Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [105]
Reading Orbach, I had a chilling thought about my own adolescence. I had owned Barbie dolls, studied fashion layouts, and done all the girl-things that were supposed to have made me a slave to the bathroom scale. Yet I couldn't have cared less. What was missing from my picture? Bluntly: Mom.
This is not to blame all mothers for infecting their daughters with an urge to compare their bodies unfavorably with the cultural ideal. But historically, through words and actions, mothers have interpreted and taught the looks and behaviors associated with "femininity" to their daughters. To place this in perspective, Chinese foot binding, a stunning cruelty in the service of "beauty," was not literally imposed by men upon women. Rather, it came about through "the shared complicity of mother and daughter," Susan Brownmiller explains in Femininity. "The anxious mother was the agent of will who crushed her suffering daughter's foot as she calmed her rebellion by holding up the promise of the dainty shoe, teaching her child at an early age that the feminine mission in life, at the cost of tears and pain, was to alter her body and amend her ways in the supreme effort to attract and please a man."
Nor is it as if mothers impart damage consciously. Given mothers' biological capacity to nourish their young, it is hardly surprising that tensions between them and their daughters might be played out through food. "Women are traditionally the primary feeders," explained psychotherapist Laura Kogel, a faculty member of the Women's Therapy Center Institute in Manhattan (founded by Susie Orbach, Luise Eichenbaum, and Carol Bloom) and a coauthor of Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model. "So whether the woman is breast- or bottle-feeding, food and mother tend to be one."
Abby, a thirty-two-year-old Vassar graduate and recovering anorexic, feels very strongly that family dynamics rather than idealized images of women contributed to her eating disorder. "I grew up in Greenwich Village," she explained. "I was the child of a single mother who was a devout feminist. I wasn't allowed to watch TV until I was thirteen because my mother believed that its patriarchal stereotypes would have a bad influence on the way I identified myself as a woman. Instead, I was given Sisterhood Is Powerful and Ms. magazine. My mother hated Barbie and what she represented. I wasn't allowed to have a Barbie, much less a Skipper or a Midge. And the irony is that I was severely anorexic as a teenager. When I was fifteen, I stopped eating. I'm five foot nine and at my lowest weight, I was just under a hundred pounds. I lost my period for three years. Today, I have come to realize that my anorexia was a reaction to a very controlled and crazy family situation. I became obsessed with being thin because it wasn't something my mother valued. I think overreacting to Barbie—setting her up as the ultimate negative example—can be just as damaging as positing her as an ideal."
"My eating disorder had nothing to do with my Barbie dolls," said a forty-year-old novelist who prefers that her name not be used. "The year my mother took me out of boarding school, I was totally miserable. She was really punishing me for getting ahead of her—for going to this fancy school. She was horrible to me when I got home—really cold and cruel. And I decided to stop eating, but I was so afraid of her that I felt I had to disguise it. The one meal we all had together was dinner, and I became the family cook. I cooked these beautiful meals that I barely ate. It was my hunger strike to make her acknowledge what she'd done. I was going to starve myself until she was nice to me. It's amazing that I eat today." She laughed. "All my friends' mothers noticed that I was losing weight, but my mother said nothing—until the following year when