It would be perpetuating a myth to say or even imply that women are, historically, foreigners to power. Women's power has historically been proscribed from the high places in government and the economy (unless you look at pre-history--but that is another article). However, women have almost always, cross-culturally, wielded power over food. Even in hunting and gathering societies, it was the women gatherers that provided daily sustenance for their clans, where the hunter's provisions were more ceremonial and glorified than substantive in nature. Women are deeply linked with agriculture. There is persuasive historical evidence that women developed (or "invented") agriculture; most agricultural deities are female (e.g. mother Earth, corn mother).
And in today's societies, it is still primarily the women who do the gathering (shopping), preparing, cooling, and serving of food. Furthermore, since the industrial revolution, having power over food has taken on more and more significance. It has become (more than before) the power to give or withhold sustenance and nurture--something all human beings, particularly children, need for their physical and emotional survival. Since most other avenues to power had been blocked, the power over food and nurturance has tended to be overused, abused, and clung to by women for many generations.
The stereotypical fill-in-blank (Jewish, Italian) mother is famous for such uses and abuses. Forced overfeeding, use of food as reward or enticement, and withholding of food as punishment are all familiar methods to most of us.
In this most recent women's movement (women's rights movements go back to women's enslavement thousands of years ago) the struggle to embrace wider circles of power and let go of food and self-abuse has been a violent and confusing one. We women are starving ourselves, starving our children and loved ones, gorging ourselves, gorging our children and loved ones, alternating between starving and gorging, purging, obsessing, and all the while hating, pounding and wanting to remove that which makes us female: our bodies, our curves, our pear-shaped selves.
This battle was chronicled daily in the American comic strip "Cathy" from 1976-2010, but unfortunately most of the humour is still relevant today. We can all see that Cathy's move up the corporate ladder is not without repercussions. She hates her body, swears to diet every other day, binges on alternate days, all against the backdrop of a love/get-away-from relationship with her overly nurturing and self-sacrificial mother. For Cathy to succeed without ambivalence in a world that was proscribed from her mother, she would have to leave the "woman who gave up everything for her" behind. And so she takes her with her. She has a successful career, but she and her mother cozy up over the diet coke and pizza and moan over their bodies together. It is, if you think about it, an ingenious solution to an emotionally wrenching problem.
Even today, women are made to feel they have no right to feed themselves when they are hungry--the most basic human need there is! While asserting one need, many women will often (unconsciously) deny another, as an expression of their fundamental feelings of non-entitlement. Why is it that to "succeed" in so many fields--i.e., to "climb the ladder"--so many women are expected to take up less space (get thinner)? I see this image of women climbing higher and higher while getting thinner and thinner, until the most "powerful" women eventually disappear into thin air.
There is another solution, but it is more painful. And that is to let go of the power over food in exchange for new forms of power. Letting go of the power struggle with food means returning it to its original purpose of mere sustenance. It means letting go of the battle--no more diets - that includes "Keto" and other fads that pretend to be "healthy eating plans," binges, puke-ins, weigh-ins, or bathing-suit competitions. Just hunger--> self-feed--> satiation and on with life. This is no easy task, and it brings innumerable complications, especially since other forms of power are not so accessible to women in these days of the feminization of poverty when our rights to control over our bodies are being revoked at every turn. Nor are the traditionally male forms of power necessarily comfortable or even acceptable to many women. Some of us might prefer to challenge the very structures of hierarchical power itself. All this sounds exhausting. The battle of the bulge is safer--at least it's familiar.
To feel "entitled" to take up space, to take our place in the world and share power equally with men, we must first learn to give up this drive to "trade off" one need for another. We must somehow, gradually, haltingly, but persistently lay claim to each and every human right, one after the other. To do this, we must make use of the greatest source of strength and power we have: each other.
Note: I do not mean to imply that this is the only reason for the continuing epidemic of eating disorders; individual situations are very unique and complex. But it may shed some light on the society-wide epidemic of fat-phobia and diet mania, an atmosphere that encourages individual eating and body obsessions to thrive.
