Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 22:24:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Sara J Bailes Conference Paper for Food and Performance, Sunday May 3rd,1998. Sara Bailes. ALL ABOUT (THE) OTHER/EVES (Transparent 1: Life Cover, Eve was Framed) This 1971 cover of Life magazine, dated August 13th (unlucky for some) shows a 70's feminist with protest placard in hand 'Eve was Framed'. And how. This particular issue of Life traces, from a feminist critical perspective, the history of the 'woman problem': women as seducers, witches, symbolizing chaos, disorder, typifying the negative or passive principle in nature, expert in devilry and bringing men to their knees with their 'foul effeminacy' to quote Milton. Such women have been tortured, incarcerated, strapped up, tied down and burnt in their thousands throughout history. They were often visionaries, saints, healers. Most likely, it has finally been established through research,, they will have suffered from eating disorders, a thin smoke screen for a much deeper rooted crises. What is a woman allowed to be in the world and how much space is she given in which to realize this. Eve was framed, she was caged, and this is the metaphor I will trace through my presentation. Today I'm going to talk about the many Eve's of the world in relation to the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, that is, the impossible relationship women negotiate between food, hunger and body image. This serves as an epitaph to my paper "Too much is not Enough/Enough is too Much" which attempts to overview the literature, treatments and inevitable problems we face in writing and treating this multidimensional disorder. The Fall, according to the Bible, and therefore according to man, comes down to Eve taking a bite from the apple. Is it any wonder then that women have trouble eating? It has never been an easy relationship from the beginning. In her book 'The Hunger Artists' Maud Ellmann suggests that if eating symbolizes the route to knowledge, anorexia can be interpreted as a flight from knowledge, starvation a yearning to return to the state of ignorance before the Fall (the moment Ellmann defines as the Locus Classicus). Food has henceforth situated itself so complexly in women's' psyche, rupturing their experience of their bodies, their sexuality, their sense of who they are in the world. We are, quite simply, not allowed to be fat, but we can always be thinnER. There is no end to how thin we can be. Nor how fat. But fat according to who? (Transparent 2: Venus of Willendorf) Here's our earliest Venus: 26,000 years old with an F cup bra, she was dug up in an Austrian field in 1908. Voluptuous and full-bellied, she's a reminder of how women were once seen and allowed to be: naturally fecund, curvaceous and round. Women need fat in order to menstruate, give birth, lactate and finally menopause. But a woman of such proportions today is more likely to resemble this: (Transparent 3: TV Dinner lady) inactive, dull, sad and storing fat in her body (approximately 65% of what she is eating) through complete inactivity and inertia. I'd like to weave with my Eve's a little more for I am referring not only to the first in Genesis, but to all women. I do not believe that it is possible for any woman in the Western world to inhabit her body with the simplicity of acceptance and love. Yesterday I had the privilege of actively participating in the 9th annual 'Women Speak Out to Reclaim Our Bodies, Our Hunger, Our Lives' organized by the Women's Institute Therapy Center who I have worked with over the last 8 weeks. I dedicate this paper to those Eves especially and to those who came up to the microphone and spoke out. I did, finally, after 22 years. The flyer (hold up) says 'Imagine a world in which women felt good about their bodies and comfortable about food. We can!' Ah yes, imagine.... But the reality outside of that room is that our TV dinner lady in reality feels more like this: (Transparent 4: Lady in Cage) TRAPPED. The cages are both literal and metaphorical. In Victorian times her cage clung literally to her body: (Transparent 5: Corseted Woman) To summarize, this is the way I see it. It really is 'All about Eve'. The 1950 Hollywood film from which I steal this title starred Betty Davis as Margot, a fading Broadway star, who spoke the immortal line 'Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.' Anorexia nervosa is a never ending sleepless and bumpy night, and only one of a number of debilitating and fatal eating disorders that gorge on so many promising, young women, consuming them literally from the inside out. Food is obsessed about but not eaten, representing as it does a culture that refuses to allow women their rights, freedom or position in the world. Refusing food means refusing acceptance of that world order: (Transparent 6: Suffragette being force fed) Such force feeding as seen here in this image of the suffragette is both an oral rape as well as ultimately smashing this woman's subjectivity, her ego, her self. Such practices still take place, failing to address the real problem. Yesterday at the Speak Out, a fragile 20 year old just released from hospital, having been pumped with food like a goose stuffed for foie gras, stood feebly at the mike and said "They fed me from the outside and not from the inside. I can't exist in real society. I don't see people, I see bodies." What about the hunger? The hunger inside? A survey by the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination (1996) discovered that young women are more afraid of becoming fat than of nuclear war, cancer or losing their parents. The issue is a lot more serious than we think it is. (Transparent 7: Anorexic Back) We no longer need 19th century corsets, for the anorexic body finally resembles a bony cage that traps the isolated woman inside as she clings desperately to what feels like the last vestiges of autonomous self, ultimately making a claim for life. From the outside, all we see is a straight line descent towards death. Why, let's ask ourselves, does it all look this way? (Transparents 7 and 8: Prada /Bones and Valentino/ Knife, to be placed one, and then the other to create a third image) My final images are from this months highly fashionable and cutting edge magazine 'The Face', taken from a photo shoot entitled 'The Butcher' featuring the clothes of Comme de Garcons, Helmut Lang, Jean Paul Gaultier, Valentino and Prada. Look at these pictures and ask yourself what and how in the world is a woman supposed to eat and feel good about living in her body? If I were Eve, I'd have taken the apple from that snake and run for my life.