We spend alot of time talking about the cultural pressure for women not to eat for two on this blog..but what about the pregnant women barely are able to eat for one?
I know it's not a quality (or even very reliable) publication, however, today in The Sun, two anorexic pregnant women are profiled and their stories are pretty horrifying. It bothers me that these anorexic women are treated like spectacles or even 'freak shows' in this particular tabloid. However this article highlights that when it comes to pregnancy, neither anorexia nor obesity is accepted as an appropriate response to motherhood. Yet, in both cases, overeating or undereating, desire (the desire to eat or not eat) is at the root of both problems.
Although most people who have never had an eating disorder cannot imagine not eating whilst growing a baby, the women in the article are represented as though they are proud of their abilities to transcend their hunger on one hand, but on the other hand, they are both extremely concerned for the safety of their future children and even their own health. As their bodies seem to be out of control in pregnancy, anorexia is the only way they can be in control. In fact, historically, anorexia has been theorised as feminine protest; a means by which women resist the limitations of the ideal of female domesticity and separate themselves from their mothers.
In Unbearable Weight, feminist scholar Susan Bordo (1993:160) argues:
Women may feel themselves deeply attracted by the aura of freedom and independence suggested by the boyish body ideal of today. Yet, each hour, each minute spent in anxious pursuit of that ideal (for it does not come naturally to most mature women) is in fact time and energy taken from inner development and social achievement. As a feminine protest, the obsession with slenderness is hopelessly counterproductive.
In pregnancy, women take up more space (literally). The anorexic is always convinced she is taking up too much space. Pregorexia is perhaps the most extreme cultural example of the fear of motherhood and the fear of bodily bigness played out on the body through a sort of internal self-mutilation.
Sources: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/article314257.ece
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.
