed top in the fashion line’s Spring 2016 campaign and poses alongside models Sarah Brannon, Rianne Van Rompaey, and Jean Campbell. Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director of Louis Vuitton, was first to share the photos, writing, “Happy to introduce Jaden Smith.”

Women have been wearing various kinds of traditionally male clothing, from slacks to tuxedos, both inside and outside the fashion industry for decades. But a male-bodied person in a skirt is still a surprise in most contexts (though on a cold-for-California day in December I saw a tall, thin, bearded guy in a gauzy just-below-the-knee skirt, bare legs and sandals, holding a toddler’s hand; made me happy all day).

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The fashion industry’s choices aren’t going to solve the problems of trans teens. Claudia McNeilly writes at Broadly about young trans people and eating disorders, something I certainly knew nothing about:

A study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health earlier this year found that transgender youth were four times more likely to report an eating disorder diagnosis than their cisgender heterosexual female peers—the next leading eating disorder group. …

The researchers compared various gender identity and sexual orientation groups with cisgender heterosexual women, who are usually the focus of eating disorder literature. Not only were transgender students four times more likely to report an eating disorder diagnosis than their cisgender heterosexual female peers, they were also twice as likely to report using diet pills and more than twice as likely to report vomiting or laxative use during the previous month.

McNeilly looks at stresses on transgender teens from a few perspectives, with a great conclusion:

In order to seriously address the issue of eating disorders among trans youth, it seems, the simplest way is to shift our understanding of what eating disorders look like and whom they affect. Dr. Alexis Duncan, senior author of the study [said]: “People tend to think about eating disorders as being people with anorexia, but most people with eating disorders are not too thin, so they by definition do not have anorexia. It’s much more likely that someone will have binge eating disorder or bulimia, and be of normal weight or even overweight. So the question is: how do we bust the myth?”

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It’s not eating disorders, but you might call it overly ordered eating. Kate Handley, writing at Sociological Images, has studied how our companions affect how we eat:

For my senior thesis, I explored whether women change the way they eat  alongside what they eat when dining with a male vs. female companion. The study is small, and intentionally limited to Euro-American women. I found it interesting and completely unsurprising.

I found that women did change the way they ate depending on the gender of their dining companion. Overall, when dining with a male companion, women typically constructed their bites carefully, took small bites, ate slowly, used their napkins precisely and frequently, and maintained good posture and limited body movement throughout their meals. In contrast, women dining with a female companion generally constructed their bites more haphazardly, took larger bites, used their napkins more loosely and sparingly, and moved their bodies more throughout their meals.

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Men may or may not be judging how the women with them eat; Handley didn’t examine that. But we learned that at the highest levels of government and politics, men are judging how and where and when and for how long women pee. After Hillary Clinton was frequently and publicly criticized for missing a few minutes of debate because of a long bathroom line, Soraya Chemaly wrote this for the Huffington Post:

I write and talk about controversial subjects all the time – violence, rape, race – but I have never received as vitriolic a response as last summer, when I wrote about the disparity in public facilities for men and women, The Everyday Sexism of Women Waiting in Bathroom Lines; it was a piece about norms and knowledge.  Angry people mostly men, by the hundreds, wrote to tell me I was vulgar, stupid, ignorant and should learn to stand in order to pee, because it’s superior. It continued for weeks, until I wrote a follow-up piece on the ten most sexist responses.

… Can you imagine the backlash and media frenzy if Clinton had actually, in some detail, pointed out that the women’s room was farther away or that there is often, especially at large public events like this debate, a line that women patiently wait in while men flit in and out and makes jokes about women’s vanity? That the microaggressive hostility evident, structurally, in so many of our legacy public spaces is relevant to women every day. “Bathroom codes enforce archaic and institutionalized gender norms,” wrote Princeton students Monica Shi & Amanda Shi about their school’s systemic sexism this year.

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If you’re curious about Addyi (the “female Viagra”), you’ll appreciate Amy Gamerman’s long, detailed article for Vogue on her experiences with it, plus some scientific background and information about what else is coming down the pike for pharmacology and women’s desire. Gamerman’s piece is hard to excerpt, but here’s a bit that caught my eye:

My desire is improving, as is the quality of the sex. I’m more enthusiastic, less distracted. The color commentary that usually runs through my mind during the act—This is nice, but am I enjoying it enough? Is that a paint chip on the ceiling?—has fallen silent. The sharp edges of daily life melt, just a bit.

Has the Addyi flipped a switch in my entorhinal cortex? More likely, the drug is helping to create “a good neurochemical environment” for desire, according to Jim Pfaus, Ph.D., a scientist in the pharmacology of sex, based at Montreal’s Concordia University. Mindfulness training, sensate exercises, and talk therapy could probably achieve the same result, given enough time and energy. But as Pfaus points out, “You can’t take a trip to Cozumel every weekend.”

Gamerman decided to renew her prescription. I wonder what else the Addyi is doing, and whether she’s missing other benefits to that theoretical trip to Cozumel. At the same time, she provides an interesting counterpoint to this link I posted last year.

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Finally, Margaret Corvid, writing for The Establishment, tells us what sex work has taught her about self-employment. Here’s one example.

Your time and emotional labor are worth money.

The work you’re paid to do is rarely all the work you do to keep your job. If you’re paid to code as part of a team, you’re probably not paid to make yourself presentable and business appropriate, deal with catcalling and packed subway cars on the way to work, and silently bear the racist rants of your office’s resident Trump fan.

The same holds true if you run your own business, but with the advantage that you can, like a magician, convert bullshit into money. If a client wants to book me in the kink studio three hours away across a rat’s nest of traffic-snarled roads, he’s going to be paying a premium for my mileage, time, pain, and suffering—and he’ll get a better service from me when I feel adequately compensated, rather than resentful. If a client wants to talk about the dirty details with me over the phone while jerking off, he’s either going to pay me or I’ll hang up and append “wanker” to his name in my phone.

It’s rare and refreshing to see sex work analyzed as work rather than as sex.

All links from my regular reading, which includes Feministe, Feministing, Shakesville, Sociological Images, and io9, among other sites.

When Eating Disorders Meet Eating Requirements

Debbie says:

For a person who doesn’t have diabetes, I know a fair amount about it. My partner has Type II diabetes, and so do a number of my close friends. For myself, I have been “pre-diabetic” (a term defined by your blood sugar numbers) for over eight years now, which makes the “pre” a little suspicious. My best friend for part of grade school was a Type 1 diabetic.

What I know about eating disorders is more academic. Although I have occasionally indulged in what people might call “binge” eating, I have never been anorexic, or bulimic. I’ve never been a serious dieter, though I’ve done a reasonably good job of controlling my carbohydrate intake since my blood sugar numbers started to go up in 2007. At the same time, the work I’ve done with Laurie both for our books and here at Body Impolitic has made me very aware of eating disorders, both from the personal story and the scientific data perspectives.

So I was struck by Bryce Covert’s excellent essay, “I Thought I Was Over My Body Issues, until I Got Diabetes.”

When I found out I had Type 1 diabetes, I had just finished eating a slice of pound cake. I still had powdered sugar stuck to my fingertips when the phone rang.

In the months before that phone call, I had become insatiably hungry. I would finish eating an entire meal — something as filling as pad Thai or Indian curry — and instantly want to eat the same thing all over again. This unending hunger would have brought me guilt and pain if it had struck in my teenage years or early 20s. I would have wrestled it into the back of my mind and denied it what it called out for. But by 30, I had ended that battle and agreed to give my body what it told me it wanted. And it had lately been telling me it wanted everything.

Almost without exception, this is how stories of getting over eating disorders and food-related body dysphoria end. “I gave my body what it told me it wanted.” Covert is clearly living in the culture’s body/mind division, which I theoretically believe is not the best for us, and which I find myself falling into all the time. More to the point, she had figured out that what she ate wasn’t a war, or a contest, or a secret test: it was just food.

Then there’s a quick medical stereotyping story. Despite extreme thirst, atypical hunger, and inexplicable weight loss,

… the doctor told me unequivocally that I didn’t have diabetes, despite a nurse’s suspicions. You’re too old, she said. You’re not sick enough. You’re not overweight.

“Too old” refers to Type 1 diabetes, which is generally diagnosed before a person is 20. As a quick oversimplified distinction, Type 1 is primarily about the body’s inability to produce its own insulin, and Type 2 is primarily about the body’s resistance to its own insulin. I know someone who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in her early 30s, which is “too young” to expect a Type 2 diagnosis (which shows up in your 40s or beyond). She wasn’t thin, which perhaps made it take longer to confirm that she really had Type 1. These things happen; doctors should probably not be unequivocal, and yet it’s easy for doctors, like the rest of us, to confuse stereotypes with certainties.

Covert’s relationship with dieting started when she was 12, and her belly began to bulge.

I wanted to have power over what my body looked like. I found that power in strictly controlling what went inside it. It was often, if not always, misinformed. I decided the best way to eat fewer calories was to eat less food. I would deny myself whatever I thought I shouldn’t have with the discipline of a monk. I spent one memorable day holed up in my bedroom abstaining from everything — from the moment I woke up until dinnertime — so that I could eat the unknown calories in the Chinese takeout my family ordered every Friday evening guilt-free. But the delivery that night came hours late, at which point I was close to fainting. … What I lost in strength (and pounds — the only other time I’ve been below 100 was one particularly austere summer during high school) I felt I gained in control. I didn’t care about giving my body what it needed. I cared about making my body look the way I needed it to.

That’s the key to eating disorders as I understand them; they are about control. The calorie intake, the size of the stomach, the curve under the chin–those are the outward manifestations. But in the life of a young girl with so many pressures on her to look, act and feel certain ways, and so few areas where she can make her own choices, control is irresistible. If our culture venerated size, these same girls would be counting calories with a view toward increasing them as much as possible.

So Covert worked for over a decade on this control, and then worked at least equally hard to let go, eat what she wanted, with the most valuable kind of success there is.

I began to feel something akin to what I felt as a kid: that my body was a means to an end and not the end itself.

Then, diagnosis.

… a Type 1 diabetic has to become her own pancreas. I’ve marched into another full-on struggle against myself, assuming the job of an organ that can no longer function because my body is trying to destroy it. This requires dictatorial discipline. For every given amount of carbohydrates I eat — which can be found in foods ranging from sugar to bread to beans to even milk, and which then turns to sugar in the body — I inject myself with a corresponding dose of insulin. I compute in quantities of 15: For every 15 grams of carbohydrate, I need one dose of insulin.

Aside from her own story, which is still unresolved, Covert connects the dots: girls and diets, women and auto-immune disorders, body hatred and the desire for control.

The whole thing leaves me wondering: if girls and women weren’t judged by our looks to such an extreme extent, would we have the same auto-immune disorder numbers that men do? Is there some kind of subtle, unexplored link between our pre-pubescent focus on our bodies and our adult risks? Covert doesn’t take her musing this far, but I suspect she’s asking herself the same questions.