othersideofweightloss

Hopefully you will have never heard of ‘thinspo’.

Thinspo is a term used to refer to images and stories etc… regarding the attainment of ‘very thin’ bodies used as inspiration for those aspiring to be ‘very thin’. Alongside general ED discourse, history paints this as a female problem, as Cristin Conger describes in this HuffPo article:

The longstanding exclusive focus on female pathology reflects eating disorders are often considered so-called women’s diseases to the point that the anorexia among men is offhandedly referred to as “manorexia.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual includes amenorrhea, or absence of a menstrual cycle, for instance, as a clinical criterion for anorexia nervosa, and indeed, women do make up a majority of eating disorder sufferers.

However things are changing, and men and boys are more and more being seen as the sufferers of eating disorders. Conger points to a statistic that suggests between 20-30% of those now diagnosed with anorexia are male, up from around 5% just a decade ago. This is rather a marked change, certainly it is ripe for theorising. The most common rationale for why this may be the case is that men have simply lagged behind their more body conscious female counterparts. Conger quotes Dr Arnold Anderson from 2000:

“I think that men are simply following a decade or two behind women in terms of being exposed to body images that are increasingly difficult to achieve.”

But this is not an answer – or rather, this is actually just requiring the reader to accept that ‘answer’ already given for women and girls. Essentially Anderson is saying that men are just  slow on the uptake. I find this a rather convenient suggestion.

I have a rather more radical theory. One that implicates the same weight-loss and body obsessed society, but locates the trigger not in ‘exposure to the media’ (with the idea that women are more exposed than men), but in exposure to a particular type of Other-ing. My theory is that the increase in the last decade has far more to do with who and when these men developed their subjectivities. It should not pass us by that it is primarily men in their late teens and twenties who are the ED clients of today, men born between 1985 and 1995. This was the unfettered hey-day of the weight-loss, image conscious society, when science and capitalism truly enmeshed in the corporations that today benefit from the bisuffering of the perfect capitalist consumer – the bulimic. Young boys in the 80s and 90s were watching the females in their world attempting to strike a path from patriarchy, which sadly seems to have just necessitated a slim image – slim soccer mum, slim working women, still ‘attractive’, still ‘desirable’.

My contention is that these boys internalised this attempt and their subjectivities started to attribute a ‘value’ to visible slimness in men that simply was not around in the 50s and 60s. These boys became the ED clients of today, and their suffering is a manifestation of their Others suffering. But even more problematic is the specific anatomy of their (male) condition. Julia Kristeva has called anorexia and bulimia consequences of “refusals of femaleness”. I think that these men are also suffering the consequences of a refusal of their own femaleness. By forming subjectivities through a period of history that required women to refuse their femaleness and embrace the man (within and without) these men learnt the same technique, and this is now being felt in ED clinics around the world.

I am not suggesting that men with EDs have some inherent femaleness that other men do not. I am suggesting that all men have an inherent femaleness. How this structures their lives is permanently debatable, though I would hope that my comments above may at least elevate the discussion to one other than a simple ‘men lag behind’ the ‘true’ anorexic: the woman/girl.