Watching Girls Die

The title of Hadley Freeman’s essay on The Free Press Substack catches your attention. “Watching Girls Die Online” feels a bit like a new form of pornography, akin to snuff films.

The subject of her essay, and of a new book, is anorexia, or self-starvation, a practice that more than a few girls are now practicing and sharing with the general public. They are not just starving themselves. They are posting horrifying skeletal images of their barely clothed bodies.

At first, you wonder whether “Watching Girls Die Online” is a sister site to the SFW work site, “Beautiful Agony.” Of course, for those who know the French language, the term “la petite mort” comes to mind. If you need me to explain what that means, you are too young to be reading this.

As it happens, Freeman recognizes the pornographic potential lying dormant in images of girls starving to death:

For a lot of people, there is something thrilling in watching a woman waste away, maybe because it seems like the ultimate expression of female self-denial, a feminine helplessness, a sexless kind of self-published pornography. 

For my part, as I will argue, these images of skeletal females are more anti-porn than porn. Calling these images thrilling is, for me, a step into incoherence.

Having suffered from anorexia herself during her adolescence, Freeman is intrigued by the fact that anorectic girls are happy to expose their condition.

One assumes that the exhibitionist anorexics know how bad they look. One assumes that they are crying out for help. And yet, one also imagines that they do not really know how bad they look. Self-starvation might very well damage brain cells, to the point where these girls do not know what they are doing to their bodies. Many of these girls think that they have reached somethingn like feminine perfection.

One would imagine that they would notice when their reproductive system shuts down, but we should take nothing for granted here.

More importantly, a woman who renders herself skeletal will surely notice that she is not attracting any male attention. Normal men will recoil at the image of a woman who is starving herself. If they desire anything, it is to feed her.

Of course, that might be the point. Being able to shut down male desire might be the goal for some girls, especially adolescents who are horrified by the thought of heterosexual intercourse.

For the historical record, back in the day, women whose mere presence dampened male desire were known as witches. See the Renaissance guidebook, the Malleus Maleficarum. To follow this argument to its bitter end, images of anorectic girls is more like anti-porn.

Moreover, we should not ignore the fact that self-starvation produces mental states that might feel like spiritual transcendence. We will see, and Freeman reports it well, that saintly women in the Middle Ages occasionally starved themselves. 

Freeman explains that when she was anorexic, she took naked selfies. She insists that she did not advertise them, but, once they exist, they risk being publicized:

When I was at my worst, I took photos of myself naked in front of a mirror with my disposable camera—the analog version of a selfie. I didn’t show my photos to other people; they were just my private trophies. This secretive, more furtive way of glorying in one’s illness is very common among anorexics. 

Obviously, such pictures do not glorify illness. They make the woman look hideous, regardless of whether she realizes it.

We need to mention that anorectics form something of a cult. A girl who is starving herself to death will certainly suffer the entreaties of those who want to feed her, but when she goes out in public, or when she posts Instagram snaps of her condition, she might also hear praise from her fellow sufferers.

For her part, Freeman offers a picture of her psychology when she fell ill:

I simply had a fear of growing up and becoming a woman and I didn’t feel ready to separate from my mother.

Of course, this might be unique to Freeman. But, one suspects that more than a few girls today are terrified at the prospect of becoming a woman. Whether or not this has anything to do with separating from one’s mother, I have my doubts.

At our current cultural juncture, young girls are suffering far too much emotional distress and even mental illness. How much of it derives from a cultural moment when becoming a woman is not something to be welcomed, but is something to dread.

And, if that is the case, where did so many women get the idea? Who taught girls that they should not look forward to becoming women, perhaps because they would then become slaves to male desire, the male gaze, and patriarchal oppression.

I trust that the answer will immediately pop into mind. Whatever else you think of it, modern feminism has taught girls that becoming a woman was a very bad deal, indeed. Anorexia does not merely delay the inevitable; it makes the inevitable evitable.

Is it really that difficult to pass from feminism to faminism?

Keep in mind, when Betty Friedan sold us modern feminism, she touted it as a solution to a problem that had no name. Whether you agree or disagree, you must admit that five decades of feminism have not produced good mental health for women. Anything but.

Interestingly, Freeman argues that many girls have found their way to anorexia by being vegetarian or vegan. She calls her own flirtation with vegetarianism a “gateway drug to the disorder.”

She writes:

It taught me from a young age to divide foods between those that were permissible and those that weren’t. Rather than seeing eating as a pleasure, it became an identity, and a moralistic one: was I a good person who conscientiously ate good foods? Or a slovenly one who unthinkingly ate bad ones?

Obviously, this reflects distorted thinking. Freeman is correct to see that eating had become a moralistic identity, but she is incorrect to see it as a pleasure. Just because you enjoy your meal, that does not mean that the dumplings' sole purpose is to give you pleasure.

Consuming nourishment is a social ritual; it binds groups together. 

Unfortunately, Freeman is a child of her times, and she feels compelled to fold anorexia into a feminist (or faminist) narrative, of rebellion against the patriarchy. These girls are not starving themselves. They are taking the only action that they can to remove themselves from the societal requirement to marry men.

Freeman considers that anorexia is empowering. Thus has feminism encouraged faminism:

And even if Catherine of Siena and Zhanna Samsonova were not classified as suffering from the same syndrome, they both learned that a woman not eating is an effective way for her to seize control when she feels otherwise powerless. All the saints listed above stopped eating at the time their parents were urging them to get married. 

Of course, these women might not have wanted to marry the men their parents had chosen. In the case of Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth century mystic, her lifetime coincides with the advent of the bubonic plague in Italy. It was not a time or prosperity or conspicuous consumption.

Besides, during that time in Italy people imagined that they could stop the plague by doing extra penance. Did anyone notice that many religions count fasting as penance, a way to atone for sins. Perhaps Catherine starved herself because she wanted to suppress her wish to marry her brother in law.

Catherine’s vocation did not involve marriage to her brother-in-law. In time, we must note, she did marry -- Jesus Christ. As you might know, when Catherine married Christ she took as her wedding band-- his foreskin. 

And no, I did not make that one up. 

If we are to sanitize the narrative, anorexia offered Catherine of Siena spiritual transcendence. 

As for the other young women of the time who adopted the same feminist habit, I refer you to the book by Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia. 

If one wished to exit feminist thinking on the topic, one should mention that in certain circles anorexia became a medieval social contagion. How do you distinguish between the young women like Catherine of Siena who stopped eating to reject unwanted suitors with those women who chose to emulate her example?