Another long post about pleasure, feminism, food, and sex

In recent years, as I continue to fiddle with my women's studies syllabus, I've moved away from emphasizing certain themes and towards others.  One theme that has become more and more important to me: tracing the cultural history of women's shame in America, particularly in regards to sexual pleasure, food, and other "selfish" desires.

I've emphasized this many times before, but my students are, overwhelmingly, non-white.  They are, overwhelmingly, first-generation college students.  And in my women's studies class, overwhelmingly female.  But whether they are black, Latina, Asian, Armenian, they've almost all been raised with one enormously important -- and colossally destructive -- discourse: pleasure comes with penalties.

I tend to focus on the close relationship between attitudes towards eating and attitudes towards sex, largely because they seem so often to be inextricably linked.  The pleasure of food is our first pleasure; when we were tiny infants, it was what we screamed for and it was gave us comfort and delight.  Long after many of our other appetites may have faded, we will still take pleasure in what we eat.  (I've spent a lot of time with the elderly; my experience has been that in nursing homes, the subject of lunch tends to dominate conversations.)  Throughout our lives, in groups or alone, eating has the potential to be one of our greatest physical delights.

And we do not live in a world where women are permitted to eat to satiety without a considerable degree of shaming.  While their brothers are often encouraged to eat to excess, the majority of my female students grew up with a sense that they had to monitor what and how much they ate.  Many were first introduced to the idea that "pleasure has penalties" by mothers who warned them, as they moved into puberty, "don't eat so much or you'll get fat."  Others grew up with parents who were happy to have them eat all they liked, but as they transitioned into puberty, found themselves under the crushing influence of the broader culture, which idealizes a female body type at odds with healthy, indulgent eating. 

Bottom line: few students get to college without a considerable amount of shame surrounding their eating.  Most, if not all, have incorporated specifically moral language to refer to their food habits.  When I ask them "What does it mean when you hear a friend say 'I've been good today'", all of them know that that refers to a particularly successful period of restriction.  When another friend says "I was so bad at lunch today", that never refers to skipping out on a restaurant bill; it's always a reference to prioritizing pleasure over self-denial.  And as a feminist, few things make me sadder than to see so many of my students caught in that trap of oscillating between self-denial and indulgence, between bouts of puritanical pride in their own restriction and crushing guilt for giving into the basic desire to be sweetly, pleasurably, full.

I always connect this struggle around food to sexuality.  Just as my students vary in their eating habits, they vary widely in their sexual mores.  I've posted before about just how diverse they can be; I've had porn stars sitting alongside those who insist that kissing before marriage is a sin.   But if I can make some generalizations, I can say with confidence that most have been raised to view women as "gatekeepers" who must carefully guard their bodies against lustful, predatory, men. Too many have grown up with a sense that lust is a one-way street in which women are objects but rarely subjects.  Many were taught by their mothers how to be pleasing  and desirable; they were taught how to attract men while at the same time keeping them at bay.  For far too many, male sexual desire is a tool to be used with great care.  But few were raised with any sense of their own sexual agency (at least in the service of their own pleasure.) During a discussion a few semesters ago about the "discovery of the clitoris" by the male-dominated medical profession, one bold young woman said frankly:

"I'd sooner admit to sleeping with dozens of guys than admit that I masturbate.  Bringing pleasure to men is always easier to cop to than bringing pleasure to yourself.  It's almost like masturbating for yourself makes you more of a slut -- it's like you can't control your own desires, and that's bad." 

While some students vigorously disagreed, it was clear that that comment had struck a familiar chord with many of the young women in the room.  (Nota bene: I do NOT ask students to disclose details of their private sexual lives to me or the class; I do, however, try and create a safe environment where those who wish to take such risks can do so.) 

Many of my students seem to have a sense of their own sexuality that reminds me of many folks with eating disorders whom I have known.  I've known quite a few women who regularly starved themselves.  And yet, rather than avoid food altogether, they became marvelous cooks.  I once dated a woman (briefly) who wanted to cook for me every weekend.  She made full-course fattening meals; she spent hours in the kitchen.  And she ate virtually nothing.  It became incredibly uncomfortable for me to eat in front of her, as she watched me with tremendous interest, constantly asking if I wanted more.  Obviously, she took some vicarious pleasure in watching someone else eat, but she clearly also had a perverse sense of personal agency.  For this woman, pleasure consisted solely in the capacity to bring pleasure to another.  She had no ability to enjoy food for herself; her delight was entirely contingent upon mine.  It was absolutely awful.

I've told that anecdote to a few of my classes, and seen many nods of recognition.  And it seems evident to me that for far too many young women, that attitude of "contingent pleasure" seems to carry over from the kitchen to the bedroom.  Even in our hypersexualized culture, most of my female students are taught more about how to provide pleasure to another than to experience it for themselves.  The agency that they are permitted is the agency that comes with mastering the male ego and the male body, learning how to flirt, learning how to seduce, learning how to bring delight and pleasure. They see porn everywhere, but rarely do they see a storyline written for them, one in which their own ecstasy is central rather than something feigned to soothe male anxiety.

I don't tell my students that they must masturbate without concomitant shame in order to be good feminists.  I don't tell them they need to eat cheesecake without guilt  in order to be liberated.  It's not the place of a feminist professor (particularly a male one) to prescribe specific steps for  transformation and growth in such profoundly personal arenas as sexuality and food.  But at the same time, I am clear that there are few areas of life where it is more important to live out our egalitarian values than eating and sex.  I am not advocating uncontrolled gluttony or destructive promiscuity. I am advocating an ethic that respects women's pleasure as an a priori good. I am not advocating selfishness.  (Heck, I'm a monogamous vegetarian; I understand the importance of balancing one's own desires with one's commitments to others.)  I am challenging my students to see physical joy as their human birthright. 

Though not all of my students are yet sexually active, all of them are "food active."   They've been eating for as long as they can remember, and will do so for the rest of their lives.   Part of beginning a feminist journey is making a commitment not merely to self-indulgence, but to the principle that all human beings are entitled to seek out pleasure.  It's one thing to say those words aloud, another to live them out.  And since feminism is never merely about transforming the self for the self alone, it's vital that men and women commit themselves to being advocates for shame-free pleasure in the lives of their friends and family.  Though our understanding of when and how we seek pleasure may be informed by our own spiritual beliefs, and though we ought never seek pleasure at the expense of another's happiness, we can still boldly, loudly, and continually proclaim the God-given right to delight in our bodies.   

Creation, in all of its messiness, is a good thing.

Comments

[prefer not to say]

V. interesting post.

Every time I hear Catholics make the argument that homosexuality represents a "disordered desire" I always wonder what would happen if those same Catholics examined their current relationships to food.

[Tam]

prefer not to say, I've also thought about the different values Christians have with food versus sex. (If you held them to the same standards, I have to assume chewing sugarfree gum is basically the same as masturbating.) I assume it's because during most of Christianity's history, food was scarce enough for most people that over-indulging wasn't an issue, while even poor people can make sex :-)

I am pretty much a chronic dieter, for health reasons, but I honestly don't have shame around my appearance or eating habits. It bothers me that all of the other women I know talk about "being good" or "being bad" with reference to eating.

But I honestly think the issue is not so much about rejecting agency and pleasure-seeking as it is about only have one model of making choices. Our whole culture views agency along the lines of, I have a childish self (an id, or whatever you want to call it) who wants all kinds of naughty things (sex, food, extra sleep, a new dress, whatever) and an adult self (or conscience, or superego) who tries to control the naughty child self. You boss that child self around and tell it how it's being bad and maybe reward it for being good, and that's how you control your urges. Christianity seems to encourage this view, but it's pretty prevalent everywhere, I suspect.

I think a much healthier model is to acknowledge that we have many desires and that they sometimes conflict, and our task is to use our skills to make choices. Often our short-term and long-term desires conflict and that is especially tricky to handle, because our short-term desires feel so much more pressing. But it's still a matter of making choices. You can look back and see that you made a wrong choice (that is, one that in retrospect you wouldn't prefer to have made), but it's not because you were "bad."

[Tam]

Sorry for the serial posting, but I think the other problem with the adult/child view of your agency is that it leads to the "deserve" model of thinking. I was good today, so I deserve ice cream! I work so hard, I deserve to buy this thing I can't afford! (You have to reward yourself for "being good", after all.)

I choose to believe that every single person deserves every good thing. But our choices can't be about deserving - we have to make the choices that are best for us, taking into account our desires. Do I "deserve" a Mercedes? By my definition above, yes. But buying a Mercedes would make me worse off in the long run, so it's not in my interests to do it.

Saying that everyone deserves every good thing is completely equivalent, in my mind, to saying that the word "deserve" has absolutely no meaning. But I choose the more positive and affirming statement.

[jt]

But at the same time, I am clear that there are few areas of life where it is more important to live out our egalitarian values than eating and sex. I am not advocating uncontrolled gluttony or destructive promiscuity.

I think this is a key point here, that people should be able to appreciate moderation - with respect to food, drink, sex, or anything else - without guilt. Pleasure often does come with penalties, particularly when taken to excess, and I think that needs to be understood; it's just that one shouldn't feel a sense of shame with every indulgence one partakes in.

In college, I knew students who were teetotalers, students who were borderline alcoholics, and students who were moderate drinkers, and it was my personal expereince that this was somewhat of an indicator of personality. The teetotalers and heavy drinkers (sometimes one became the other) both tended to view drinking as "being naughty" at some level, while the moderate drinkers didn't have any particular emotional attachment to the act of drinking per se. I imagine a similar dynamic applies here, and perhaps it ties into what Tam said about bossing around an inner child vs. just making informed, rational decisions.

[Anna]

This was one of the weirdest issues for me to wrap my head around when I moved from East-Central Europe to the West. Heaven knows my home country is extremely patriarchal, much more so than where I live now. But this is one thing that never, ever cropped up at home. Women, and men, ate just as much as they wanted, and they looked at Western TV depicting people starving themselves with a mixture of pity and bewilderment. The sweet feeling of fullness was not even considered a right, it was so normal.

This is probably changing now, especially in the more cosmopolitan capitals. But I wonder if this does not question the assumption that the phenomenon you describe has a simple link to patriarchy. I would have thought that it is a mixture of a consumerist and perfectionist culture with patriarchal attitudes that creates this effect. I wonder also how much of this is about trying to fulfill a classist ideal. Being trim and perfectly packaged is, after all, a costly pursuit: you generally have to be able to afford healthy food and opportunities to exercise (as well as a myriad of cosmetic products, good haircuts etc). And this would also support my Eastern European example, where, until recently, class divisions just were not the same.

[jeffliveshere]

I'm amazed that you could write a whole post (good post, by the way) about pleasure regarding food and sex and not note that it's likely that a lot of the sexual shame can be traced directly to the needs of various churches to control women's (and to a lesser degree, men's) bodies. One big reason fewer people masturbate in general is because they are browbeaten with the idea that some voyueristic god doesn't want them to...just as a for-instance.

[nico]

I have to admit, I starve myself to be thin. But it's not because I want to be more attractive to men (actually, in my experience men find the curvier me more attractive), it's because I simply feel more powerful the more my body resembles a boy's. I can trace this back to childhood I suppose - puberty meant tons more restrictions, learning to "act like a girl", and unwanted sexual advances and inuendo - so maybe it's natural that a prepubescent-type body is the kind I would feel more comfortable in. I don't know if this is a motive for dieting that other women share, but I thought I'd throw it out there...

[Hugo]

It's a classic one, Nico. Thank you for sharing it.

[Kate]

Intriguingly, I seem to remember an advert (I think it was for Muller yoghurt or something) which had the tagline "all this pleasure...but where's the pain?". The adverts were always reinforcing the idea that there must be pain to balance out the pleasure experienced.

This post really resonated with me. My mother grew up in a house with six sisters, no brothers, and they all share a policing attitude to female eating - indulging each other while delighting in the sinfulness, admonishing each other or denying themselves. I realised this when I
was trying to understand what makes my mother always speak to me about my weight. I used to wonder if it was tied into the Irish thing of food as hospitality (they're Irish Catholic) but that doesn't really explain why you can't treat yourself, too...
I always saw the self-denial while providing pleasure (cooking for others and watching them eat, as per your ex, or in my mother's and aunts' case, urging food onto the others as a 'treat' whilst not having any yourself but washing up instead) as an attempt for a strange kind of power.
I think the provision of food for others (care) is tied up with the discouse of mothering - self denial being somehow associated with the Good Mother.
Interestingly, I don't know if this is related, but my late grandmother on that side of the family always used to say to me when I was an adolescent, on the subject of Men, "Don't ever give the dog the bone, and he will keep chasing you forever". I knew somehow that she meant sex, although she never said that word...I found this advice confusing, to say the least - I always wondered, does that make marriage the dog-house?

[Rachel]

Excellent, thought-provoking stuff. I can't tell you how glad it makes me to know that these issues are being discussed in classrooms and across the blogosphere. :-)

[Angiportus]

This whole idea of pleasure as being somehow evil...I've got a cousin who favors a perfume called "Indecence". Go figure. She also likes to whine about her weight (not that excessive) and one Christmas indicted the whole nation as a bunch of indolent sloths. Other cousin, fatter, doesn't seem to care.
Way back in the supposedly liberated 70's, the prevailing message was that it was just so cool to sleep around, but self-pleasuring was still suspect. One who dind't involve others in one's getting-off was selfish or immature. Boys were forgiven for a few years of it because of their supposedly stronger urges, but it was still thought of as kind of pathetic compared to having another person--even of the same gender. But to me it always seemed at least as immature to risk disease, unwanted parenthood, emotional havoc, etc.
I always hated the idea that pleasure was somehow bad; I thought it was a conspiracy by adults to torture us, the young, for some obscure reason of their own.
It wasn't just sex and food. I recall my mom looking down on my interest in getting a synthesizer and just experimenting in private, with no one else to hear; she implied that one only had a right to musical instruments if one was planning to play them for others some day. To me, this was a conspiracy against us introverts. Why couldn't she just be glad that I was considerate enough to keep my lack of talent to myself?
But it's sad to see adults still treating themselves as they were once treated when powerless. Especially a segment of the populace that has been struggling for equal rights for so long, in so many other areas. Seems to me that learning self-defense or some practical skill is a better reason to exercise one's body, and that a fit body would be better able to carry whatever weight was present.
I'm getting ready for the possibility of some lively discussions at the family table this Thanksgiving...

[Oriscus]

Hugo, you write:

"Bottom line: few students get to college without a considerable amount of shame surrounding their eating. Most, if not all, have incorporated specifically moral language to refer to their food habits. [...] as a feminist, few things make me sadder than to see so many of my students caught in that trap of oscillating between self-denial and indulgence, between bouts of puritanical pride in their own restriction and crushing guilt for giving into the basic desire to be sweetly, pleasurably, full."

I shall be interested in hearing you explore this meme as you progress in a vegan rule of life.

To tip my hand, I should admit that I ahve noted you have already admitted that "left to your own devices" you'd subsist on rice cakes and peanut butter, or some such. Thus, you make it clear you have a "tin ear" as regards the aesthetics of food (you're an "eat to live" not a "live to eat" person). It is a short step from that to a moralistic/puritanical relationship to food and eating. (Yes, I know, there are *delicious vegan dishes. I prepare and eat them because they are delicious. Same reason I prepare and eat grass-fed no-hormone beef steak.)

My momma made/makes the most amazing country southern food. and frowned/frowns at me for asking for seconds. and I'm male.

Puritans.

[Gus]

I really wish that Americans could take a few lessons from the French. Their attitude seems to be: pleasure is a good thing in itself. We (and I'm no exception) feel that pleasure must be earned somehow.

[octopod]

Nico: that's why I work out and wear clothing that restricts or hides my breasts -- when all the boys went through puberty they obtained a power and privilege that I missed out on by instead developing into a girl. Same motivation, different tactic.

[Sarah P]

Great article and well thought out... you might want to read this:

Cosmic Tap: The Haunting Myth of American Anorexia

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