Letters to the Editor
Sandra M
Published Letters: 577 Editor's Choice: 139
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Dying to Be Thin
[Read the article: Newsweek's anorexic cover girl]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am a recovered anorexic - I became ill around the age of 13, and recovered around the age of 25. I am 42 now.
When I was sick, I ate up stories about anorexia. Starving For Attention and The Best Little Girl In The World are the Bibles of anorexia - or were when I was young. Perhaps some new annie lit (as me and my anorexic friends call it) has arrived on the scene. These books provided inspiration - a sort of 'how to' roadmap to being a better anorexic. Group therapy was another great way to learn tips for further weight loss, and to fuel my competitive desire to be the thinnest/sickest.
I imagine most anorexics and would-be anorexics feel jealous and angry and competitive about the Newsweek cover girl. Anorexics are unpleasant people who have learned to camouflage their incredible self-absorption, overwhelming vanity and insecurity with a people-pleasing exterior that is designed to 1) make sure everyone likes them and 2) make sure everyone is fatter than they are.
I can't really explain why I was anorexic. My parents were strict, my father an alcoholic, both parents angry, emotionally distant, and verbally abusive. But in spite of all of this, I know they loved me. They were involved in my activities. They knew who my friends were. It's possible that I subconsciously thought my anorexia was effective in 'controlling' them - i.e. they were helpless to do anything about it, though they obviously wanted to. Maybe I just wanted to externalize the pain I felt inside - to the outside world my family seemed nice, respectable, accomplished - no one who knew us could imagine the screamfests, the fear, my father's everpresent rage. Or maybe I was just born to be an addict of some kind, and instead of alcohol like my father, I chose food/weight management. I don't know. What I do know is this - I was utterly immune to any dire warnings about the impact of my anorexia on my health or looks. I was smug and superior - I was in control. Nothing got through to me - not when I found it difficult to walk because of the depletion of padding on the bottoms of my feet, not the Hep C, not the hopspitalizations, not my loose teeth and bleeding gums, not friends saying I didn't even look pretty anymore (there were always plenty of girls who envied me, plenty of guys who were attracted to my thinness).
I got better when my weight ceased to be the most interesting thing about me to others. I got a scholarship to work on my Ph.D. and moved to another state. There, I was competing in a fierce academic environment. No one cared what I weighed. My obsession with my weight started seeming silly, juvenile - a lot of effort for no reward. So I just stopped. I got a boyfriend. He was far more intrigued by my intellect, quick wit and athletic abilities than in my spindly limbs. When people stopped remarking on my weight, giving me tacit approval for my efforts, I stopped obsessing about it.
The Newsweek article would have inspired nothing more than a 'huh, I can do better than *that*'. I'm pretty confident that it will not spur any anorexics to change their ways, and it won't stop any budding anorexics from embracing the obsession. It will simply make parents of healthy girls unnecessarily worried, and parents of borderline/sick girls completely frantic. The cover was selected to sell magazines - a healthy-looking, pretty young girl is something every parent of a daughter can relate to. An emaciated horror show of rotting teeth and thinning hair, scabby lips and jutting knee joints - who would want to buy a magazine selling THAT?
I have come to believe that the cure for anorexia lies in an environment dismissive of weight as a key indicator of a girl's attractiveness, and equally dismissive of attractiveness as a key indicator of a girl's worth. Remove the reward and the behavior goes away - it's hard to keep doing something you don't get attention for. Unfortunately we live in society that values a girl's looks above all things. A girl can be smart, athletic, witty, independent, kind and free-spirited and even be praised for these things...but these qualities will never be as celebrated as pretty, which, in our hypersexualized, celebrity-saturated culture, is nearly synonomous with 'thin'.
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Like It or Not, It's My Body
[Read the article: A man's right to choose, take three]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's too bad that men aren't born with wombs and therefore have more control over the choice to bear children or not. It's also too bad that women aren't born with penises, and therefore have more control over the social and political institutions in which they find themselves compulsory participants, not to mention the ability to freely choose sex partners independent of any force or coercion EVER.
It's my body. I should be able to do with it what I wish. Men can have a say in whether or not I abort their child when I can have a GUARANTEED say in whether or not I can attach his wages, or, in the case of his derelictness, his family's wages, for the education, health insurance, boarding. feeding, and social nurturing of the child I bear. Until my control of that GUARANTEED financial and emotional support on part of the impregnator is legally validated, he has no claim on my womb. Period.
You think abortion is murder? Until the law equally legislates both sides of the issue, I"m satisfied letting that moral distinction rest between me and my God.