Eating in the Light of the Moon

Today, more women than ever find themselves in a struggle with their weight. Diet books and programs for weight loss are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating have reached epidemic proportions. In America, millions of women struggle with anorexia and bulimia, and thousands of them die from complications resulting from these disorders. Statistics indicate that 95 percent of those who have been diagnosed with eating disorders are female.

Obsession with the body, continual dieting, and excessive exercise routines have become so widespread among women that they are now considered normal behavior. Bodies sculpted by plastic surgery to look like those of prepubescent boys with breasts have become the standard for the ideal female body. Since the average model or actress is thinner than 95 percent of the population, most women know the frustration of living in a body that refuses to conform to the ideal.

It is impossible to discuss the causes for disordered eating without questioning the experience of being female in our society today. What is going on? Studies show that American women value being thin over being successful or loved and that most girls are unhappy with their bodies by age thirteen. Why are so many females so dissatisfied with their bodies? Is it because there is such an emphasis on thin, angular bodies, which very few women come by naturally?

If so, why has a naturally masculine shape (broad shoulders, no waist, narrow hips, flat belly) become the ideal for the female body? Why is it that those aspects of a woman’s body that are most closely related to her innate female power, the capacity of her belly, hips, and thighs to carry and sustain life, are diminished in our society’s version of a beautiful woman?

The answers can be found by taking a look at history from a perspective much broader than what we were taught as children. The history we were taught in school belongs to the patriarchy. It is a history that concerns itself with the struggle for power and domination. Our history books are filled with winners and losers of the great wars and the names of the men who fought in them.

The history of the patriarchy is limited to the last five thousand years. New archaeological data and research are revealing a much broader scope. Rather than reviewing civilization in terms of centuries, researchers Merlin Stone, Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, and others are looking at the process of civilization over many millennia, as far back as thirty thousand years, before the advent of Judaism, Christianity, and the classical age of Greece.

A long time ago, these researchers tell us, the experience of women on this earth for thousands and thousands of years was very different than it is today. In their world, that which was female, and all its manifestations, was honored and revered. The female side of God, in the form of the Goddess, was worshipped. The spirit of the feminine was recognized as the creative life force of the earth.

Its symbol was the circle, a shape that has no beginning and no end. That which was round or curved was considered beautiful: the shape of the earth, an egg, the naturally rounded, curved shape of a woman’s body. That which moved in cycles was respected and honored as a source of wisdom. The seasons, the moon phases, the ebb and flow of the tides, and nature’s life-death-rebirth cycle were looked to for the answers to the mysteries of life.

Women’s wisdom, gained from their natural connection to nature through their menstrual cycle, was revered. Women were respected for the power of their intuition and their understanding of the earth’s ways. This wisdom was passed on from woman to woman, from mother to daughter, for thousands of years.

A new way of perceiving the world came into being. The line came to be considered superior to the circle. A hierarchy developed. What was made by men was considered superior to what was made by nature.

The circle was removed from a position of reverence and replaced by the symbol of the line, which had a beginning and an end, a top and a bottom, a superior position and an inferior position. And all things came to be valued according to their position. Those on top had more power than those on the bottom.

The Goddess was banished. Only the male side of God was allowed to be worshipped. The Earth was no longer viewed as the sacred source of all creation. It became an object to be divided up into many square pieces for those men with the most power to own and use. Women’s connection to the wisdom of the earth through her body and the cycles of nature was rejected. The power of her intuition and emotions was ridiculed.

Women who taught the way of the circle, who used their connection to the earth for healing, who celebrated the feminine spirit, were imprisoned or killed. Generation after generation after generation watched their mothers and sisters burn at the stake for celebrating and embracing their feminine power.

Women still live in a society where what is masculine, linear, rational, and logical is considered superior to what is feminine, circular, intuitive, and emotional. Today’s woman is a round peg trying desperately to fit into a square hole in order to survive and flourish.

How does she do this? By trying to shape her body into a more angular, masculine form, one that has zero fat to round off its edges. By being shamed into pretending that her menstrual blood (which once kept her so connected to the earth’s ways) doesn’t exist. By denying her most powerful emotions and quieting her intuitive voice.

Because she has banished her feminine spirit, she lives in a state of perpetual spiritual hunger. Her starving soul yearns for nourishment. But the nourishment of the Goddess, of the Woman Spirit, is not available to her. All there is is the food she feeds her body.

Is it any wonder that she overcompensates for her starvation? Is it any wonder that in frustration she goes on strike and decides to stop eating? Is it any wonder that her body becomes a battle-ground for the war between food and fat?