Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher Page B

“Cooties!”
    Added to the slush pile of mental contradictions was the association
    of female sexuality with sexual voracity, weakness, an inability to control one's physical appetites , one's hungers , one's needs . It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control. Our most hallowed virtue in modern society is self-control, personal “power” (also the most hallowed virtue in my own family).
    If you thumb through the cannon of philosophy, you find Augustine and Co. speaking of women with the same fear and virulence that we now use to speak of food, as something “sinful,” something that
    “tempts,” something that causes a loss of control. “The slimy desires of the flesh,” Augustine writes. Note: not the flesh itself, but its desires , arising from the flesh, dismantling our control.8
    That is to say, my control, what little I had. Sexual maturation was terrifying to me, not for the reasons shrinks often cite, but because I was already utterly terrified of my needs, my passions, and, admittedly, my derriere. The last thing I wanted was more of any of the above. Believing that I was already perceived as uncontrollable, I was most alarmed to find my body going out of control, internally and externally—and also alarmed by the response it was causing.
    It was as if people could see , just by the very presence of my breasts, that I was bad and sexual and needy. I shrank back from my body as if it were going to devour me.
    The cacophony in my head was not only cultural. My family, always skittish about the topic of sex, grew increasingly bizarre during my pubertal years, from eight to twelve. They seemed as surprised, and annoyed, by its advent as I was. My father said, years later, that I became “something of a foreign animal” to him during that time.
    My mother simply did not know what to do. This is not uncommon.
    Fathers are often uncomfortable with their daughter's maturation, and my father was perhaps overly so. My physical development scared the hell out of my mother and sent her into a 7See Jeremy Iggers, The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and the Hunger for Meaning. A food critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune with a Ph.D. in philosophy, he provides an excellent discussion of the translation of cultural taboos into issues of food and body.
    8Susan Bordo, “Psychopathology as the Crystalization of Culture,” The Philosophical Forum, Winter 1985-86, v. 17, n. 2: 79.
    frenzy of reading up on the Gifted Child and the Child Who Grows Up Too Fast. The closeness I had shared with my family, as strange and tentative as it was, disappeared altogether—and I saw my im-pending sexual maturity as the culprit. That is to say, I blamed my body itself.9
    My physical and intellectual development were careening far ahead of my emotional development. My mother was concerned, and rightly so, for I did not have the emotional tools to negotiate the new confusion of both sexual and intellectual possibilities. Chock-full of hormones, I babbled maniacally at the dinner table about my test scores and how, after I finished high school at fifteen, I was going to Columbia Medical School to be a neurological surgeon and was going to figure out how to cure all the ills of the world by the time I was twenty. My parents stared at me and suggested I be a little more realistic. I threw a rather age-appropriate temper tantrum.
    Recent research suggests that an extremely strong desire for academic achievement may be as significant as sexual maturation, if not more so, in the development of eating disorders in young women.10 There is a combination of issues at work here: a family that has high expectations of achievement (as distinguished from genuine encouragement and prompting of a child to develop her intellectual skills); a child who is prone to excessive