OPINION

Published Monday, March 01, 2004
Body Image With Ginger Spice and Miss America
Thoughts on a Forum About Eating Disorders
By David Meadow
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

Have you ever had a sister who was slowly destroying herself? I hope not. If you have, did she manage to conceal this from you even as you communicated with her on a regular basis? I fervently hope not. Unfortunately, Dr. Rebecca Knapp’s sister did just that.

Knapp’s was one of many powerful voices at a forum on February 25th, put on in Gutman Library by the Harvard Eating Disorders Center of Massachusetts General Hospital. A series of women spoke about their experiences with self-image and its strong ties to physical health – first, Erika Harold, crowned Miss America 2003; then Knapp, a child and adolescent psychology professor at UMass Medical School; and, finally, Geri Halliwell, erstwhile Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls and now solo act in search of a medium.

Lisa Hughes, an award-winning news anchor from WBZ TV 4, was billed as the moderator but basically served as an emcee since there was no real debate to moderate; more on this later. For now, I will say that I had expected a more searching discussion than there was.

Hughes set the tone for the evening by sharing her personal experiences with self-image. News anchors are constantly evaluated by their appearance, and she said that the profession can be hard when, according to some genius, “you have the wrong haircut and your ears are too big.” She said it dawned on her that “only when we feel good about ourselves can we empower other people.”

This was a good lead-in to the speakers, who would talk a great deal about assuming leadership roles in the face of deep-seated cultural conditions that chip away at women’s self-esteem.

The first speaker was the dynamic pageant winner, Ms. Harold. Hardly just a pretty face, she plans to occupy various spheres of influence; she will start at Harvard Law School in the fall. Her message was that people with a bully pulpit, like herself, should make it very clear to young women that they need to be at peace with their bodies and to stop buying into the culture of self-deprecation.

For example, during her tour of the country as Miss America, Harold visited high schools and would help young women with their college applications, but not with mascara tips. She would not even let girls criticize themselves, let alone loathe themselves, in her presence.

The Miss America Pageant still exerts considerable influence on Americans. Harold recounted how one little girl would look at website daily, change her own hair to look like Harold’s, and then send her photos of it. Representatives of all ages and genders followed the star’s every move, whether to ogle or simply admire. This drama surrounding Ms. Harold’s celebrity led her to realize that, as “an instant role model,” she had to give some serious thought to the message she sent.

This dignitary really caught my attention with her anecdotes about racism and sexism. These stories drove home the kind of banal evil that too many people face every day, but that doesn’t make it into the paper because it isn’t a Hate Crime with Blood and Guts. Harold described terrible persecution at her school, ostensibly because she was biracial; she had her house defaced and even received death threats.

Her principal’s response? She should be “more submissive, like other women.” He also chided her for putting her accused harassers’ tender emotions at risk – by accusing them.

She didn’t say anything about the Oppressive Structures of the White Capitalist Patriarchic Hegemony (imagine using this lingo at the Pageant!), but I had a feeling that she was trying to give us a sense of what she is up against in her mission to empower women.

The next speech was quite literary. It came from Dr. Knapp, whose late twin sister Caroline wrote the book Appetites: Why Women Want. The former read many haunting passages from this work, which chronicles Caroline’s own struggles with anorexia and other illnesses, as well as examining the societal perversities that often push women into unhealthful behavior.

The speech was really about Caroline. Most references the psychiatrist made to herself were in the context of the sisters’ relationship. One poignant fact of their interaction was that they lived far apart and did not see each other face to face. Thus Rebecca did not witness Caroline’s emaciated frame, but only heard her voice on the phone – and anorexia did not surface in their conversation. It is “an illness of silence,” Dr. Knapp said, and, eerily, Caroline was articulate about everything but the illness.

The book came when Caroline began to speak out – but not before suffering through the other addictions of compulsive spending and alcoholism. Appetites opens the reader up to an anorexic’s gruesome logic with reflections such as the following: she said hunger was her “balm of safety and containment…. I was the Queen of Anhedonia,” living in an ascetic castle where there was only one single, terrible trouble. It seemed to her that the media she saw all around her were issuing their own “commandments,” including, “Thou shalt compare and contrast,” “Thou shalt fail to measure up,” and “Thou shalt blame thyself and feel like shit.”

Anorexia did not kill Caroline – technically. She developed terminal cancer and, in one of life’s great paradoxes, chose to end her life by starvation, long after she had conquered anorexia and its evil successors.

But Dr. Knapp did not interpret this as a victory for anorexia – but rather as a tribute to Caroline’s overcoming of appetites. Caroline owned this last choice. Knapp said it was the last way that Caroline found, “in this complicated world, to be full.”

So much for tragedy. We moved from the sublime to the almost-ridiculous in the form of the rather embarrassing Geri Halliwell. She was not only inarticulate (a common enough malady), but she was following two acts that were models of eloquence, which made her look all the clumsier.

Halliwell did establish, to my surprise, that she had suffered from “all three things”: anorexia, bulimia, and some third thing that, well, she didn’t articulate. I suppose it takes some courage for people, even celebrities who do everything in public, to speak candidly about self-destructive behaviors. If people become that much more concerned because it’s Ginger Spice breaking the silence and admitting her imperfections, that’s probably a good thing.

In her disjointed way, Ms. Halliwell managed to set up some vivid images. Her bingeing was a way of “stuffing down feelings”; the purging provided a “fantastic release,” especially of anger. She cautioned, though, that collapsing all of one’s anxieties into one obsession about food and body is a bit like building frail, ephemeral sandcastles.

Halliwell’s conclusion was that everybody engages in self-destructive behavior to some degree; it’s a matter of “how much it takes out of your life.” And who was the audience to judge, she pressed? Sure, she read tabloids from time to time – presumably, internalizing their vapid messages. Didn’t we, too?

All of the personal reflections above were rich enough, but event left me ultimately unsatisfied. It ended up being more of a pep talk than a panel discussion. The most important thing I took away from it was the warning that it requires eternal vigilance to stamp out the plague of eating disorders.

That is important, and, in any given audience, there are those who need to be shaken out of their complacency. But the women didn’t debate with one another, and surely they had some differences. I have to believe that a psychiatrist who works with patients suffering from eating disorders is going to disagree here and there with pop stars (Miss America included) who appear in the very same image-looney places like MTV, women’s magazines, Reader’s Digest, and, yes, Ms. Hughes, news outlets too, that purvey messages of body angst.

For that matter, there are people – some of them women – out there who think media influence is overrated and that the self-destructive should suck it up and take responsibility for their bodies regardless of the messages they see. Offensive? Maybe. So let the offense prod us to examine our assumptions.

At any rate, I want to hear about new threats and new tactics against those threats. What magazines, toys, movies, etc., are the worst offenders? Which ones merit a widescale boycott, and which should people simply not buy for their own family?

Now, one can begin to see the possible conflicts of interest here, since three or four men are controlling all of the media these days, and Ginger could conceivably get blackballed by Rupert Murdoch for bad-mouthing Disney because it jeopardized some yet-undeveloped product tie-in with Coke. Who knows what self-censorship occurred at this panel? In fairness, the media personalities who were there have recognized and embraced their hefty influence with a keen desire to use it for good. It is hard to fault that. (I don’t fault Dr. Knapp either.)

But as long as they are fighting the fight, it would make for great dialogue if they investigated further where they stand in the acceptance/rejection/perpetuation of their own cultures’ pathologies – and if they invited the audience to do the same. People’s neuroses about body image are constantly evolving, and so are the pathways to sanity.

David Meadow, a masters candidate in the Specialized Program, writes “event critiques” for The Appian.