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We date women’s eating disorders to the 1970s, when the diktat of thinness emerged, but the injunction for women to surround themselves with food without eating it is much older.
Pandora must hide her ‘bitch’s stomach’ inside a perfect body; Eve is condemned to submit to every male desire for having bitten the apple; in the 17th century, the first Parisian cafés served food but women were excluded…
Women are presented as housewives or gluttons, while men are chefs or gourmets.
What lies behind this great unequal banquet? And are many of us experiencing what is now tersely called EDs (eating disorders)?
For what reasons? And how can one get out of it?
This is the subject of Lauren Malka’s passionate, intense, and sincere investigative account, a writer who seems to feel the same things we do. An essay titled “Mangeuses”, published in October 2023 by Les Pérégrines.
The guest: Lauren Malka
Lauren Malka is a journalist and podcaster (so I’m a bit under pressure). She writes, in particular, for Causette and Les Epicurieux.
She wrote and co-directed a documentary, “La France aux fourneaux”, and contributed to four feminist anthologies, including “Ceci est mon corps” and “Survivre au sexisme ordinaire”.
Photo © NB
My questions
- Lauren, you cite countless wonderful women writers in your text, such as Colette, Virginia Woolf, Ursula Le Guin, Simone Weil, Geneviève Brisac, Margaret Arwood, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous. It feels like being among friends; it’s a big necklace you can put on to reassure yourself. Is it the same language that will help us speak better / invent the missing narrative / break free from the dominant script AND eat better?
- You quote as an epigraph a passage from Naomi Wolf, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession with female beauty but an obsession with female obedience. Dieting is one of the most powerful political sedatives in women’s history; a population that is silently angry is a docile population.” Can you explain the connection you draw between patriarchy and women’s eating disorders?
- Aren’t mothers often participants in these injunctions? It seems to me that patriarchy also sabotages mother-daughter relationships in this respect.
- You refer to the constraints and the internalization of norms that have weighed on our bodies since Antiquity, both in the push to deprive and in the praise of certain fats. Can you explain these two sides of the same coin?
- Are women then confined to writing and commenting? To dreaming of imaginary meals with Virginia Woolf and a proto-feminist gastronomy with daring nuns? What does feminist culinary writing look like?
- Talk to us about the fear of gaining weight that you associate with the fear of growing up and claiming one’s full place as a woman.
- And the link with fatphobia?
- And what about ‘dénivores’? (ah, denial!)
- Could the millennia-long appropriation of food resources by men have contributed to morphological differences between men and women?
- A word on anorexia and bulimia — eating disorders as a language of resistance?
- And to conclude, how do we save ourselves by sharing the bread of sisterhood? How do we turn stigmas around and reclaim indulgence and pleasure? How, to quote you, do we return to sender the pies we’ve been receiving for centuries?
