Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [97]
She looked at me. “Like what?”
I answered, “Like getting off the street. I’ll help you when you’re ready.”
I wish I could say that Violet’s story had a happy ending, but after a few months she left for California to pick fruit with a man she met at the center. She sent me a postcard from the Central Valley. It said: “The weather’s great and there’s work. But I miss my shrink. I’ll be back. Don’t worry.”
Violet comes from an extreme situation, but in terms of dynamics, she’s similar to most compulsive eaters. She learned to associate love with food and to use food to comfort and nurture herself. She’s good at caring for others, but relatively poor at meeting her own needs. She’s good at burying her pain.
Her sexual fears are quite typical of compulsive eaters. Many date the start of their compulsive eating to an incident involving sexual abuse. Others are fearful of men or their own sexual appetites and see their weight as a form of protection. Many have had the experience of being pursued by men when they lose weight. Often they gain to avoid the choices and dangers that pursuit causes in their lives.
If I could have seen Violet in therapy, I would have encouraged her to examine her feelings carefully at the times when she felt tempted to gorge. No doubt she had pain from her past life, with its foster homes and institutions. She had abandonment issues and physical and sexual abuse issues to deal with. She learned that while people let her down, food was an ever-faithful friend.
I would have taught her to respect rather than run from her feelings. I would have encouraged exercise as a way to fight depression, manage stress and feel better about her body. I would have taught her to set limits with others and even to ask for help. I would have encouraged her to stay in our town and work her way through problems. We could have found money for her to go back to school or get some technical training so that she’d be employable. I would have found her a good dentist.
Beauty is the defining characteristic for American women. It’s the necessary and often sufficient condition for social success. It is important for women of all ages, but the pressure to be beautiful is most intense in early adolescence. Girls worry about their clothes, makeup, skin and hair. But most of all they worry about their weight. Peers place an enormous value on thinness.
This emphasis on appearance was present when I was a girl. Our high school had a “gauntlet” that we girls walked through every morning. It consisted of all the boys lined up by their cars along the sidewalk that led into the front doors. We walked past them to catcalls and remarks about our breasts and legs. I wore a girdle made of thick rubber to flatten my stomach on days I dressed in straight skirts.
But appearance is even more important today. Three things account for the increased pressure to be thin in the 1990s. We have moved from communities of primary relationships in which people know each other to cities full of secondary relationships. In a community of primary relationships, appearance is only one of many dimensions that define people. Everyone knows everyone else in different ways over time. In a city of strangers, appearance is the only dimension available for the rapid assessment of others. Thus it becomes incredibly important in defining value.
Secondly, the omnipresent media consistently portrays desirable women as thin. Thirdly, even as real women grow heavier, models and beautiful women are portrayed as thinner. In the last two decades we have developed a national cult of thinness. What is considered beautiful has become slimmer and slimmer. For example, in 1950 the White Rock mineral water girl was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. Today she is 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 110 pounds.
Girls compare their own bodies to our cultural ideals