This article makes me wonder about a possible connection between anorexia and transgender victims. The author references a seizure of power and that seems to be the case to an even greater degree with trans people.
BINGO. We've been trying to point that out for years now. Same idea, different strategy. Except one can get help and recover from anorexia, become a healthy weight and lead a healthy life. But one can't reattach the breasts they had removed and the uterus that they discarded because they wanted to become a "man." It's very, very sad to watch what's happening right now.
There's that lack of acceptance again -- I mean accepting problem thinking and acting as a problem and instead pretending so as to "affirm" the psychosis.
I've picked up a lot of good information about diet and exercise from young people. They have some good things to say about consciousness around personal diet, exercise and metabolism.
When I worked I weighed 167 pounds on a 5 feet 11 inches frame. After I retired I gained about 35 pounds and weighed 200 pounds and had resigned myself to that weight. But then I was diagnosed with diabetes. I knew there was a relationship between weight and diabetes.
I hate taking meds. I never considered myself a fanatic but I hate taking meds and a switch turned on in my mind and I stopped eating. Really I modified my diet. When I went to a restaurant the first thing I ordered was a to-go box and I would scrape half my order into the box. After supper I wouldn't snack, eat anything at all. I was hungry all the time but it got to the point when I looked at food, I would say to myself, "I don't need that." and I wouldn't eat it.
I told my wife that I knew how anorexics felt. It would piss her off.
Anyway at 165 pounds I started eating normally again and 20 years later I am about 157-8 pounds. I still don't eat any simple carbs, potatoes, rice, white bread. All of this paid off. I have never taken any diabetes meds and my blood sugar is within range.
I realize not everybody has the fanatical discipline I had. It baffles me how I did it because I don't think of myself as disciplined.
The upshot of all this is. I have some, not all, knowledge how an anorexic feels.
Agreed on avoiding carbs. I started the carnivore diet in July and have dropped 30 pounds very quickly. I even moved to one meal a day just to make it easier. Big steak for dinner, don't eat again until the next evening. I never even feel hungry, and have started doing some short (2-3 day) fasting just to prove that I can. It's amazing what a deleterious effect carbs have on your body and mind, and what eliminating them can do for your quality of life.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick at FOUND MY FITNESS has two FREE vegetable smoothie recipes at the sight which I recommend and personally make up about twice a week. --- A look at her appearances on Joe Rogan is worth the time.
If it works, it works. I'm certainly not one to preach on health topics or any other, but I'm glad you found a healthy way of eating. It's hard to swim against the tide of what foods are pushed through advertising and culture, but I feel like more people are waking up to the negative consequences of the Standard American Diet.
After I stopped eating until I was stuffed, eating after dinner and randomly snacking because I was bored, I stopped being hungry all the time. Your body gets used to it and the pounds will come off. Most of the people (not all) with type 2 diabetes have the ability to control it without drugs, it takes a lot of will power and some discomfort.
It's part of a larger fad/social media-driven social contagion. Social media puts all these phenomena on steroids. Younger people look at this stuff and sometimes wrongly conclude that what's bothering them (actually delusions) are somehow "affirming" because it affirms the problem as something positive.
And we are not called "bigots" if we point out that the anorexic girl (who tries to avoid puberty and becoming a woman) is mentally ill. We are not expected to "affirm" her delusion.
Absolutely. Difference though is our government, AMA, and powers that be seem to applaud transgenderism while at the same time acknowledging that anorexia is a mental illness.
They applaud transgenderism and REWARD it by even going as far as appointing Trans or Gender- Benders to government positions (Rachel Levine and that other dude Sam Brinton).
And if that isn't bad enough - they even promote obesity as "body positive" now....
Ladies and gentlemen, you've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone
Yes. The main differences are that anorexia was never seen as important to a political objective (like DIE) and it did not make anyone rich the way Gender Identity does. A healthy person does not make a lot of money for the pharma and medical complexes we have today but with trans you get a lifetime patient. See: "U.S. Sex Reassignment Surgery Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Gender Transition (Male To Female, Female To Male), And Segment Forecasts, 2022 - 2030" Synthetic Sex hormones were always a drug looking for a market (sex criminals, menopausal women, etc.).
" I paused time by starving and arresting my puberty.
Anorexia gave me nothing. All it did was take away my teens and twenties. But for the medieval girls, it gave them enormous power. Like today’s anorexia influencers, these once-anonymous girls accrued followers, clout, and fame."
Girls get lots of social clout with "trans" identity. They come to really believe it as well which is cult like.
It’s the same with obesity --> diabetes, heart disease, etc. = $$$ for the pharmaceutical companies. Not to mention that heart disease is the leading killer in this country, I believe it’s higher for women too.
Except really you don't. The average lifespan after surgery to remove sexual organs to "affirm" sex is 10 years. That's for adults. We don't even know what average life span is for kids who do it. But it's not going to good, and I suspect the receipts are going to come due a lot sooner that people are expecting.
"Gender affirming" care is a fast bus to death. My brother in law died 11 years after his surgery from a treatable disease he chose not to treat, so conveniently not recorded as a suicide. His family knows better. So, a lot like anorexia there too.
Most of the masses of AYA (Adolescent and Young Adult) ROGD girls don't go as far as sex organ removal. More typically its synthetic testosterone (which is destructive enough) and too often double mastectomy. Government, Pharma, "Medicine" and "Admiral" Levine have a lot to answer for.
I am amazed how transgenderism was once treated as an illness and is now treated as usual. If you take the woke playbook to this article, the Woke could say that high mortality rates are more from the hatred and exclusion of skinny people, and if we scorned people who want them to live in a healthy manner, then most would not die but thrive. I think being woke is another mental disorder that hurts more people than it helps.
Wokeness certainly warps perspective. Note also how we are told to believe that being gay is something you are born with and have no choice about, but being trans is a decision and your birth gender is immaterial. Fabulous hypocrisy.
Yes! My sister is a recovered anorexic and she looks at the transgender madness as very similar. What if, when an anorexic insists that she is fat—even though we can all see that she is stick thin—we were all pressured to validate her and offer “affirming care”? In this case, perspective-affirming care looks like agreeing that she’s fat and then helping her go on a diet.
Usually when someone is completely out of touch with objective reality (ie, having a penis but insisting you’re a woman), we consider that a mental illness. To affirm it is, itself, madness. We don’t do it with any other kind of dysmorphia.
It is the reality the person sees. The anorexic sees health, the transgender feels they are something they are not, and the woke's awareness is more orthodoxy and ideology rather than reality.
The term "woke" in Black vernacular used to refer to "awareness". The term "Woke"now has become synonymous with the obsessive hyper-awareness of social issues involving LGBTQA+ and trends being driven by social media (body positivity for obesity and acceptance of pedophilia among them).
Awareness of racism is still in the mix but seems to have taken a back seat to social media frenzy surrounding LGBTQA++
Transfiguration and transubstantiation have nothing to do with transgenderism. Whether your believe/accept them or not, the former are, literally, metaphysical explanations for things that aren't and can't be made manifest in physical reality. Transgenderism is an inner disturbance that sufferers insist MUST be made manifest in physical reality and asserted by everyone else.
There are no obvious points. Transfiguration refers to when Christ took John and Peter up on a mountain and his body was transformed into the glorious body he had in heaven. Transubstantiation refers to the belief that the communion elements are transformed into representations of the body and blood of Christ (I'm not Catholic, so please forgive me if I am not quite right on this). Nothing to do with mental illness and eating or sex disorders.
Cynthia-Decades back there was a wonderful woman who supported men's efforts at re-capturing and participating in a healthy masculine by providing a definition of the healthy feminine. One book she wrote was on Anorexia.
THE OWL WAS A BAKERS DAUGHTER:Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine. A Psychological Study. (139p) by Marion Woodman
Of course the popular press and misandrist feminists did everything they could to undermine the conversation.
You are correct in your definitions. Attempting to tie them to "trans" is altogether specious.
In the Transfiguration, the apostles saw Christ's divinity. His body didn't change. Nothing about him changed, because he was and is always both fully human and fully divine. In Transubstantiation, the essence of the wine and bread are changed to the essence of Christ (not representations of them) -- but their physical qualities remain exactly the same. This is accomplished by a miracle, by God. While the priest says the words and makes the gestures, he doesn't make it happen. There is nothing a person can do to change the essence of a thing without also changing its physical properties (through chemical reactions, etc.) The Orthodox Churches also believe this, although they don't put it in the same words -- what both maintain is that the metaphysical reality of the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but the physical reality stays the same. Whether or not one agrees with these teachings, they are metaphysically logical and sound--either true, or false, but not just a muddle of ideas.
People who advocate for "transgenderism" say that their metaphysical reality is different from their bodies, but that it matches the physical reality of other bodies. But as it is our bodies that give us sex, it makes no sense to say that a man is "really a woman inside," or is a "woman born in a man's body." Moreover, they have no way of knowing what a person of the opposite sex's "inner reality" is in the first place. On top of that, they say that their bodies must be mutilated and drugged to make them "conform to their inner reality." None of these things are logically or metaphysically sound. They might as well say they have the inner reality of turnip.
That's an interesting way to say you're wrong--although I have no idea why you bothered to do so, when you could just have ignored my comment.
There is no connection between either transfiguration and transgenderism or transubstantiation and transgenderism-- just the prefix "trans." They are opposites.
Yes! So many parallels. My older daughter went from anorexia to identifying as “non binary” after her second hospitalization. Her 15yo sister who idolizes her now identifies as a “gay man”. I see so much in common with trans and eating disorders right before my eyes. The author talks about her fear of growing up and and becoming a woman, freezing time. Identifying out of becoming a woman and essentially rejecting your own sexed body through self harm is exactly what my younger daughter is doing - only this time it’s trans.
Oh you poor thing… I m so sorry you and your daughters are going through this. I flew my pre-teen kids away from the US last month because of all this. I hope for a healthy resolution for your family. 🙏🏻
I'm sorry your family is going through this. I wish there'd be some discussion (social, medical, political, etc) about why puberty and womanhood seems so terrifying to so many girls. It's been discussed on TFP before, but as a wider society it's something we need to fix.
I feel for you, and I see this quite often, w/ the female to male trans. Why would they want to jump into being "a woman" when there is so much baggage, so much pressure? The stakes are high! Be a Kardashian or a Cardi B. etc. etc. or what? And they are expected to navigate sexual encounters so early!
Although she hints that it has something to do with her relationship with her mother, Hadley Freeman’s article provides no insight into why she was anorexic. I have yet to see any anorexics in person, but I see a lot of fat people. Do fat people don’t get treatment for their over eating and lack of exercise disorder. Free Press could perform a public service by promoting healthy lifestyles. This article concentrates on the skinny trees and ignores the fat forest.
She says it pretty clearly actually. She was scared to grow up and develop into a woman, and she wanted to stay close to her mother. It seems like she was trying to pause/stop puberty, and it developed from there
Anorexia is a specific mental illness. It has its own language and way of being. It’s not like obesity. Promoting healthy lifestyles won’t help treat anorexia.
I’m reading her book. Her mother and other female relatives were anorexics on both sides of her family. So I would think it is mostly an inherited trait.
That’s interesting. I have not read the book (or even heard of it) but my H’s brother has a daughter who was anorexic in high school. She went through medical treatment and eventually recovered, BUT that entire family to this day has and had a ridiculous obsession with weight and body size. The anorexic girl’s older sister was/is fat, not just overweight. The father, my BIL, was/is fat, not just overweight. And I mean really, really LARGE. H’s parents were always perfect: perfect size, perfect clothes, perfect house, perfect athleticism, perfect, perfect, perfect. As grandparents they constantly complained to my BIL why he didn’t lose weight and why he let his fat daughter be so big. The fat daughter decided her grandparents didn’t love her because she was fat. At some level the younger sister must have gotten the message that you have to be thin to be loved and she became anorexic.
Fwiw, years later I began to realize that my MIL (Mrs. Perfect) was probably anorexic herself. As I spent more time around her the eating (or not eating) patterns emerged. When her H, my FIL lost a ton of weight she proudly said, “Look, Grandpa is back to his college weight!” Well, to me he looked like he had cancer. Guess what? He had cancer!
H’s sister was also fat growing up. She was convinced her mother didn’t love her because she was fat. My H was the only normal sized kid they had. His siblings fumed he was “the favorite”. Even today SIL and BIL are constantly on a diet, constantly obsessing about their weight. SIL finally lost so much weight she looked like she had cancer (she didn’t). But she then gained back 20 lbs and is still thin, and still exercises 2-3 hours a day and eats very little (vegetarian) to stay as thin as possible. She now has Parkinson’s and that is a whole other pile of trouble.
Anyway, this family is always talking about food and obsessing over it. I think that’s the root of their dietary problems. Inherited obsession.
I think it’s why we are seeing guidance from the NHS to let some anorexics starve. We affirm trans children’s delusions but we haven’t affirmed those with eating disorders. Until now.
It seems that democrats are morbid about humanity. Abortion until the moment of birth, let anorexics die, destroy puberty with blockers or surgery, assisted death, human composting. I don't hear about republicans or red states pushing in these directions, only blue states. I used to live in Vermont, deep blue and full of all this crap. And the locals are passionate about it, framing the elimination of life as women's right to choose, or freedom to be yourself, or some other cliche that makes a negative sound positive. It is obnoxious and hard to live with, so I happily moved to a red state where rational thought seems to be congregating these days.
All fascism/totalitarianism requires the reduction of human dignity to "thingdom". The individual, human liberty, speech and thought must be subsumed and controlled by the bureaucratic State. The American Republic is founded on, and the Constitution enshrines, protection of individual human rights and freedom. The DNC is a weaponized psyop controlled by international criminal financiers who are using Maoist/Stalinist tactics to dismantle the Republic. It's not something else. The insanity witnessed in "Blue States" is pathological not political.
There is a lot to unpack here. I agree that groupthink is the democrat way of homogenizing society. They adopted cancel culture and rode that wave all the way to LBGTQ++ vote gathering nirvana. Same thing with unrestricted abortion rights. Same thing with DEI and ESG. Same thing with broadcasting approved talking points to MSM, who swallow them whole and regurgitate ad nauseam. Bribes from Ukraine and China aren't bribes at all, but a phone call is an impeachable offense. The laptop lie, the election lie, the emails lie, the border lie, the Afghan withdrawal lie, the Russia collusion lie, DOJ Hunter Biden lies, laws named to hide reason for spending lies, etc. Rules for everyone but themselves.
Totalitarianism demands control and distortion of the national narrative, and the creation of a hyperreality to prevent the fact/truth/solutions based American national dialogue "..we the people.." deserve. DNC/surveillance state sleight of hand runs cover for the criminal financiers looting the world economy. Living inside a lie is crazy making. Like yourself, people who lie in my face when I can see their actions are creating human damage makes me angry. I often say that Marxist "woke" is the lipstick on a pig called totalitarian finance. The one serves the other. I can choose not to be "gaslit" but the way to clarity while living in a society suffering disintegration and polarization like ours is difficult. Especially when a huge amount of the chaos is pathology and has no actual bearing on politics or a healthy human reality. In most cases the popular narrative doesn't fit the reality. --- My view:
(1) The only legitimate frame of reference and the only legitimate engine of survival for human dignity and freedom is the American Republic and its Constitution. A conscious decision to think and act as a CITIZEN of the Republic is the first step forward. Most of us (myself included), having been propagandized into believing that a Democracy and a Republic are the same thing. They're not. The destruction of statues, the distortion of American history, attacks on American free speech and principals, etc. is weaponized pathological Marxist psychology: If you don't know where came from, you don'r know who you are. As in the case of the feminist attack on men, it pretends moral concern, but is in reality an assault on personal identity and a form of spiritual/emotional homicide.
(2) "ism's" are dead. Criminal finance looted and destroyed free markets and capitalism and the communist destroyed communism. Social/cultural chaos, the collapsing infrastructure surrounding everyday American life and the capture of elected American political leadership is proof that capital has abandoned America. The looting of American tax dollars and natural resources will continue until collapse. Consider the million dollar a year class room that can't teach a child to read.
(3) An international cabal of criminal financiers (EU/WEF/Wall Street/CCP) is attempting to install and overlay a CCP style surveillance system over the peoples of the world.
As proof I point to the ongoing destruction of American cities, the middle class, the assault on civil liberties in Europe, Canada and Australia, the DNC's criminalization of the American voter, its creation of the CIC and its attempts through threat and intimidation to capture tech/communications and bring it under control of the FBI/CIA.
(4) This is a new age. The leap in consciousness created by the leap in tech and communications makes the political/financial grift transparent to human moral reason. THE FIGHT IS: Who will control the American destiny? Again: This is 20th Century retro. The A-Bomb and the attempt of criminal financiers to install a Maoist/Stalinist totalitarianism proves them visionless. Our Constitution, an entirely human document, unique in its proclamation of the right to unrestricted subjective individuality and human freedom, was written for times like these. "..we the people" are the necessary change. D.C. was/is and will be a hog trough of special interests. It's time to remember who we are and act in our own best interest.
Well "Abortion until the moment of birth" is bullshit., but I think you already know that. I totally agree that the left has made the wonderful freedom! to abort too much of a positive! experience with no downsides, but very few, if any, leftist / wokesters advocate for literal "Abortion until the moment of birth." (Unless you are conflating that with abortions to A: save the life of the mother or B: abort a child who is either already dead or will die within hours of being born...?)
I formerly lived in Vermont (abortion is allowed in all stages of pregnancy) and before that in New Jersey (Abortion is not restricted based on gestational age) - parenthetical comments taken from online sources. Both states (among others) really do legally allow for abortion up to the moment of birth. That is the law. It is allowed. It is not a crime to do it. If it is never done, or so morally impossible to even consider doing it, why do we need the law to be written that way? The laws mention nothing about saving a life or miscarriages. So no, it is not bullshit to note it.
My niece had a "late term abortion" at law when her child died inside her one week before its due date, and her doctors had to get it out of her body for the sake of her own health. It was also considered an "abortion" at law when she lost a child at four months, and she had to have a procedure to remove the dead baby from her body.
The PROCEDURE of removing the child from the womb, dead or alive, is an "abortion." A "miscarriage" is the spontaneous expulsion of a child before 20 weeks. It does not involve a procedure to remove the child from the womb.
When states make laws that completely ban "abortions," they are banning the procedure regardless of whether the baby is alive or not.
Miscarriage is a colloquial term for spontaneous abortion.
Provide us with existing law which provides no exception for the life of the mother. So far, I can’t find any that do not provide for the three exceptions.
Good question with a complicated answer, which I don’t pretend to know. Better republican candidates would help. So would ending the indoctrination that occurs in colleges. The media is biased at least partly because of the fact that they are joined at the hip with their college buddies in D.C. who they want to help stay in power for future access to jobs and power for themselves. But I agree that we have to get democrats out before it’s too late.
In between there was "cutting" as "a cry for help". And way before all these were the Salem Witch Trials where unhinged young girls all saw the same things, experienced the same things, did the same things.
The prospect of being an adult where you are expected to make your own choices and life altering decisions is daunting for teen boys too. We have made that more difficult for boys with the emasculation movement, stripping them of their rites of passage so that they are less prepared to deal with their more risk-taking peers. So too with girls, but in the opposite direction. Aim high, you are at least as good as a male. But in reality, the physical differences are significant - size and strength to start, but later drive and focus. Can women overcome these things? Of course, but only on a less common individual basis, not across the board. It is especially daunting when the strong tendency toward motherhood is hormonally inevitable. So, as a teen girl, remove the limiting hormones and the obvious physical clues that you are not male, and presto you are with almost instant gratification more ready to take on the world. Except that you are not more ready just from that silver bullet. The real work still needs doing and you are then also permanently deformed. Please overlook my mixed metaphors.
I mentioned this very idea to a person and found out they work for a major hospital system and they said “we have to treat them with gender affirming care it’s our job we have no choice” they just shrugged their shoulders.
Yes, I’ve been saying this for a long time-Trans could be another form of body dysmorphia. If so, should be treated as such; with compassion and empathy. It shouldn’t be politicized. It’s like what I’ve heard about Alzheimers and the connection to sugar. In some circles, Alzheimers is refered to as Type 3 Diabetes. Trans might be on the body dysmorphia spectrum with bulimia, anorexia, etc...
Wonderful article and I commend the author for her courage, tenacity and vulnerability to share and enlighten us.
The concept of control is critical to understanding anorexia and other eating disorders. Social media is an amplifier of these problems, even 20 years ago when my daughter had anorexia, there were online groups that encouraged/rewarded/enabled her thinking. Advice on disguising starvation,cutting and defying parents. We had to severely restrict access to this poison as part of her recovery. Interestingly she became deeply involved in horse training and riding, which allowed a much more positive sense of control. Saved her life actually.
"I simply had a fear of growing up and becoming a woman and I didn’t feel ready to separate from my mother. "
I have no scientific proof, but I would hypothesize that this is very likely similar to what is going on with gender dysphoria.
My fiance's teen daughter, in 8th grade, concluded that she was a boy. She wanted a breast binder and to start on puberty blockers. She gave up girls clothing and she covered her hair after cutting it short. It started when her best friend decided that she was trans. Her parents supported her emotionally, got her counseling but even after tantrums and boat loads of tears they refused to let her have a binder or do any kind of transition. They never yelled or judged, they just calmly said "no" and moved ahead, holding her to the same academic and behavioral expectations they always had.
Now, her mother will tell you that she is the baby of the family, the one that most closely clings to her mother and father, the one that wanted to stay close to home to go to college. She feels safe and happy in the family nest. She did not, and to some degree still does not, want the world to change, to grow up, to see her parents grow older, to deal with the harsh realities of adult life. She actually got upset when she found out her older sister had had sex for the first time. She got borderline angry when that same sister chose to move to the other coast to go to college.
Her mother will also tell you that she is a stunning beauty and has a killer bikini body. She carries herself in a way that would make you think she is older than she is. She is a great wit and highly intelligent. Well, I would agree with her mother. She is a very beautiful girl with curves. In short, she started to attract a lot of attention from boys and men as a freshman in HS.
Long story short, she is now a junior in HS and has given up the trans thing and is dressing much more in keeping with a girl her age. For the first time she is showing a strong interest in boys. She is looking at colleges all over the country. She says that she feels like she can do it because she saw her sister do it.
The thread I see here, that compares to that line from the author I put in above, is a fear of growing up, of puberty, of becoming a sexual creature, one that attracts male attention whether that is positive or negative. I see a thread of fear of the world changing, parents ageing, and of adulting, a desire to retain that feeling of safety and comfort you get in childhood if you are lucky.
As a man who grew up in a matriarchy, grew up in the country with his mother and 3 younger sisters, who of his 27 first cousins only 4 are male, and who participated in female dominated sport (horseback riding), I have seen a LOT of preteen and teenage girls go through that awkward transition from child to young woman. I have seen a lot of the emotional turmoil around it. Boys go through it too, but later and in a different way. Male puberty brings on a similar discomfort, boys feel the fear of adulthood too, the differences are that boys start to fear less and become more aggressive, they tend to want to attack the world more as opposed to be protected from it.
My suspicion is that the same things that cause some young women to engage in eating disorders also are at the root of gender dysphoria and I think that gender dysphoria is as contagious among young women as is anorexia. I think all young people can be subject to social contagion but I firmly believe that the more social nature of women makes them more susceptible than men and boys. As with most things comparing men and women, the factors involved are all the same but the proportions of them are different.
The question I think we need to ask ourselves is; How do we manage these dangerous social contagions in an age of social media? I'm not sure that we managed them well before social media. I'm not even sure that we have been willing to admit that social contagions of this type are real.
This: “I'm not even sure that we have been willing to admit that social contagions of this type are real.” Thanks for your thoughtful comment. It’s sad to see so many adults unable to see what is right in front of them.
Very good comment. Reading it when I got to "[H]ow do we manage ..." my mind went to the rampant feminization of education. It is time for a correction there I think.
How do you manage this social contagion? You inoculate your kids at a young age by teaching them things like "your sex was determined at the moment of conception" so when they hear it was "assigned at birth" the first time it already sounds incorrect. Psychiatrist, Dr Miriam Grossman discusses these strategies in her book, "Lost in Trans Nation."
You nip it in the bud immediately, I would suggest the parents band together and fight the system in schools because that’s were it is starting. When all else fails pull them out and home school them. I know it’s easier said then done. These schools don’t care about our children it’s up to us to care!
That is pretty brilliant, Wrung Out Lemon. I see my daughter in much of what you say.
Re: "her best friend decided that she was trans" That's pretty typical. One thing I want to bring up is that there is so much confusion in our society when people try to talk about "true trans". Sure, there's always been a tiny percentage of - pretty much men - who suffer a body dysmorphia regarding their sex. But, it is a mental disorder. And we should be kind regarding people who have mental disorders. They have rights, afterall. However, we do not need to (or be forced to) agree with them that the Stork delivered their soul/brain into the wrong body. We are our bodies - whatever one does with them (including self harm by doctor). This societal confusion harms the traditionally dysmoprhic and it harms the girls who each think "they are not like other girls".
Remember Kayleigh Scott? He was even traditionally pretty - and therefore "passed".
Excellent article but I have one minor quibble - the saints Hadley referenced didn’t become saints because of their eating habits but because of actions of sanctity. Catherine of Siena took care of poor sick people, and had a lively correspondence with the pope, urging him to return from the Avignon exile. Now that was real take-chargedness.
yeah, I can't say I don't expect it, but it is a little distasteful to me. I don't think anyone would say that Ghandi was anorexic, and from the history that I know of these saints, I think there self-deprivation was not merely because they were being "forced to marry". It takes all the devotion to Christ out of the equation. I understand why they would maybe bring it up, but when you start thinking the logic through, it just doesn't hold water.
Well- having grown up Catholic- I did see a lot of emphasis on the value of "self-abnegation" for the female saints. Celebrating this, and holding this up as model behavior, has triggered anorexia in more than one young Catholic girl. I'm not saying devotion to Christ wasn't the motivation for their saintly acts, but I believe that a lot of the "story telling" that took place in catechism classes sowed seriously disastrous seeds in vulnerable children's minds.
Kate, sorry I just saw your response to this comment. Thanks for your input! As someone who did not grow up Catholic, it's always good to know more from your perspective. I can see how this could happen. Thanks again for sharing.
I get what you mean, but to be fair, though, most of these women wouldn't be on the cover of vogue, either. Did you click on any of the links to the thin-fluencers? They look really sick. I think that's what this author is saying, too, that while famous, dangerously thin people may be seen as encouraging eating disorders, eating disorders usually hide deeper feelings of anxiety, depression, and lack of control. I think the difference between these people in history that went on hunger strikes/fasting vs eating disorders is the reasoning behind the decision (outward- or inward-facing).
I do think it's not a great analogy, though, the author seems to have picked out a few historical women to make a point while neglecting all the other famous people who have deprived themselves of one thing or another to make a statement, further a cause, or show extreme devotion.
Thank you! I would say this is more than a Minor Quibble. Part of the problem is people like Hadley Freeman (who I assume is fairly secular) to understand someone from the Early/High/Late Middle Ages. Quite simple we (believes/non-believers) look at the world differently than someone is (say) 1123.
For those interested may I recommend Middle Ages The Great Courses Professor Philip Daileader
Never underestimate the value of “family dinner“. Start it early, never give it up. Even with kids scheduled sports and afterschool activities, it is one real thing that parents can provide for their kids. Good nutrition, a forum for ideas and opinions, and of course, love for each other.
Agree completely! Even if it is at 9:30 pm after practice, homework, etc. it is the most important part of the day. And what I miss the most now that my children have moved out...
To link back a series of comments in another thread. Very similar to the transgender phenomena we are living through. Frequently the parents are pushing the children down that road rather than providing guardrails on the road the child is traveling. Whether out of an overly affirming belief they have absorbed in the current cultural confusion (the well-intentioned reason) or for their own social status achieved through virtue signaling their acceptance of a trans child (the ill-intentioned reason) they are abandoning their role as parents.
I went and googled her. You know how on tv shows like csi and others that discover dead bodies? And they have been missing for a while and then they show basically skeletons covered by skin? Well that’s this chick except her skin isn’t mottled or discolored. But she is a walking skeleton, literally and her face looks like a skull with makeup, a lot of makeup.
Clearly she has no muscles, just tendons and I doubt she can pick up anything heavier than a shot glass. Laughably she posts on “beauty”.
OMG, she is disgusting! Her mother must be totally psycho. That girl looks like the prisoners who were rescued from the concentration camps. That family needs an intervention asap!
A while back, WSJ did a great series on how social media amplifies the most upsetting and harmful content. Reporters posed as girls interested in fashion or beauty tips and were quickly led to influencers peddling anorexia, cutting, suicide, and tics. It became impossible to avoid.
If it drives engagement, they like it, unless, of course, it's political speech. Then, they seem very capable of adjusting their algorithms.
Yes, part of it is that-10 years ago at least- insurance didn't want to cover inpatient treatment. Some nit picky loophole about mental illness vs physical, which of course is nonsense. I think you have an equal or better chance at recovering from opioids but heard that anecdotally so am open to correction. Sad all around.
My dad worked at the Coatesville PA VA. That’s a mental hospital.
In the 70’s PA closed inpatient facilities and let everyone go.
Dad said that would lead to homelessness, crone, addiction and death.
He was right.
As for inpatient I’ve actually seen it. That’s not what people think it is. God bless those who work there, because they’re set up to fail.
You’d think America would actually try to fix that but it looks like we are more concerned about what sounds good over solitons which can really save people.
If you want to understand, read Hadley Freeman's book. This type of body hatred is not about wanting to be thin. It's more about saying something without having to speak. In some ways it's about wanting to look ill; to express distress and pain without having to say "hey, I'm in pain over here." It certainly is not about wanting to be attractive.
In her book she discusses this. Apparently her care wasn’t expensive. But she didn’t know about it until she asked her parents many years later. She lived mostly thinking she’d cost her parents a lot of money when she hadn’t.
Kathleen wrote nothing about white men. She was making a true statement about what does/does not aid in anorexia recovery. Like any addiction, it's a family disease.
BTW-- I don't think Kathleen was trying to blame tis on "white men". Just advising that fathers and brothers making comments on their daughters' and sisters' sizes and body shapes (esp approaching puberty) can be very detrimental. I personally was NOT at the receiving end of negative comments from males in my family, but females! (Mother and grandmother!) but I know women who were scarred by being called "thunder thighs" etc. by their fathers!
Of course you’re not. The mcara comment is what you get from someone so embedded in resentment that the actual world (i.e., your quite sensible comment about the difference men make) is essentially invisible. He’s not responding to you; he’s having a conversation with himself. Don’t take the bait!
Yup- friend's dad would offer huge shopping trips ($1,000+) if she hit "goal weight"- well into adulthood. I think he was embarrassed to have a slightly overweight daughter. Now he has a massive beer gut and no shame over it whoatsoever. She was never anorexic but is tormented by her body in a way that I think most American women can relate to.
I guess I was trying to explain why this seems odd to men.
Reading Hadley's book it struck me that what's happening with anorexia and, to some extent, with other mental health issues, is that people are finding different vehicles to communicate distress. And that many mental health problems share deeply unhealthy ways of thinking which are in some ways incomprehensible to people outside of the experience.
I know that what's in the essay is about influencers and the culture surrounding this, how it makes it better or worse. One cannot deny that our culture might encourage certain disorders and that experiences we have with others and what others say influences us. But the unhealthy thinking patterns that lead to unhealthy behaviours are at the core of the issue. After all, some people can hear a silly comment from a relative and be okay, while others will not.
Jenny, we get it, you resent the idea that women would do anything to attract men and not just to satisfy themselves. Got ya. Ok. All power to the feminist ideal. That is an interesting, utopian view, but it is not reality.
But if you are being honest, men and women both do things to attract the other sex. We just do. And whether you particularly do it or do not do it, most women realize that female beauty has a lot of power and brings with it a lot of social capital not just with men but with other women as well. You can rage against the machine all you like but the machine always wins. If nothing else, it will outlast you.
Its is not different than young men learning that being tall, assertive and able to earn a lot of money makes them attractive to large swaths of the female population. Is that "fair"? Do a lot of guys push themselves, even kill themselves, to achieve fitness and economic status just to attract women? Of course they do.
Bottom line, human behavior, whether you like it or not, is largely driven by what will attract the opposite sex. Whether that is women and makeup and bikinis or men with 6 pack abs, shoe lifts and who work 80 hrs a week to win a 6 figure income. Humans do what the other sex responds to and to compete and beat out other members of the same sex in the mating market. It has always been this way and unless someone does some radical gene modifications, it will likely always be that way.
I didn’t say that though. I pointed out that not everything we do has that aim.
Specifically, in this case I really don’t believe women and girls with anorexia are starving themselves because they think it makes them more attractive to men (if anything it’s probably the opposite).
I suspect that fear of growing up, of all that comes with it, to include becoming a sexual creature and all the risks, hurts and fears that come with that, are at the heart of a lot of these behaviors whether anorexia or gender dysphoria.
And I suspect that the boys that want to transition to girls are dealing with similar issues. Going from being a boy that is largely protected and embraced by the women in his life to being forced to compete aggressively with other men, the fear of not being able to, and to being attracted to girls more than legos and all the complications that brings and to realizing that the girls and women in your life see you differently, be that as a threat or as a potential mate, carries its own type of trauma.
It strikes me how many of the more touted transitions from man to woman or even the drag queen personas seem to pick the most “glamorous” and twisted image of womanhood to model...it’s a worship of a stylized, perversely stilted caricature of women playing dress-up in their choice of sparkly or shiny taffeta prom dress, lacquered hair, gloves, pointed maiden form bra mentality sort of a 1940’s to early Jackie-O perfection. Did you see the pictures of the latest trans prom queen from Missouri? Yike! This is celebrated? Then on the opposite spectrum you have women cutting off their breasts & sewing up their wombs..and so many of the trans must take (forever) these ghastly hormone cocktails to change & manifest their idea of secondary sex characteristics that make them either the most attractive or oddly the least noticeable ...the movement seems to embrace some weird juxtaposition of either the a 4 year old’s repeated insatiable demand to their parent, “look at me”, “mom, look at me!” Or the opposite --to uglify oneself as if to crawl under a rock and become invisible. Is all this self image fixation (all a mental illness?) narcissism all about being noticed or absolutely not noticed? The juxtaposition seems so odd how some old time feminists wanted to be seen as masculine strong or not bound by comparative physical strength limits of typical female sex or overly girly traits of societies female stereotype roles as wives in their heterosexual relationship (and similarly some men reacting to the role of macho husband breadwinner) but then in gay relationships someone deliberately chooses to take on the “wife” role with the partner choosing the role of “husband”... so in the homosexual marriage or partnership many times the traditional stereotype societal man-woman roles are emphasized. Somewhere along the line this insistence that everyone else stop what they are doing right now and take notice & applaud what some other person has decided is their true self (and you better like us or else!!) has just plain gotten warped. Do we just have too much time on our hands or is this some form of mass narcissistic psychosis? Isn’t part of what we as humans really need in order to grow is to focus on God? In part so that we can spiritually transcend all this fixation on self and body image?
I would agree that most drag queens and most men that transition to female take on the least sophisticated, least real, most caricatured version of what a woman is.
I've been to drag shows. I know people who have been transvestites and some who have transitioned. The common thread I see is a love / hate relationship to femininity. They seemingly want to embrace it but simultaneously mock it in a grotesque way.
There is, I am convinced, for some, almost a misogynistic attitude, that the caricatures they create are a means of mocking women as opposed to embracing femininity.
Odd then that so many women seem to be fascinated by this and to one degree or another to celebrate it. Not sure they understand the dislike and disdain that underlies it.
I beg to differ! Yes- biology is an impetus, but I have seen people (both men and women) do things to purposely make themselves un attractive to the opposite sex. Yes- it is not the "natural order", but when someone is traumatized (note, I do not say "victimized") by something , they can often develop a coping mechanism- either blanketing themselves in a protective layer of fat and or wearing figure obscuring clothing, not grooming etc. or starving themselves to the point of androgyny or invisibility. No gene modification needed! I'm not saying this is "normal"! Far from it, it is "abnormal", but NOT uncommon.
We all dress and act in ways that best suit our purposes or to make a statement. We all wear some kind of uniform to fit in with our desired environment.
Even kids that purposely dress down, get large tattoos, and nose rings or brow rings are not just dressing for themselves. They are sending a message about their attitude toward life. They are a cliche trying to appear as novel. They are signalling to others like them or to those they wish to be like or engaged with.
No different really than the guy that puts on a Ralph Lauren polo and a pair of khakis and docksiders. Its a uniform that is intended to make a statement of where you see yourself in the social strata and how you want to be perceived.
If people just dressed for themselves, we would all spend our days in sweats and our favorite t-shirt.
No, how we dress, the quality of what we dress in, is signalling to others. Nobody just dresses for themselves. OMG.....every major brand of fashion, every specialty clothing shop, would go out of business if that were true.
Being pleased is emotional. Therefore, there is an emotional tie to how you dress.
Have you asked yourself WHY dressing as you do pleases you?
AND....why do I suspect that if dressing as it pleases you were to subject you to mockery, or to exclude you from a job you really wanted or needed, or would embarrass your parents in public or prevent you from accessing a bar or restaurant that you want to eat at, that you would modify your dress?
If it pleased you to wear a bikini top and short shorts to a PTA meeting just because it pleased you, and if doing so meant that nobody took you seriously when you spoke, or that doing so would subject your young children to be embarrassed at school, would you still do it?
Nobody on this planet dresses just to please themselves. It has a purpose, practical and social. Anyone who says they do is fooling themselves.
I agree! As a man (and I mean in the ages old definition), I understand that the things women do to themselves are the result of self-image and, often, insecure body imaging. The fashion industry has only a small part of this, as it is influenced by gay men who see women as pre-pubescent boys.
Yea most of it is to flag to other women how much effort they put into their appearance. Its to show that you have the skill, money, and time to be a trendsetter. There is an element of trying to attract a member of the opposite sex, however we already know that most do not know about, care, or even notice these trends. Sometimes men specifically say that they don't like some trends (dyed hair, loud makeup, piercings) however it doesnt stop the girlies If it was just about attracting men, then older women and women who are in comfortable in their relationships wouldnt even bother to dress nice because they dont need to attract men and they know that their current partner loves them when they are dressed up or down. However that is not the case at all.
A similar male behavior is working out, participation in sport, and other risky behaviors that show how cool they are (recall the recent TFP article about subway surfers). Sure, a chiseled body can aid with securing a mate, however a lot of it is flagging to other guys how ripped and committed they are to their bodies and appearance.
Women dress for a combination of themselves and other women. Trends in fashion are driven locally by what other women we see (at work, at school, at the PTA meeting, at church) are wearing. We check out each other’s shoes, purses and accessories. Something will take off. A Chloe bag, Tory Burch shoes, Lily Pulitzer pink and green. If the Junior League women are wearing it, it will catch fire. Then everyone is wearing it. Sure we want to be attractive to men, but men rarely notice what you’re wearing other than it “looks good” or you look good in it. Men don’t notice brand names, styles or colors. Women do. We signal to each other what we can afford and how hip we are, whether we’re in the right social group. The fashion industry understands this. Men in general do not. This is why most men in the fashion industry are gay and not straight.
One of my daughters suffered from anorexia in her early teens. It started when she began middle school, her best friend moved to a different school and her body went through puberty and suddenly she was curvy and was attracting attention from boys and men which she was not mentally ready to deal with. Fortunately, we realized what was happening in and got her into treatment early before the behaviors really became entrenched, and she made a full recovery.
Sally, what did the treatment involve? I know a girl who seems to be flirting with eating disorder behaviors, and I am wondering how to help her. What is the approach of a treatment program?
We did an intensive outpatient program with her. It was family-based so my husband and I had to attend with her; and it involved group CBT and DBT therapy for both parents and the patients - sometimes together, sometimes separately, group meals, individual therapy, nutrition therapy with a dietician, and it was 20 hours per week for about eight weeks. We also had to supervise all of her meals to make sure she ate; and at school she had to eat lunch in the nurse’s office so we could be sure she ate. Fortunately my daughter realized she had a problem and was motivated to get well; and she was 14 at the time so the behaviors had not become really entrenched. She’s 18 now and doing great. Getting into treatment early is key; girls who don’t get treated until their 20s have much lower recovery rates.
Thanks for sharing the details. Can you recommend a private therapist who might be available to do zoom sessions? The girl in question fears being “fat”, and has developed eating habits that are counterproductive at best, and, at worst, could lead to serious problems. Thank you!
Unfortunately I don’t know one - this all happened pre-Covid so our experience was with in-person therapists. National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) has a database of therapists and treatment centers on their website. Hopefully you can find someone on there! By the way, many girls with anorexia suffer from anxiety and OCD, which turned out to be the case for my daughter. She reported that after getting on medication, her body dysmorphia subsided dramatically. She still needed a lot of CBT and DBT to learn how to deal with unpleasant feelings; but the medication helped her a lot as well.
Similarly, I know two women who were victims of rape who are obese. They both have said that they didn’t want to seem attractive to men. I’ve lost contact with one of them, but my current friend maintains this attitude even though it’s been over 30 years and she’s married to a man she loves very much. Trauma can affect us in so many ways.
I have a dear friend who experienced child sexual abuse. She is a bodybuilder now (has always lifted weights). I sensed this was her way of protecting herself, by being "strong".
It’s similar with anorexic babies, who are neglected or abused by their mothers. They also don’t eat as a mechanism of control, and to try to elicit a response from the mom. They don’t develop the normal behavior.
Yes, this is it. I suffered from anorexia for years and like Hadley, it had nothing to do with fashion magazines or beauty ideals. I already had a (likely genetic) predisposition to anxiety, and then when I hit puberty, the experience of being perceived as a maturing, sexual being (I starting getting breasts early) while I still felt like a child was terrifying. Starving myself was very much about trying to make that stop.
The male equivalent to anorexia is also anorexia. I don’t remember seeing it in boys decades ago when I was young, but I see it now among the children of friends.
I had a male friend who was hospitalized for anorexia at age 12/13 back in the late 70's. He had always been chubby and was tired of being mocked- and went off the deep end- starving himself. eventually normalized.
Girl or woman with curves? As the writer points out, she was afraid of becoming a woman. Some people also have sexual trauma, which I can imagine only makes anorexia (or for, instance, temporary gay or trans identities) more appealing, to avoid further external trauma.
The idea of anorexia being a way to stop puberty is not something I had ever thought of but it makes a ton of sense. I had always thought it was only about being thin.
It is the flip side of excess eating and unhealthy weight gain. Both are unconscious tactics to ward off the male/female attraction, and both can, and DO, have catastrophic health repercussions.
When my daughter developed anorexia, she had zero interest in fashion or beauty. She just wasn’t quite ready to change from a child to a young woman and refusing to eat gave her a sense of control.
About 10 year ago, a psychiatrist friend of mine told me that she and her colleagues were starting to see anorexia in Baby Boomer women, so maybe it’s also a way in their minds to stave off old age and post menopausal weight gain. Shortly after she told me, I ran into one of the (formerly) most beautiful woman in my town, a former marathoner, who was positively skeletal.
I tend to think most Boomers who lean towards being very thin are less interested in control than they are betrayed by their lack of interest in food. I no longer find many foods I used to like palatable My tastebuds have changed a great deal. A friend of mine had the same issue: certain tastes, once enjoyed, no longer carried any pleasure.
We eat less many times because the food is less enjoyable and we also aren’t hungry as much. Not because we want control.
Different side of the same coin but there was an Amy Winehouse documentary a few years ago that was pretty enlightening about this sort of thing. She had bulliema, and disordered eating started for her around the same time as her parents divorce (there could be more causes, but appeared to be a control thing too) but pretty enlightening about eating disorders. Still sad and tragic bc the eating disorder contributed to her death maybe even more so than the addictions. Her body couldn’t handle it when she relapsed bc of all the damage from the disordered eating.
I have to wonder if this new push for “fat liberation” isn’t the same thing, just the other side of the coin. In some corners of the Internet, people look on as women starve themselves. “Here’s my healthy plate with two peanuts on it.” In others, they watch as people eat themselves into an early grave. “Here’s everything I eat in a day as a 400 pound woman.” I understand that social media is neither the direct or singular cause of mental illness, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders, but it surely isn’t helping. I also wonder if any responsibility can be laid at the feet of spectators. Is there a moral obligation to step in in the same way many of us believe we have a moral obligation to stand up against gender affirmation?
>I understand that social media is neither the direct or singular cause of mental illness, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders, but it surely isn’t helping.
I'm starting to think social media, and 24/7 access to the internet in general (that is, cell phone addiction), has *a lot* to do with the ills of today. With issues like anorexia and the transgender movement, it may indeed be a very direct cause (if not *the* cause). Ask yourself this...if social media were to never have been developed, would we have these issues? I think the answer is a resounding "no". Hard to know for sure, and it's certainly only my opinion, but I suspect neither anorexia nor transgenderism would be issues of such large scale in the absence of social media.
In Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, she talks about cyclical eras of social contagion among primarily teenage girls. Anorexia and Bulimia was the big one in the 80s and 90s (sounds like when this author struggled), self-mutilation was in the early 2000s, and the most recent decade was been marked by transgenderism, particularly in teen females despite historically afflicting primarily boys/men. All to say, this has been happening for decades and predates social media.
At this scale? Absolutely not - I agree with you there. But to Hadley’s point, they would still exist. Social media is amplifying and spreading it. I definitely believe in social contagion. Without it, cases would be rarer, especially for the gender issues. If we were able to weed out the cases caused by social contagion, the small percentage remaining would be brought on by other factors.
Something similar happened in England in the 15th century. One of the first non-bible books to be published there was about how to identify witches. It became very widely read across the country, and thousands of women were drowned and burned.
Social Media, or as I call it Antisocial Media, promotes the abnormal and sensational. it provides a platform to those who would otherwise be unknown, ignored or powerless. But the power it provides is illusory unless it is a money maker.
I don't think it's social media per se but rather 24/7 access to media in general. Growing up, we played outdoors, did school events, etc. Access to media consisted of watching TV for a couple of hours at night and maybe listening to the radio or music while doing something else. This left enough time to have the realization that media is exaggerated for entertainment purposes vs. now where media is a constant presence.
Plus the media has much better tools and much more skill at targeting, and monetizing, any cohort of the population that can help them turn a profit. In in the search for that profit they have abandoned any sort of moral compass at all.
With two daughters who suffered from anorexia in their teens this brings back memories and the times that were challenging but showed our family’s strength and love, especially my wife. They were dancers which has always been encouraging of a lithe figure. Both are now in their thirties and doing well. Thanks for the thoughtful and insightful article as it will be helpful for those that are now going through what many of us did in the past.
In my opinion the medieval women are more akin to monks who go on hunger strikes than modern day anorexics. Women protesting arranged marriages using the only lever of power they had. I find no such nobility of cause in modern anorexia which makes it even more horrific and heartbreaking.
I had the same thought about the medieval examples, which seem to have nothing to do with the modern illness. Her inclusion of those examples makes it sound more like "something women have always had to deal with" instead of what it more likely is, a particularly modern phenomenon in response to modern culture and conditions.
As I put in my comment elsewhere here, I’d be a lot more interested in seeing the modern timeline - I’m guessing cases were close to zero, then all of a sudden took off. When was that, and what changed?
My daughter was slightly anorexic for a time it was frightening. I found a way to make my daughter eat by supplying her everyday with pancakes which she found hard to resist! Not a good diet I know but then we kept adding things like fruit or veg. I will never make a pancake ever again it was draining. She is fine now. Luckily I worked at home which is not available to a lot of parents.
Control and fear ... the two operative words that permeate this piece. Girls who fear growing up and girls who want some control in a world where they have little and don't see that changing. That is literally adolescence in a nutshell.
As Mr. Giunta rightly observes in the comments section, there is a lot of overlap with the trans movement. Both involve children who are at war with their bodies.
Anorexia and trans, however, give young people tribes and attention and protection. In the trans case, it also has the noxious reality of having captured the medical system in a Munchausen-like doom loop that enmeshes the mentally ill child with a parent (typically a mother) who now has a tribe with a medical establishment that now has a cause (and a very lucrative forever patient). Can one imagine the medical system not trying to cure an anorexic but rather profiting off of her by cutting her apart, limb by limb, to weigh less? Of course not. That would be monstrous - and malpractice.
Add to all of this the utter stupidity of social media and you have a perfect storm that spreads mental illness like a contagion. Luckily for the author, she lived in a time when the adults around her recognized that she had an illness and treated her for it. Now, most of those adults would profit from it financially, socially, and emotionally in some form because something has changed in the underbelly of our social order. There's a rot there that is difficult to articulate. Perhaps the only hope is to bring it into the light where sunshine acts as an antiseptic. I have less faith this will happen as the trans and anorexic and related illnesses become normalized, fetishized, profitized, and - as with the medieval anorexics - sanctified in the new church of woke.
My best wishes to the author for her continued good health and my thanks for raising awareness through her writing.
As more "women" transition to become "a man", and then reading about female self-harm, it is becoming more and more clear that women , in larger numbers, are expressing a hatred of their own bodies. Why? Is it because of societal or media agitprop? Or is there some deeper reason?
I wonder how much the advent of easy porn has been a factor. Porn magazines were highly visible when I was growing up -- you could see them in grocery stores. Today porn is as accessible as the phone in your pocket and far more warped, with a great deal more violence. How could this not have an impact on how developing girls see their bodies?
And how prevalent was anorexia (or gender dysphoria) before porn was so widespread?
Bruce, even those women who are declaring themselves as "non-binary" are expressing the same emotion. The young female lead of a populat zombie thriller has expressed that as well. But if you look at her, she appears to be far from the idealized image of femininity. Not "ugly", but not "beautiful" either. Just average. But that is not enough for some women.
Did that comment make you feel particularly virtuous? The difference is that teenage boys do not drive major sectors of the internet and economy. Except, perhaps, for pro sports leagues and video games.
It was just a comment Bruce, just a comment. No intent, otherwise. By the way, teen boys kill themselves with their actions more directly, and quickly, than teen girls. I'm just comparing the two, not excusing anyone.
This article makes me wonder about a possible connection between anorexia and transgender victims. The author references a seizure of power and that seems to be the case to an even greater degree with trans people.
BINGO. We've been trying to point that out for years now. Same idea, different strategy. Except one can get help and recover from anorexia, become a healthy weight and lead a healthy life. But one can't reattach the breasts they had removed and the uterus that they discarded because they wanted to become a "man." It's very, very sad to watch what's happening right now.
There’s a reason we don’t have ‘slender affirming care’ for people with anorexia. It’s because that would be psychotic.
There's that lack of acceptance again -- I mean accepting problem thinking and acting as a problem and instead pretending so as to "affirm" the psychosis.
I've picked up a lot of good information about diet and exercise from young people. They have some good things to say about consciousness around personal diet, exercise and metabolism.
From reading PITT group stories, seemed like many young girls had prior eating disorders before declaring a trans identity.
When I worked I weighed 167 pounds on a 5 feet 11 inches frame. After I retired I gained about 35 pounds and weighed 200 pounds and had resigned myself to that weight. But then I was diagnosed with diabetes. I knew there was a relationship between weight and diabetes.
I hate taking meds. I never considered myself a fanatic but I hate taking meds and a switch turned on in my mind and I stopped eating. Really I modified my diet. When I went to a restaurant the first thing I ordered was a to-go box and I would scrape half my order into the box. After supper I wouldn't snack, eat anything at all. I was hungry all the time but it got to the point when I looked at food, I would say to myself, "I don't need that." and I wouldn't eat it.
I told my wife that I knew how anorexics felt. It would piss her off.
Anyway at 165 pounds I started eating normally again and 20 years later I am about 157-8 pounds. I still don't eat any simple carbs, potatoes, rice, white bread. All of this paid off. I have never taken any diabetes meds and my blood sugar is within range.
I realize not everybody has the fanatical discipline I had. It baffles me how I did it because I don't think of myself as disciplined.
The upshot of all this is. I have some, not all, knowledge how an anorexic feels.
Agreed on avoiding carbs. I started the carnivore diet in July and have dropped 30 pounds very quickly. I even moved to one meal a day just to make it easier. Big steak for dinner, don't eat again until the next evening. I never even feel hungry, and have started doing some short (2-3 day) fasting just to prove that I can. It's amazing what a deleterious effect carbs have on your body and mind, and what eliminating them can do for your quality of life.
I do eat complex cards like greens.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick at FOUND MY FITNESS has two FREE vegetable smoothie recipes at the sight which I recommend and personally make up about twice a week. --- A look at her appearances on Joe Rogan is worth the time.
If it works, it works. I'm certainly not one to preach on health topics or any other, but I'm glad you found a healthy way of eating. It's hard to swim against the tide of what foods are pushed through advertising and culture, but I feel like more people are waking up to the negative consequences of the Standard American Diet.
After I stopped eating until I was stuffed, eating after dinner and randomly snacking because I was bored, I stopped being hungry all the time. Your body gets used to it and the pounds will come off. Most of the people (not all) with type 2 diabetes have the ability to control it without drugs, it takes a lot of will power and some discomfort.
It's part of a larger fad/social media-driven social contagion. Social media puts all these phenomena on steroids. Younger people look at this stuff and sometimes wrongly conclude that what's bothering them (actually delusions) are somehow "affirming" because it affirms the problem as something positive.
"Gender Affirming Care" is what used to be called Conversion Therapy. Insanity.
Another way of putting it
And we are not called "bigots" if we point out that the anorexic girl (who tries to avoid puberty and becoming a woman) is mentally ill. We are not expected to "affirm" her delusion.
Absolutely. Difference though is our government, AMA, and powers that be seem to applaud transgenderism while at the same time acknowledging that anorexia is a mental illness.
They applaud transgenderism and REWARD it by even going as far as appointing Trans or Gender- Benders to government positions (Rachel Levine and that other dude Sam Brinton).
And if that isn't bad enough - they even promote obesity as "body positive" now....
Ladies and gentlemen, you've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone
sure way to cut population on a voluntary basis , pure genius
Yes. The main differences are that anorexia was never seen as important to a political objective (like DIE) and it did not make anyone rich the way Gender Identity does. A healthy person does not make a lot of money for the pharma and medical complexes we have today but with trans you get a lifetime patient. See: "U.S. Sex Reassignment Surgery Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Gender Transition (Male To Female, Female To Male), And Segment Forecasts, 2022 - 2030" Synthetic Sex hormones were always a drug looking for a market (sex criminals, menopausal women, etc.).
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-sex-reassignment-surgery-market Think of the baby formula companies, fertility clinics and surrogacy business that will make $$ later, too.
See also the words of Corina Cohn who has written about being on the leash of synthetic hormone "therapy". https://corinnacohn.substack.com/p/the-medical-leash-of-hormone-replacement
Pedro Gonzalez has pointed to the deadly and destructive trifecta of ideology, politics, and profits that came together in the Trans Travesty - in his "Transgender Leviathan". https://pitt.substack.com/p/lets-read-the-transgender-leviathan
I found this FP chillingly on the nose for Trans:
" I paused time by starving and arresting my puberty.
Anorexia gave me nothing. All it did was take away my teens and twenties. But for the medieval girls, it gave them enormous power. Like today’s anorexia influencers, these once-anonymous girls accrued followers, clout, and fame."
Girls get lots of social clout with "trans" identity. They come to really believe it as well which is cult like.
It’s the same with obesity --> diabetes, heart disease, etc. = $$$ for the pharmaceutical companies. Not to mention that heart disease is the leading killer in this country, I believe it’s higher for women too.
it is all going to plan. Make money killing people slowly
"...with trans you get a lifetime patient."
Except really you don't. The average lifespan after surgery to remove sexual organs to "affirm" sex is 10 years. That's for adults. We don't even know what average life span is for kids who do it. But it's not going to good, and I suspect the receipts are going to come due a lot sooner that people are expecting.
"Gender affirming" care is a fast bus to death. My brother in law died 11 years after his surgery from a treatable disease he chose not to treat, so conveniently not recorded as a suicide. His family knows better. So, a lot like anorexia there too.
I'm sorry to hear about your sister's husband.
Most of the masses of AYA (Adolescent and Young Adult) ROGD girls don't go as far as sex organ removal. More typically its synthetic testosterone (which is destructive enough) and too often double mastectomy. Government, Pharma, "Medicine" and "Admiral" Levine have a lot to answer for.
The lawsuits alone are going to cripple America.
We don't always get that anorexia is a mental illness. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see the emergence of "slenderism" and "slender affirmation."
I am amazed how transgenderism was once treated as an illness and is now treated as usual. If you take the woke playbook to this article, the Woke could say that high mortality rates are more from the hatred and exclusion of skinny people, and if we scorned people who want them to live in a healthy manner, then most would not die but thrive. I think being woke is another mental disorder that hurts more people than it helps.
Wokeness certainly warps perspective. Note also how we are told to believe that being gay is something you are born with and have no choice about, but being trans is a decision and your birth gender is immaterial. Fabulous hypocrisy.
Yes! My sister is a recovered anorexic and she looks at the transgender madness as very similar. What if, when an anorexic insists that she is fat—even though we can all see that she is stick thin—we were all pressured to validate her and offer “affirming care”? In this case, perspective-affirming care looks like agreeing that she’s fat and then helping her go on a diet.
Usually when someone is completely out of touch with objective reality (ie, having a penis but insisting you’re a woman), we consider that a mental illness. To affirm it is, itself, madness. We don’t do it with any other kind of dysmorphia.
It is certainly a psychological disorder, and a criminal one if it mosies over the line into grooming.
Thank you for this awareness which had hitherto not occurred to me!
How is transgenderism and anorexia considered to be the same as being aware?
It is the reality the person sees. The anorexic sees health, the transgender feels they are something they are not, and the woke's awareness is more orthodoxy and ideology rather than reality.
You've changed the meaning of woke. There is no "woke's awareness," there is only awareness.
Call it "perception," then.
There is no "woke" perception, there is only perception. Only humans and animals can be aware. There is no such thing as a "woke."
The term "woke" in Black vernacular used to refer to "awareness". The term "Woke"now has become synonymous with the obsessive hyper-awareness of social issues involving LGBTQA+ and trends being driven by social media (body positivity for obesity and acceptance of pedophilia among them).
Awareness of racism is still in the mix but seems to have taken a back seat to social media frenzy surrounding LGBTQA++
Actually, it came from the conservative aphorism "wake up, America."
As always, liberals ruined it like everything they touch.
nice catch
That term first appeared on a poster in 1917, it was not connected to a political party or movement.
It’s from colonial days, and it was quite conservative in nature.
Hadley's reasoning for becoming anorexic (stopping puberty/not wanting to grow up) is very telling for this connection
Absolutely connected. Also, the religious element to both is clear: transfiguration, transubstantiation.
Transfiguration and transubstantiation have nothing to do with transgenderism. Whether your believe/accept them or not, the former are, literally, metaphysical explanations for things that aren't and can't be made manifest in physical reality. Transgenderism is an inner disturbance that sufferers insist MUST be made manifest in physical reality and asserted by everyone else.
You're missing all the obvious points here, but I don't have time to educate you. Good luck!
There are no obvious points. Transfiguration refers to when Christ took John and Peter up on a mountain and his body was transformed into the glorious body he had in heaven. Transubstantiation refers to the belief that the communion elements are transformed into representations of the body and blood of Christ (I'm not Catholic, so please forgive me if I am not quite right on this). Nothing to do with mental illness and eating or sex disorders.
Cynthia-Decades back there was a wonderful woman who supported men's efforts at re-capturing and participating in a healthy masculine by providing a definition of the healthy feminine. One book she wrote was on Anorexia.
THE OWL WAS A BAKERS DAUGHTER:Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine. A Psychological Study. (139p) by Marion Woodman
Of course the popular press and misandrist feminists did everything they could to undermine the conversation.
You are correct in your definitions. Attempting to tie them to "trans" is altogether specious.
In the Transfiguration, the apostles saw Christ's divinity. His body didn't change. Nothing about him changed, because he was and is always both fully human and fully divine. In Transubstantiation, the essence of the wine and bread are changed to the essence of Christ (not representations of them) -- but their physical qualities remain exactly the same. This is accomplished by a miracle, by God. While the priest says the words and makes the gestures, he doesn't make it happen. There is nothing a person can do to change the essence of a thing without also changing its physical properties (through chemical reactions, etc.) The Orthodox Churches also believe this, although they don't put it in the same words -- what both maintain is that the metaphysical reality of the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but the physical reality stays the same. Whether or not one agrees with these teachings, they are metaphysically logical and sound--either true, or false, but not just a muddle of ideas.
People who advocate for "transgenderism" say that their metaphysical reality is different from their bodies, but that it matches the physical reality of other bodies. But as it is our bodies that give us sex, it makes no sense to say that a man is "really a woman inside," or is a "woman born in a man's body." Moreover, they have no way of knowing what a person of the opposite sex's "inner reality" is in the first place. On top of that, they say that their bodies must be mutilated and drugged to make them "conform to their inner reality." None of these things are logically or metaphysically sound. They might as well say they have the inner reality of turnip.
That's an interesting way to say you're wrong--although I have no idea why you bothered to do so, when you could just have ignored my comment.
There is no connection between either transfiguration and transgenderism or transubstantiation and transgenderism-- just the prefix "trans." They are opposites.
Exactly!
Well I am missing them too. I don’t want a diatribe, but are you suggesting Christianity is as destructive as anorexia and transgender ideology?
No, I'm saying that Transfiguration and Transubstantiation have nothing to do with Transsexualism.
Yes! So many parallels. My older daughter went from anorexia to identifying as “non binary” after her second hospitalization. Her 15yo sister who idolizes her now identifies as a “gay man”. I see so much in common with trans and eating disorders right before my eyes. The author talks about her fear of growing up and and becoming a woman, freezing time. Identifying out of becoming a woman and essentially rejecting your own sexed body through self harm is exactly what my younger daughter is doing - only this time it’s trans.
Oh you poor thing… I m so sorry you and your daughters are going through this. I flew my pre-teen kids away from the US last month because of all this. I hope for a healthy resolution for your family. 🙏🏻
A wise move enjoy your new home
I'm sorry your family is going through this. I wish there'd be some discussion (social, medical, political, etc) about why puberty and womanhood seems so terrifying to so many girls. It's been discussed on TFP before, but as a wider society it's something we need to fix.
I feel for you, and I see this quite often, w/ the female to male trans. Why would they want to jump into being "a woman" when there is so much baggage, so much pressure? The stakes are high! Be a Kardashian or a Cardi B. etc. etc. or what? And they are expected to navigate sexual encounters so early!
🥲🥲
Although she hints that it has something to do with her relationship with her mother, Hadley Freeman’s article provides no insight into why she was anorexic. I have yet to see any anorexics in person, but I see a lot of fat people. Do fat people don’t get treatment for their over eating and lack of exercise disorder. Free Press could perform a public service by promoting healthy lifestyles. This article concentrates on the skinny trees and ignores the fat forest.
She says it pretty clearly actually. She was scared to grow up and develop into a woman, and she wanted to stay close to her mother. It seems like she was trying to pause/stop puberty, and it developed from there
Anxiety, depression, and control are the major themes of anorexia. The food rituals and the mirror are just the vehicles.
Anorexia is a specific mental illness. It has its own language and way of being. It’s not like obesity. Promoting healthy lifestyles won’t help treat anorexia.
I’m reading her book. Her mother and other female relatives were anorexics on both sides of her family. So I would think it is mostly an inherited trait.
That’s interesting. I have not read the book (or even heard of it) but my H’s brother has a daughter who was anorexic in high school. She went through medical treatment and eventually recovered, BUT that entire family to this day has and had a ridiculous obsession with weight and body size. The anorexic girl’s older sister was/is fat, not just overweight. The father, my BIL, was/is fat, not just overweight. And I mean really, really LARGE. H’s parents were always perfect: perfect size, perfect clothes, perfect house, perfect athleticism, perfect, perfect, perfect. As grandparents they constantly complained to my BIL why he didn’t lose weight and why he let his fat daughter be so big. The fat daughter decided her grandparents didn’t love her because she was fat. At some level the younger sister must have gotten the message that you have to be thin to be loved and she became anorexic.
Fwiw, years later I began to realize that my MIL (Mrs. Perfect) was probably anorexic herself. As I spent more time around her the eating (or not eating) patterns emerged. When her H, my FIL lost a ton of weight she proudly said, “Look, Grandpa is back to his college weight!” Well, to me he looked like he had cancer. Guess what? He had cancer!
H’s sister was also fat growing up. She was convinced her mother didn’t love her because she was fat. My H was the only normal sized kid they had. His siblings fumed he was “the favorite”. Even today SIL and BIL are constantly on a diet, constantly obsessing about their weight. SIL finally lost so much weight she looked like she had cancer (she didn’t). But she then gained back 20 lbs and is still thin, and still exercises 2-3 hours a day and eats very little (vegetarian) to stay as thin as possible. She now has Parkinson’s and that is a whole other pile of trouble.
Anyway, this family is always talking about food and obsessing over it. I think that’s the root of their dietary problems. Inherited obsession.
I think it is a culturally inherited trait, not genetic, but passed on verbally. I speak from direct experience!
Terence- perhaps visit some college campuses? Anorexia manifests itself there quite often.
I think it’s why we are seeing guidance from the NHS to let some anorexics starve. We affirm trans children’s delusions but we haven’t affirmed those with eating disorders. Until now.
It seems that democrats are morbid about humanity. Abortion until the moment of birth, let anorexics die, destroy puberty with blockers or surgery, assisted death, human composting. I don't hear about republicans or red states pushing in these directions, only blue states. I used to live in Vermont, deep blue and full of all this crap. And the locals are passionate about it, framing the elimination of life as women's right to choose, or freedom to be yourself, or some other cliche that makes a negative sound positive. It is obnoxious and hard to live with, so I happily moved to a red state where rational thought seems to be congregating these days.
All fascism/totalitarianism requires the reduction of human dignity to "thingdom". The individual, human liberty, speech and thought must be subsumed and controlled by the bureaucratic State. The American Republic is founded on, and the Constitution enshrines, protection of individual human rights and freedom. The DNC is a weaponized psyop controlled by international criminal financiers who are using Maoist/Stalinist tactics to dismantle the Republic. It's not something else. The insanity witnessed in "Blue States" is pathological not political.
There is a lot to unpack here. I agree that groupthink is the democrat way of homogenizing society. They adopted cancel culture and rode that wave all the way to LBGTQ++ vote gathering nirvana. Same thing with unrestricted abortion rights. Same thing with DEI and ESG. Same thing with broadcasting approved talking points to MSM, who swallow them whole and regurgitate ad nauseam. Bribes from Ukraine and China aren't bribes at all, but a phone call is an impeachable offense. The laptop lie, the election lie, the emails lie, the border lie, the Afghan withdrawal lie, the Russia collusion lie, DOJ Hunter Biden lies, laws named to hide reason for spending lies, etc. Rules for everyone but themselves.
Totalitarianism demands control and distortion of the national narrative, and the creation of a hyperreality to prevent the fact/truth/solutions based American national dialogue "..we the people.." deserve. DNC/surveillance state sleight of hand runs cover for the criminal financiers looting the world economy. Living inside a lie is crazy making. Like yourself, people who lie in my face when I can see their actions are creating human damage makes me angry. I often say that Marxist "woke" is the lipstick on a pig called totalitarian finance. The one serves the other. I can choose not to be "gaslit" but the way to clarity while living in a society suffering disintegration and polarization like ours is difficult. Especially when a huge amount of the chaos is pathology and has no actual bearing on politics or a healthy human reality. In most cases the popular narrative doesn't fit the reality. --- My view:
(1) The only legitimate frame of reference and the only legitimate engine of survival for human dignity and freedom is the American Republic and its Constitution. A conscious decision to think and act as a CITIZEN of the Republic is the first step forward. Most of us (myself included), having been propagandized into believing that a Democracy and a Republic are the same thing. They're not. The destruction of statues, the distortion of American history, attacks on American free speech and principals, etc. is weaponized pathological Marxist psychology: If you don't know where came from, you don'r know who you are. As in the case of the feminist attack on men, it pretends moral concern, but is in reality an assault on personal identity and a form of spiritual/emotional homicide.
(2) "ism's" are dead. Criminal finance looted and destroyed free markets and capitalism and the communist destroyed communism. Social/cultural chaos, the collapsing infrastructure surrounding everyday American life and the capture of elected American political leadership is proof that capital has abandoned America. The looting of American tax dollars and natural resources will continue until collapse. Consider the million dollar a year class room that can't teach a child to read.
(3) An international cabal of criminal financiers (EU/WEF/Wall Street/CCP) is attempting to install and overlay a CCP style surveillance system over the peoples of the world.
As proof I point to the ongoing destruction of American cities, the middle class, the assault on civil liberties in Europe, Canada and Australia, the DNC's criminalization of the American voter, its creation of the CIC and its attempts through threat and intimidation to capture tech/communications and bring it under control of the FBI/CIA.
(4) This is a new age. The leap in consciousness created by the leap in tech and communications makes the political/financial grift transparent to human moral reason. THE FIGHT IS: Who will control the American destiny? Again: This is 20th Century retro. The A-Bomb and the attempt of criminal financiers to install a Maoist/Stalinist totalitarianism proves them visionless. Our Constitution, an entirely human document, unique in its proclamation of the right to unrestricted subjective individuality and human freedom, was written for times like these. "..we the people" are the necessary change. D.C. was/is and will be a hog trough of special interests. It's time to remember who we are and act in our own best interest.
Well "Abortion until the moment of birth" is bullshit., but I think you already know that. I totally agree that the left has made the wonderful freedom! to abort too much of a positive! experience with no downsides, but very few, if any, leftist / wokesters advocate for literal "Abortion until the moment of birth." (Unless you are conflating that with abortions to A: save the life of the mother or B: abort a child who is either already dead or will die within hours of being born...?)
I formerly lived in Vermont (abortion is allowed in all stages of pregnancy) and before that in New Jersey (Abortion is not restricted based on gestational age) - parenthetical comments taken from online sources. Both states (among others) really do legally allow for abortion up to the moment of birth. That is the law. It is allowed. It is not a crime to do it. If it is never done, or so morally impossible to even consider doing it, why do we need the law to be written that way? The laws mention nothing about saving a life or miscarriages. So no, it is not bullshit to note it.
The Women's Health Act of 2022 directly and unequivocally refutes that comment.
Miscarriages are not abortions.
My niece had a "late term abortion" at law when her child died inside her one week before its due date, and her doctors had to get it out of her body for the sake of her own health. It was also considered an "abortion" at law when she lost a child at four months, and she had to have a procedure to remove the dead baby from her body.
The PROCEDURE of removing the child from the womb, dead or alive, is an "abortion." A "miscarriage" is the spontaneous expulsion of a child before 20 weeks. It does not involve a procedure to remove the child from the womb.
When states make laws that completely ban "abortions," they are banning the procedure regardless of whether the baby is alive or not.
That approaches accuracy but doesn’t meet it.
Miscarriage is a colloquial term for spontaneous abortion.
Provide us with existing law which provides no exception for the life of the mother. So far, I can’t find any that do not provide for the three exceptions.
Why do we keep voting these Democrats in, this is all our cancer, we need to sever it now before the world tips off it’s axis.
Good question with a complicated answer, which I don’t pretend to know. Better republican candidates would help. So would ending the indoctrination that occurs in colleges. The media is biased at least partly because of the fact that they are joined at the hip with their college buddies in D.C. who they want to help stay in power for future access to jobs and power for themselves. But I agree that we have to get democrats out before it’s too late.
Thank you Rob, an excellent reply.
This is addressed in my book, Good Girls
In between there was "cutting" as "a cry for help". And way before all these were the Salem Witch Trials where unhinged young girls all saw the same things, experienced the same things, did the same things.
In the case of females, both want to opt out of becoming a woman. What are we doing to these girls that they fear womanhood?
The prospect of being an adult where you are expected to make your own choices and life altering decisions is daunting for teen boys too. We have made that more difficult for boys with the emasculation movement, stripping them of their rites of passage so that they are less prepared to deal with their more risk-taking peers. So too with girls, but in the opposite direction. Aim high, you are at least as good as a male. But in reality, the physical differences are significant - size and strength to start, but later drive and focus. Can women overcome these things? Of course, but only on a less common individual basis, not across the board. It is especially daunting when the strong tendency toward motherhood is hormonally inevitable. So, as a teen girl, remove the limiting hormones and the obvious physical clues that you are not male, and presto you are with almost instant gratification more ready to take on the world. Except that you are not more ready just from that silver bullet. The real work still needs doing and you are then also permanently deformed. Please overlook my mixed metaphors.
I mentioned this very idea to a person and found out they work for a major hospital system and they said “we have to treat them with gender affirming care it’s our job we have no choice” they just shrugged their shoulders.
This article makes me want to eat a steak
Tranorexia 🎯
I think "Transorexia" would roll off the tongue more easily. Just add s.
Yes. Look at that Dylan guy. If he’s not anorexic he plays a good one on tv. He’s made a lot of money off being a freak.
Yes, I’ve been saying this for a long time-Trans could be another form of body dysmorphia. If so, should be treated as such; with compassion and empathy. It shouldn’t be politicized. It’s like what I’ve heard about Alzheimers and the connection to sugar. In some circles, Alzheimers is refered to as Type 3 Diabetes. Trans might be on the body dysmorphia spectrum with bulimia, anorexia, etc...
Wonderful article and I commend the author for her courage, tenacity and vulnerability to share and enlighten us.
It is another form of body dysmorphia!
The concept of control is critical to understanding anorexia and other eating disorders. Social media is an amplifier of these problems, even 20 years ago when my daughter had anorexia, there were online groups that encouraged/rewarded/enabled her thinking. Advice on disguising starvation,cutting and defying parents. We had to severely restrict access to this poison as part of her recovery. Interestingly she became deeply involved in horse training and riding, which allowed a much more positive sense of control. Saved her life actually.
“There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”
― Winston S. Churchill
Or girl.
This caught my eye....
"I simply had a fear of growing up and becoming a woman and I didn’t feel ready to separate from my mother. "
I have no scientific proof, but I would hypothesize that this is very likely similar to what is going on with gender dysphoria.
My fiance's teen daughter, in 8th grade, concluded that she was a boy. She wanted a breast binder and to start on puberty blockers. She gave up girls clothing and she covered her hair after cutting it short. It started when her best friend decided that she was trans. Her parents supported her emotionally, got her counseling but even after tantrums and boat loads of tears they refused to let her have a binder or do any kind of transition. They never yelled or judged, they just calmly said "no" and moved ahead, holding her to the same academic and behavioral expectations they always had.
Now, her mother will tell you that she is the baby of the family, the one that most closely clings to her mother and father, the one that wanted to stay close to home to go to college. She feels safe and happy in the family nest. She did not, and to some degree still does not, want the world to change, to grow up, to see her parents grow older, to deal with the harsh realities of adult life. She actually got upset when she found out her older sister had had sex for the first time. She got borderline angry when that same sister chose to move to the other coast to go to college.
Her mother will also tell you that she is a stunning beauty and has a killer bikini body. She carries herself in a way that would make you think she is older than she is. She is a great wit and highly intelligent. Well, I would agree with her mother. She is a very beautiful girl with curves. In short, she started to attract a lot of attention from boys and men as a freshman in HS.
Long story short, she is now a junior in HS and has given up the trans thing and is dressing much more in keeping with a girl her age. For the first time she is showing a strong interest in boys. She is looking at colleges all over the country. She says that she feels like she can do it because she saw her sister do it.
The thread I see here, that compares to that line from the author I put in above, is a fear of growing up, of puberty, of becoming a sexual creature, one that attracts male attention whether that is positive or negative. I see a thread of fear of the world changing, parents ageing, and of adulting, a desire to retain that feeling of safety and comfort you get in childhood if you are lucky.
As a man who grew up in a matriarchy, grew up in the country with his mother and 3 younger sisters, who of his 27 first cousins only 4 are male, and who participated in female dominated sport (horseback riding), I have seen a LOT of preteen and teenage girls go through that awkward transition from child to young woman. I have seen a lot of the emotional turmoil around it. Boys go through it too, but later and in a different way. Male puberty brings on a similar discomfort, boys feel the fear of adulthood too, the differences are that boys start to fear less and become more aggressive, they tend to want to attack the world more as opposed to be protected from it.
My suspicion is that the same things that cause some young women to engage in eating disorders also are at the root of gender dysphoria and I think that gender dysphoria is as contagious among young women as is anorexia. I think all young people can be subject to social contagion but I firmly believe that the more social nature of women makes them more susceptible than men and boys. As with most things comparing men and women, the factors involved are all the same but the proportions of them are different.
The question I think we need to ask ourselves is; How do we manage these dangerous social contagions in an age of social media? I'm not sure that we managed them well before social media. I'm not even sure that we have been willing to admit that social contagions of this type are real.
This: “I'm not even sure that we have been willing to admit that social contagions of this type are real.” Thanks for your thoughtful comment. It’s sad to see so many adults unable to see what is right in front of them.
Very good comment. Reading it when I got to "[H]ow do we manage ..." my mind went to the rampant feminization of education. It is time for a correction there I think.
Well said.
How do you manage this social contagion? You inoculate your kids at a young age by teaching them things like "your sex was determined at the moment of conception" so when they hear it was "assigned at birth" the first time it already sounds incorrect. Psychiatrist, Dr Miriam Grossman discusses these strategies in her book, "Lost in Trans Nation."
You nip it in the bud immediately, I would suggest the parents band together and fight the system in schools because that’s were it is starting. When all else fails pull them out and home school them. I know it’s easier said then done. These schools don’t care about our children it’s up to us to care!
That is pretty brilliant, Wrung Out Lemon. I see my daughter in much of what you say.
Re: "her best friend decided that she was trans" That's pretty typical. One thing I want to bring up is that there is so much confusion in our society when people try to talk about "true trans". Sure, there's always been a tiny percentage of - pretty much men - who suffer a body dysmorphia regarding their sex. But, it is a mental disorder. And we should be kind regarding people who have mental disorders. They have rights, afterall. However, we do not need to (or be forced to) agree with them that the Stork delivered their soul/brain into the wrong body. We are our bodies - whatever one does with them (including self harm by doctor). This societal confusion harms the traditionally dysmoprhic and it harms the girls who each think "they are not like other girls".
Remember Kayleigh Scott? He was even traditionally pretty - and therefore "passed".
https://nypost.com/2023/03/23/trans-flight-attendant-famed-for-united-ad-dies-by-suicied/
- LM
Great post!
WOL--I agree totally! Always important to bring in the balance of what males go through as well!
Excellent article but I have one minor quibble - the saints Hadley referenced didn’t become saints because of their eating habits but because of actions of sanctity. Catherine of Siena took care of poor sick people, and had a lively correspondence with the pope, urging him to return from the Avignon exile. Now that was real take-chargedness.
glad you said this. That was a bit of a tenuous thread to say the least. Not everyone who went through hunger strikes in history was anorexic.
Exactly. Only ignorance and a secular view of truly devout people could lead to this comparison.
yeah, I can't say I don't expect it, but it is a little distasteful to me. I don't think anyone would say that Ghandi was anorexic, and from the history that I know of these saints, I think there self-deprivation was not merely because they were being "forced to marry". It takes all the devotion to Christ out of the equation. I understand why they would maybe bring it up, but when you start thinking the logic through, it just doesn't hold water.
Well- having grown up Catholic- I did see a lot of emphasis on the value of "self-abnegation" for the female saints. Celebrating this, and holding this up as model behavior, has triggered anorexia in more than one young Catholic girl. I'm not saying devotion to Christ wasn't the motivation for their saintly acts, but I believe that a lot of the "story telling" that took place in catechism classes sowed seriously disastrous seeds in vulnerable children's minds.
Kate, sorry I just saw your response to this comment. Thanks for your input! As someone who did not grow up Catholic, it's always good to know more from your perspective. I can see how this could happen. Thanks again for sharing.
No worries Rachel!! It's hard to keep up w/ all the replies etc. We do have a lively bunch of corresponders here!
Yeah - Cesar Chavez and Bobby Sands were never candidates for the cover of Vogue…
I get what you mean, but to be fair, though, most of these women wouldn't be on the cover of vogue, either. Did you click on any of the links to the thin-fluencers? They look really sick. I think that's what this author is saying, too, that while famous, dangerously thin people may be seen as encouraging eating disorders, eating disorders usually hide deeper feelings of anxiety, depression, and lack of control. I think the difference between these people in history that went on hunger strikes/fasting vs eating disorders is the reasoning behind the decision (outward- or inward-facing).
I do think it's not a great analogy, though, the author seems to have picked out a few historical women to make a point while neglecting all the other famous people who have deprived themselves of one thing or another to make a statement, further a cause, or show extreme devotion.
Agreed. Catherine of Siena has a strange and sad story, but whatever she was, she was not revered for her starvation alone. The Rest is History did an episode on her story: https://player.fm/series/the-rest-is-history-2817045/ep-356-the-blood-drinking-bride-of-christ
Another author worth reading is Regine Pernod: Women in the days of the Cathedrals. Clarifies WITH EVIDENCE a lot of these misunderstandings
I was also troubled by this connection. Thank you.
Thank you! I would say this is more than a Minor Quibble. Part of the problem is people like Hadley Freeman (who I assume is fairly secular) to understand someone from the Early/High/Late Middle Ages. Quite simple we (believes/non-believers) look at the world differently than someone is (say) 1123.
For those interested may I recommend Middle Ages The Great Courses Professor Philip Daileader
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Philip+Daileader&i=movies-tv&ref=dp_byline_sr_dvd_1
Alas they are only in Audio book form today. Your library MAY have the CD's.
History History History! :-)
Example
The House of Islam - Philip Daileader (2004)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adsEaPMm_Ps
Glad we can still call this mental illness vs. they identify as skeletons.
The NHS may just let them die because they identify as.... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/09/anorexia-patients-nhs-guidance-palliative-care-treatment/?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1694437871-1
Never underestimate the value of “family dinner“. Start it early, never give it up. Even with kids scheduled sports and afterschool activities, it is one real thing that parents can provide for their kids. Good nutrition, a forum for ideas and opinions, and of course, love for each other.
Agree completely! Even if it is at 9:30 pm after practice, homework, etc. it is the most important part of the day. And what I miss the most now that my children have moved out...
"Eugenia Cooney, with 689K Instagram followers, is easily the best-known anorexia influencer today. In photos and videos...
........ taken by her mother..............
Cooney poses in costumes—Cowgirl Barbie, Hawaiian princess—that show her skeletal body to maximum effect."
Parents & families are the first line of defense against addiction & mental illness. Sad to see this one right there encouraging it.
To link back a series of comments in another thread. Very similar to the transgender phenomena we are living through. Frequently the parents are pushing the children down that road rather than providing guardrails on the road the child is traveling. Whether out of an overly affirming belief they have absorbed in the current cultural confusion (the well-intentioned reason) or for their own social status achieved through virtue signaling their acceptance of a trans child (the ill-intentioned reason) they are abandoning their role as parents.
I went and googled her. You know how on tv shows like csi and others that discover dead bodies? And they have been missing for a while and then they show basically skeletons covered by skin? Well that’s this chick except her skin isn’t mottled or discolored. But she is a walking skeleton, literally and her face looks like a skull with makeup, a lot of makeup.
Clearly she has no muscles, just tendons and I doubt she can pick up anything heavier than a shot glass. Laughably she posts on “beauty”.
Instagram will censor anti vaxx info (even today, they are still putting false info warnings on anti vaxx accounts), but allows this??
It’s Zuckerberg
Me too! Apparently her Mother is also mentally unstable.
This is sad.
OMG, she is disgusting! Her mother must be totally psycho. That girl looks like the prisoners who were rescued from the concentration camps. That family needs an intervention asap!
I did not know that anorexia has the highest mental illness mortality. Instagram et al know, and clearly they don’t care.
I recall reading it's somewhere close to 30%.
A while back, WSJ did a great series on how social media amplifies the most upsetting and harmful content. Reporters posed as girls interested in fashion or beauty tips and were quickly led to influencers peddling anorexia, cutting, suicide, and tics. It became impossible to avoid.
If it drives engagement, they like it, unless, of course, it's political speech. Then, they seem very capable of adjusting their algorithms.
That they are.
Yes, part of it is that-10 years ago at least- insurance didn't want to cover inpatient treatment. Some nit picky loophole about mental illness vs physical, which of course is nonsense. I think you have an equal or better chance at recovering from opioids but heard that anecdotally so am open to correction. Sad all around.
I’m old.
My dad worked at the Coatesville PA VA. That’s a mental hospital.
In the 70’s PA closed inpatient facilities and let everyone go.
Dad said that would lead to homelessness, crone, addiction and death.
He was right.
As for inpatient I’ve actually seen it. That’s not what people think it is. God bless those who work there, because they’re set up to fail.
You’d think America would actually try to fix that but it looks like we are more concerned about what sounds good over solitons which can really save people.
As a man, I find it very sad and confusing to see women do this sort of thing to themselves. I simply don’t understand it.
A lot a men (most men, I would say) like a girl with curves.
If you want to understand, read Hadley Freeman's book. This type of body hatred is not about wanting to be thin. It's more about saying something without having to speak. In some ways it's about wanting to look ill; to express distress and pain without having to say "hey, I'm in pain over here." It certainly is not about wanting to be attractive.
Sounds a bit like normalizing insanity. It takes considerable resources to be hospitalized for years.
Kinda like the trans and pronouns movements?
In her book she discusses this. Apparently her care wasn’t expensive. But she didn’t know about it until she asked her parents many years later. She lived mostly thinking she’d cost her parents a lot of money when she hadn’t.
Jessica, I think you found the undertone to Hadley’s story via her book.
“It’s more about saying something without having to speak, to express distress and pain without having to day hey, I’m in pain over here.”
(I combined the writing to capture the undertone).
Very helpful comment, genuinely illuminating. Thank you!
Hadley Freeman’s article does not describe why she was in pain.
She said that she didn't want to grow up and be separated from her mother.
Herr Forkenspoon, I did not remember that you captured my thoughts earlier in this thread.
Terrence, my take away is that her pain was her not wanting to separate from her mother and as someone else mentioned stop puberty.
Now we’re getting somewhere - for the love of god - can we please find a good way to blame this all on white men!!
Kathleen wrote nothing about white men. She was making a true statement about what does/does not aid in anorexia recovery. Like any addiction, it's a family disease.
BTW-- I don't think Kathleen was trying to blame tis on "white men". Just advising that fathers and brothers making comments on their daughters' and sisters' sizes and body shapes (esp approaching puberty) can be very detrimental. I personally was NOT at the receiving end of negative comments from males in my family, but females! (Mother and grandmother!) but I know women who were scarred by being called "thunder thighs" etc. by their fathers!
Of course you’re not. The mcara comment is what you get from someone so embedded in resentment that the actual world (i.e., your quite sensible comment about the difference men make) is essentially invisible. He’s not responding to you; he’s having a conversation with himself. Don’t take the bait!
Yup- friend's dad would offer huge shopping trips ($1,000+) if she hit "goal weight"- well into adulthood. I think he was embarrassed to have a slightly overweight daughter. Now he has a massive beer gut and no shame over it whoatsoever. She was never anorexic but is tormented by her body in a way that I think most American women can relate to.
I guess I was trying to explain why this seems odd to men.
Reading Hadley's book it struck me that what's happening with anorexia and, to some extent, with other mental health issues, is that people are finding different vehicles to communicate distress. And that many mental health problems share deeply unhealthy ways of thinking which are in some ways incomprehensible to people outside of the experience.
I know that what's in the essay is about influencers and the culture surrounding this, how it makes it better or worse. One cannot deny that our culture might encourage certain disorders and that experiences we have with others and what others say influences us. But the unhealthy thinking patterns that lead to unhealthy behaviours are at the core of the issue. After all, some people can hear a silly comment from a relative and be okay, while others will not.
Not everything women do is to make themselves more attractive to men!
Hadley’s book is excellent if you want to understand more.
Jenny, we get it, you resent the idea that women would do anything to attract men and not just to satisfy themselves. Got ya. Ok. All power to the feminist ideal. That is an interesting, utopian view, but it is not reality.
But if you are being honest, men and women both do things to attract the other sex. We just do. And whether you particularly do it or do not do it, most women realize that female beauty has a lot of power and brings with it a lot of social capital not just with men but with other women as well. You can rage against the machine all you like but the machine always wins. If nothing else, it will outlast you.
Its is not different than young men learning that being tall, assertive and able to earn a lot of money makes them attractive to large swaths of the female population. Is that "fair"? Do a lot of guys push themselves, even kill themselves, to achieve fitness and economic status just to attract women? Of course they do.
Bottom line, human behavior, whether you like it or not, is largely driven by what will attract the opposite sex. Whether that is women and makeup and bikinis or men with 6 pack abs, shoe lifts and who work 80 hrs a week to win a 6 figure income. Humans do what the other sex responds to and to compete and beat out other members of the same sex in the mating market. It has always been this way and unless someone does some radical gene modifications, it will likely always be that way.
I didn’t say that though. I pointed out that not everything we do has that aim.
Specifically, in this case I really don’t believe women and girls with anorexia are starving themselves because they think it makes them more attractive to men (if anything it’s probably the opposite).
Then we would agree.
I suspect that fear of growing up, of all that comes with it, to include becoming a sexual creature and all the risks, hurts and fears that come with that, are at the heart of a lot of these behaviors whether anorexia or gender dysphoria.
And I suspect that the boys that want to transition to girls are dealing with similar issues. Going from being a boy that is largely protected and embraced by the women in his life to being forced to compete aggressively with other men, the fear of not being able to, and to being attracted to girls more than legos and all the complications that brings and to realizing that the girls and women in your life see you differently, be that as a threat or as a potential mate, carries its own type of trauma.
It strikes me how many of the more touted transitions from man to woman or even the drag queen personas seem to pick the most “glamorous” and twisted image of womanhood to model...it’s a worship of a stylized, perversely stilted caricature of women playing dress-up in their choice of sparkly or shiny taffeta prom dress, lacquered hair, gloves, pointed maiden form bra mentality sort of a 1940’s to early Jackie-O perfection. Did you see the pictures of the latest trans prom queen from Missouri? Yike! This is celebrated? Then on the opposite spectrum you have women cutting off their breasts & sewing up their wombs..and so many of the trans must take (forever) these ghastly hormone cocktails to change & manifest their idea of secondary sex characteristics that make them either the most attractive or oddly the least noticeable ...the movement seems to embrace some weird juxtaposition of either the a 4 year old’s repeated insatiable demand to their parent, “look at me”, “mom, look at me!” Or the opposite --to uglify oneself as if to crawl under a rock and become invisible. Is all this self image fixation (all a mental illness?) narcissism all about being noticed or absolutely not noticed? The juxtaposition seems so odd how some old time feminists wanted to be seen as masculine strong or not bound by comparative physical strength limits of typical female sex or overly girly traits of societies female stereotype roles as wives in their heterosexual relationship (and similarly some men reacting to the role of macho husband breadwinner) but then in gay relationships someone deliberately chooses to take on the “wife” role with the partner choosing the role of “husband”... so in the homosexual marriage or partnership many times the traditional stereotype societal man-woman roles are emphasized. Somewhere along the line this insistence that everyone else stop what they are doing right now and take notice & applaud what some other person has decided is their true self (and you better like us or else!!) has just plain gotten warped. Do we just have too much time on our hands or is this some form of mass narcissistic psychosis? Isn’t part of what we as humans really need in order to grow is to focus on God? In part so that we can spiritually transcend all this fixation on self and body image?
I would agree that most drag queens and most men that transition to female take on the least sophisticated, least real, most caricatured version of what a woman is.
I've been to drag shows. I know people who have been transvestites and some who have transitioned. The common thread I see is a love / hate relationship to femininity. They seemingly want to embrace it but simultaneously mock it in a grotesque way.
There is, I am convinced, for some, almost a misogynistic attitude, that the caricatures they create are a means of mocking women as opposed to embracing femininity.
Odd then that so many women seem to be fascinated by this and to one degree or another to celebrate it. Not sure they understand the dislike and disdain that underlies it.
Yes agree - I think this is all really well covered in Hadley’s book (and also How Not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb on the male side).
Jenny, I think girls become anorexic because it is a choice in their life they can control.
I beg to differ! Yes- biology is an impetus, but I have seen people (both men and women) do things to purposely make themselves un attractive to the opposite sex. Yes- it is not the "natural order", but when someone is traumatized (note, I do not say "victimized") by something , they can often develop a coping mechanism- either blanketing themselves in a protective layer of fat and or wearing figure obscuring clothing, not grooming etc. or starving themselves to the point of androgyny or invisibility. No gene modification needed! I'm not saying this is "normal"! Far from it, it is "abnormal", but NOT uncommon.
A good friend of mine observed that women don’t dress for men. They dress for other women. “Did you see that dress that she wore? Oh, my God!”
And many just dress for themselves
Nah....I think that is bogus.
We all dress and act in ways that best suit our purposes or to make a statement. We all wear some kind of uniform to fit in with our desired environment.
Even kids that purposely dress down, get large tattoos, and nose rings or brow rings are not just dressing for themselves. They are sending a message about their attitude toward life. They are a cliche trying to appear as novel. They are signalling to others like them or to those they wish to be like or engaged with.
No different really than the guy that puts on a Ralph Lauren polo and a pair of khakis and docksiders. Its a uniform that is intended to make a statement of where you see yourself in the social strata and how you want to be perceived.
If people just dressed for themselves, we would all spend our days in sweats and our favorite t-shirt.
No, how we dress, the quality of what we dress in, is signalling to others. Nobody just dresses for themselves. OMG.....every major brand of fashion, every specialty clothing shop, would go out of business if that were true.
Dress has a purpose.
You do you. I dress to please myself : )
But have you asked yourself WHY it pleases you?
Being pleased is emotional. Therefore, there is an emotional tie to how you dress.
Have you asked yourself WHY dressing as you do pleases you?
AND....why do I suspect that if dressing as it pleases you were to subject you to mockery, or to exclude you from a job you really wanted or needed, or would embarrass your parents in public or prevent you from accessing a bar or restaurant that you want to eat at, that you would modify your dress?
If it pleased you to wear a bikini top and short shorts to a PTA meeting just because it pleased you, and if doing so meant that nobody took you seriously when you spoke, or that doing so would subject your young children to be embarrassed at school, would you still do it?
Nobody on this planet dresses just to please themselves. It has a purpose, practical and social. Anyone who says they do is fooling themselves.
I agree! As a man (and I mean in the ages old definition), I understand that the things women do to themselves are the result of self-image and, often, insecure body imaging. The fashion industry has only a small part of this, as it is influenced by gay men who see women as pre-pubescent boys.
I have always found the role of gay men in women's beauty odd. After all they are the competition if you are a heterosexual woman.
Right on, Jenny.
OK, then explain the fashion, make up, health care etc. industries.....
Yea most of it is to flag to other women how much effort they put into their appearance. Its to show that you have the skill, money, and time to be a trendsetter. There is an element of trying to attract a member of the opposite sex, however we already know that most do not know about, care, or even notice these trends. Sometimes men specifically say that they don't like some trends (dyed hair, loud makeup, piercings) however it doesnt stop the girlies If it was just about attracting men, then older women and women who are in comfortable in their relationships wouldnt even bother to dress nice because they dont need to attract men and they know that their current partner loves them when they are dressed up or down. However that is not the case at all.
A similar male behavior is working out, participation in sport, and other risky behaviors that show how cool they are (recall the recent TFP article about subway surfers). Sure, a chiseled body can aid with securing a mate, however a lot of it is flagging to other guys how ripped and committed they are to their bodies and appearance.
Women dress for a combination of themselves and other women. Trends in fashion are driven locally by what other women we see (at work, at school, at the PTA meeting, at church) are wearing. We check out each other’s shoes, purses and accessories. Something will take off. A Chloe bag, Tory Burch shoes, Lily Pulitzer pink and green. If the Junior League women are wearing it, it will catch fire. Then everyone is wearing it. Sure we want to be attractive to men, but men rarely notice what you’re wearing other than it “looks good” or you look good in it. Men don’t notice brand names, styles or colors. Women do. We signal to each other what we can afford and how hip we are, whether we’re in the right social group. The fashion industry understands this. Men in general do not. This is why most men in the fashion industry are gay and not straight.
Thanks for the insight. But I confess that's even stranger than I imagined.
We are nothing if not mysterious and incomprehensible.
I suspect that avoiding the curves that attract male attention is part of the point.
No curves, no breasts, no hips, then no male attention and therefore you are safer and more likely to stay in the cocoon you had in childhood.
One of my daughters suffered from anorexia in her early teens. It started when she began middle school, her best friend moved to a different school and her body went through puberty and suddenly she was curvy and was attracting attention from boys and men which she was not mentally ready to deal with. Fortunately, we realized what was happening in and got her into treatment early before the behaviors really became entrenched, and she made a full recovery.
Sally, what did the treatment involve? I know a girl who seems to be flirting with eating disorder behaviors, and I am wondering how to help her. What is the approach of a treatment program?
We did an intensive outpatient program with her. It was family-based so my husband and I had to attend with her; and it involved group CBT and DBT therapy for both parents and the patients - sometimes together, sometimes separately, group meals, individual therapy, nutrition therapy with a dietician, and it was 20 hours per week for about eight weeks. We also had to supervise all of her meals to make sure she ate; and at school she had to eat lunch in the nurse’s office so we could be sure she ate. Fortunately my daughter realized she had a problem and was motivated to get well; and she was 14 at the time so the behaviors had not become really entrenched. She’s 18 now and doing great. Getting into treatment early is key; girls who don’t get treated until their 20s have much lower recovery rates.
Thanks for sharing the details. Can you recommend a private therapist who might be available to do zoom sessions? The girl in question fears being “fat”, and has developed eating habits that are counterproductive at best, and, at worst, could lead to serious problems. Thank you!
Unfortunately I don’t know one - this all happened pre-Covid so our experience was with in-person therapists. National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) has a database of therapists and treatment centers on their website. Hopefully you can find someone on there! By the way, many girls with anorexia suffer from anxiety and OCD, which turned out to be the case for my daughter. She reported that after getting on medication, her body dysmorphia subsided dramatically. She still needed a lot of CBT and DBT to learn how to deal with unpleasant feelings; but the medication helped her a lot as well.
Thank God!!
Similarly, I know two women who were victims of rape who are obese. They both have said that they didn’t want to seem attractive to men. I’ve lost contact with one of them, but my current friend maintains this attitude even though it’s been over 30 years and she’s married to a man she loves very much. Trauma can affect us in so many ways.
Agree. A women who experienced domestic abuse became a size that couldn’t be thrown against a wall. Trauma rationalizes a solution.
I have a dear friend who experienced child sexual abuse. She is a bodybuilder now (has always lifted weights). I sensed this was her way of protecting herself, by being "strong".
Exactly. This was likely what Jenny was saying. It’s not about attracting a man. It’s about perceived safety and control with anorexia.
It’s similar with anorexic babies, who are neglected or abused by their mothers. They also don’t eat as a mechanism of control, and to try to elicit a response from the mom. They don’t develop the normal behavior.
It’s the saddest thing to see.
I have never heard of that before. How horrifying!
Yes, this is it. I suffered from anorexia for years and like Hadley, it had nothing to do with fashion magazines or beauty ideals. I already had a (likely genetic) predisposition to anxiety, and then when I hit puberty, the experience of being perceived as a maturing, sexual being (I starting getting breasts early) while I still felt like a child was terrifying. Starving myself was very much about trying to make that stop.
I hadn’t thought about that
The male equivalent to anorexia is obsessive bodybuilding and steroid use. Just as women see themselves as too fat, men see themselves as puny.
The male equivalent to anorexia is also anorexia. I don’t remember seeing it in boys decades ago when I was young, but I see it now among the children of friends.
I had a male friend who was hospitalized for anorexia at age 12/13 back in the late 70's. He had always been chubby and was tired of being mocked- and went off the deep end- starving himself. eventually normalized.
Kindly: it’s not about you. It’s a woman’s warped perception that is addictive for its perceived control of an otherwise uncontrollable Life.
How do fathers in particular play a role in this? The answer may be kind of obvious, but I’d like to hear more from you if you know. Thanks!
Is it like alcoholism? I really don’t know much about it
Girl or woman with curves? As the writer points out, she was afraid of becoming a woman. Some people also have sexual trauma, which I can imagine only makes anorexia (or for, instance, temporary gay or trans identities) more appealing, to avoid further external trauma.
Hey, like I said, I didn’t understand it.
I think the commends I’ve gotten have helped to educate me.
A girl who doesn't want to grow up doesn't give a shit about what kind of curves you like, Ben.
I’m learning.
Cut me a little slack for my ignorance on the subject.
I'm glad to hear that.
Invariably when the subject of ED or the like is written about there's always men in the comments section saying some variation of:
"I don't like this! I like this other thing instead!
And since girls are doing this for me, I'll be really helpful and let them know that's not what I want."
In reality the girls suffering motives either have nothing to do with you, or doing what you don't like is a feature rather than a bug.
I will admit, that was a somewhat accurate summary of what I was thinking.
Good thing we have open and free debate to challenge our ideas/assumptions (for now, at least).
I've had EDs and body dismorphia since I was in kindergarten. I'm well apprised of the nuances of the subject.
The idea of anorexia being a way to stop puberty is not something I had ever thought of but it makes a ton of sense. I had always thought it was only about being thin.
It is the flip side of excess eating and unhealthy weight gain. Both are unconscious tactics to ward off the male/female attraction, and both can, and DO, have catastrophic health repercussions.
When my daughter developed anorexia, she had zero interest in fashion or beauty. She just wasn’t quite ready to change from a child to a young woman and refusing to eat gave her a sense of control.
About 10 year ago, a psychiatrist friend of mine told me that she and her colleagues were starting to see anorexia in Baby Boomer women, so maybe it’s also a way in their minds to stave off old age and post menopausal weight gain. Shortly after she told me, I ran into one of the (formerly) most beautiful woman in my town, a former marathoner, who was positively skeletal.
This really reminds me of Douglas Murray’s poem pick this week. When I am old I shall wear purple.
I tend to think most Boomers who lean towards being very thin are less interested in control than they are betrayed by their lack of interest in food. I no longer find many foods I used to like palatable My tastebuds have changed a great deal. A friend of mine had the same issue: certain tastes, once enjoyed, no longer carried any pleasure.
We eat less many times because the food is less enjoyable and we also aren’t hungry as much. Not because we want control.
Different side of the same coin but there was an Amy Winehouse documentary a few years ago that was pretty enlightening about this sort of thing. She had bulliema, and disordered eating started for her around the same time as her parents divorce (there could be more causes, but appeared to be a control thing too) but pretty enlightening about eating disorders. Still sad and tragic bc the eating disorder contributed to her death maybe even more so than the addictions. Her body couldn’t handle it when she relapsed bc of all the damage from the disordered eating.
I have to wonder if this new push for “fat liberation” isn’t the same thing, just the other side of the coin. In some corners of the Internet, people look on as women starve themselves. “Here’s my healthy plate with two peanuts on it.” In others, they watch as people eat themselves into an early grave. “Here’s everything I eat in a day as a 400 pound woman.” I understand that social media is neither the direct or singular cause of mental illness, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders, but it surely isn’t helping. I also wonder if any responsibility can be laid at the feet of spectators. Is there a moral obligation to step in in the same way many of us believe we have a moral obligation to stand up against gender affirmation?
>I understand that social media is neither the direct or singular cause of mental illness, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders, but it surely isn’t helping.
I'm starting to think social media, and 24/7 access to the internet in general (that is, cell phone addiction), has *a lot* to do with the ills of today. With issues like anorexia and the transgender movement, it may indeed be a very direct cause (if not *the* cause). Ask yourself this...if social media were to never have been developed, would we have these issues? I think the answer is a resounding "no". Hard to know for sure, and it's certainly only my opinion, but I suspect neither anorexia nor transgenderism would be issues of such large scale in the absence of social media.
In Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, she talks about cyclical eras of social contagion among primarily teenage girls. Anorexia and Bulimia was the big one in the 80s and 90s (sounds like when this author struggled), self-mutilation was in the early 2000s, and the most recent decade was been marked by transgenderism, particularly in teen females despite historically afflicting primarily boys/men. All to say, this has been happening for decades and predates social media.
Social media helps to spread it far and wide.
At this scale? Absolutely not - I agree with you there. But to Hadley’s point, they would still exist. Social media is amplifying and spreading it. I definitely believe in social contagion. Without it, cases would be rarer, especially for the gender issues. If we were able to weed out the cases caused by social contagion, the small percentage remaining would be brought on by other factors.
One can only imagine the chaos if Salem circa 1691 had access to the internet......
Something similar happened in England in the 15th century. One of the first non-bible books to be published there was about how to identify witches. It became very widely read across the country, and thousands of women were drowned and burned.
Social Media, or as I call it Antisocial Media, promotes the abnormal and sensational. it provides a platform to those who would otherwise be unknown, ignored or powerless. But the power it provides is illusory unless it is a money maker.
I don't think it's social media per se but rather 24/7 access to media in general. Growing up, we played outdoors, did school events, etc. Access to media consisted of watching TV for a couple of hours at night and maybe listening to the radio or music while doing something else. This left enough time to have the realization that media is exaggerated for entertainment purposes vs. now where media is a constant presence.
Plus the media has much better tools and much more skill at targeting, and monetizing, any cohort of the population that can help them turn a profit. In in the search for that profit they have abandoned any sort of moral compass at all.
With two daughters who suffered from anorexia in their teens this brings back memories and the times that were challenging but showed our family’s strength and love, especially my wife. They were dancers which has always been encouraging of a lithe figure. Both are now in their thirties and doing well. Thanks for the thoughtful and insightful article as it will be helpful for those that are now going through what many of us did in the past.
In my opinion the medieval women are more akin to monks who go on hunger strikes than modern day anorexics. Women protesting arranged marriages using the only lever of power they had. I find no such nobility of cause in modern anorexia which makes it even more horrific and heartbreaking.
You're right.
But I think the author is writing less about the actual phenomenon than about the public fascination with the phenomenon, no?
I had the same thought about the medieval examples, which seem to have nothing to do with the modern illness. Her inclusion of those examples makes it sound more like "something women have always had to deal with" instead of what it more likely is, a particularly modern phenomenon in response to modern culture and conditions.
As I put in my comment elsewhere here, I’d be a lot more interested in seeing the modern timeline - I’m guessing cases were close to zero, then all of a sudden took off. When was that, and what changed?
Well done writing about this.
My daughter was slightly anorexic for a time it was frightening. I found a way to make my daughter eat by supplying her everyday with pancakes which she found hard to resist! Not a good diet I know but then we kept adding things like fruit or veg. I will never make a pancake ever again it was draining. She is fine now. Luckily I worked at home which is not available to a lot of parents.
Control and fear ... the two operative words that permeate this piece. Girls who fear growing up and girls who want some control in a world where they have little and don't see that changing. That is literally adolescence in a nutshell.
As Mr. Giunta rightly observes in the comments section, there is a lot of overlap with the trans movement. Both involve children who are at war with their bodies.
Anorexia and trans, however, give young people tribes and attention and protection. In the trans case, it also has the noxious reality of having captured the medical system in a Munchausen-like doom loop that enmeshes the mentally ill child with a parent (typically a mother) who now has a tribe with a medical establishment that now has a cause (and a very lucrative forever patient). Can one imagine the medical system not trying to cure an anorexic but rather profiting off of her by cutting her apart, limb by limb, to weigh less? Of course not. That would be monstrous - and malpractice.
Add to all of this the utter stupidity of social media and you have a perfect storm that spreads mental illness like a contagion. Luckily for the author, she lived in a time when the adults around her recognized that she had an illness and treated her for it. Now, most of those adults would profit from it financially, socially, and emotionally in some form because something has changed in the underbelly of our social order. There's a rot there that is difficult to articulate. Perhaps the only hope is to bring it into the light where sunshine acts as an antiseptic. I have less faith this will happen as the trans and anorexic and related illnesses become normalized, fetishized, profitized, and - as with the medieval anorexics - sanctified in the new church of woke.
My best wishes to the author for her continued good health and my thanks for raising awareness through her writing.
As more "women" transition to become "a man", and then reading about female self-harm, it is becoming more and more clear that women , in larger numbers, are expressing a hatred of their own bodies. Why? Is it because of societal or media agitprop? Or is there some deeper reason?
I wonder how much the advent of easy porn has been a factor. Porn magazines were highly visible when I was growing up -- you could see them in grocery stores. Today porn is as accessible as the phone in your pocket and far more warped, with a great deal more violence. How could this not have an impact on how developing girls see their bodies?
And how prevalent was anorexia (or gender dysphoria) before porn was so widespread?
"Elliot" Page?
Bruce, even those women who are declaring themselves as "non-binary" are expressing the same emotion. The young female lead of a populat zombie thriller has expressed that as well. But if you look at her, she appears to be far from the idealized image of femininity. Not "ugly", but not "beautiful" either. Just average. But that is not enough for some women.
As I expressed earlier, there is no creature on earth as vacuous and suggestible as a teenage girl.
All subway surfers are boys. Talk about vacuous and suggestible
Or as brainless and reactionary as a teen boy, for that matter!
Did that comment make you feel particularly virtuous? The difference is that teenage boys do not drive major sectors of the internet and economy. Except, perhaps, for pro sports leagues and video games.
It was just a comment Bruce, just a comment. No intent, otherwise. By the way, teen boys kill themselves with their actions more directly, and quickly, than teen girls. I'm just comparing the two, not excusing anyone.