The-F-Word.org

I don’t react well to stress, which is to say, I often freak out about and over-dramaticize those situations in which even the minute of forces are beyond my control. It’s the same kind of classic black and white thinking that helped structure and bolster my eating disorder.

Like every quarter of my undergraduate and graduate school years, I procrastinate in writing the final paper until the deadline looms ominously at which point I usually churn out fabulous stuff. It takes the threat of a deadline to spur me to action, but my work is usually much better for it. Last Monday saw me starting the final paper of my graduate seminar on nineteenth century America. The paper was to be a broad overview, based on the books and article we read throughout the quarter - no primary research - on the nineteenth century. I don’t do well with broad; I like structure, detail, focus, all of which is part of why I didn’t start on the 15-page paper until two nights before it was due.

I was making pretty good headway when my husband, who was sitting at the desk next to me playing a video game, reached for a can of soda and spilled it on the desk, splashing on my laptop keyboard. I immediately sopped up the spill, while he ran to get towels, but a few seconds later, my laptop screen went completely dead. I immediately freaked out - my paper! all my work! my research! my designs and photography! Gone, gone, gone! It also didn’t help that I haven’t backed up my work on my external hard drive in, well, ever.

We spent the better part of an hour disassembling and drying each removable component of the computer, while I continued to mentally console myself that things generally work out for me in the end, that this wasn’t the end of the world, that I have an awesome understanding professor and am a good student, and that these things, well, happen. An hour later, the computer was back on, with some loss of data in just the paper I was working on, but not much.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the world is not out to get me.

As for the paper itself, I wrote about gender relations and informal social controls on women and women’s behaviors in the nineteenth century, but fit it within the broader context called for by arguing how oppression of women originates from a multitude of cultural forces, the study of which invokes analogies to other groups similarly marginalized by race, class or other social circumstance, while both analyzing the meaning and nature of their oppression and seeking to explain the inequalities of power organized along these axes. Whew, yeah, my paper is full of over-scholarly mouthfuls like that, but hey, that’s graduate school for you.

I discussed a lot of social controls in my paper, ranging from religion to sexuality to industrialization, but I wanted to share a snippet that is particularly relevant to the scope of this blog and its readers:

Indeed, such informal social controls proved an attack on the body politic of women, both literally and figuratively. As women increasingly stepped into public spheres and rallied for greater political participation and involvement, they faced a conservative backlash from a public largely surprised by and opposed to female autonomy and suffrage. Western art has long celebrated rotundity, especially that of the full-figured women as epitomized by the zaftig models gracing the works of artists like Rubens. In a time of widespread poverty and inequitable distributions of wealth among a growing number of ethnic groups, fatness was viewed as a sign of wealth, health, and prosperity, especially amongst women for whom it was also linked to successful motherhood. Spurred, in part, by increasing advances in the new science of nutrition, commercial manipulation and religious ascetism, dieting – the act of food restriction to induce weight-loss – took on new dimensions in nineteenth century America, with a call for leanness directed disproportionately towards women. While ladies’ magazines and journals cautioned women against weight gain and listed advertisements for diet products, - some as drastic as the ingestion of tapeworms – the focus for men centered on muscle development rather than appetite control. Although men formed blunt targets of weight-related jokes and disparagements, they were not subject to them on comparable intensity as were women. In fact, the Fat Men’s Club, founded in 1866, didn’t close its doors until 1903.

That aesthetic standards and a particular emphasis on weight control and thinness have grown increasingly and progressively stringent almost exclusively for women only, suggests other unique forces to be at play other than the rise of science. It comes as no irony that such standards have gotten higher and harsher as women increasingly struggled and continue to struggle for independence both within and outside the private sphere. As Naomi Wolf has suggested, dieting potentially fills a woman’s time and attention, keeping them busy and hence distracted from activities that risk disrupting an established gender order. “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty,” writes Wolf. It is “an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

Oh, and I absolutely love that last quote by Naomi Wolf. If I ever had a girl crush, she’s it. And despite the stress and the hassle in writing the paper, I got my usual grade of an A.