Across the pond

In the pursuit of research for a blog I will write in a few days, I spent several hours tonight reading the auto-biography of a woman who has suffered from anorexia. I went on reading, not because I have a consuming interest in the subject, but because of her compelling honesty. And because she was telling me about a world I could not easily inhabit. Foreign territory.

Because I am, thanks to my genes, a rather thin person. So I will never become fat, however much I patronise the fish and chip shops of my youth, or the burger bars of the present.

But in reading what she had to say, I was jolted into an awareness of how much her problems were the result of politics. Nothng to do with her genetics.

But quite simply to do with the dominant culture, which suggests that women will not get a man if they are ‘fat’. This myth pervades our culture, including the only serious left-wing publication in Britain – the Guardian/Observer, whose models on the style pages are not at all anorexic. But they are never, repeat never, fat.

Anorexics, who are nearly all women, have problems, because they can only be ‘not fat’ if they deny their own being. They want to eat and enjoy all the good things in life, which makes American consumer capitalism so popular.

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American consumer capitalism is male-dominated. And males, as the Greeks told us, are nervous af big women who swallow them.

It is the male fear of the big female, which dominates.

So the current fashion is for females so thin that they do not have any physical characteristics, which are threatening to the male.

They do not have breasts the size of those of Marilynn Monroe. And they have hips so slim that they would crack upon any vigorous interchange.