Take even a fleeting glance at women’s magazines and you’ll be justified in concluding that the whole lot of them are engaged in a massive conspiracy to ruin your enjoyment of doughnuts for ever. Mags such as Cosmopolitan, Closer and Glamour, with their calorie-obsessed features, are also hell-bent on destroying your penchant for mayonnaise by informing you how much fat per gram it contains and marking it ‘Sinful’ in huge capital letters, thus condemning you to a lifetime of watery, tasteless condiments or ridiculous food supplements.
Everywhere you turn, some celebrity is inflicting her food diary on you, recording everything that passes her lips save collagen, only for some tedious nutritionist to inform her that there isn’t enough curly kale in her diet. Features such as Closer’s ‘Fridge Raiders’ will purport to have the fridge-owning celebrity’s best interests at heart, when really it’s an excuse for a questionable dietician to experience a little jolt of schadenfreude at the discovery that that lass off Emmerdale is addicted to Dairylea triangles and, despite her size-8 figure, is actually a covert midnight Pringles-muncher (this is also known as ‘food shaming’). The fact that most celebrities’ fridges really only contain a baggie of amphetamines and a Tupperware container full of wheatgrass smoothie is something they choose mostly to ignore, mainly because the headline ‘Celeb’s diet diaries: what they REALLY eat’ sells a lot of copies. Of course it does: we have become a nation obsessed.
Most of these magazines are fairly alert to the fact that they can’t be seen to openly tout weight loss to people with healthy BMIs, so their dieting and weight loss features often masquerade as ‘healthy eating plans’ or ‘friendly’ advice. Of course, the content itself has always been and will always be centred round being skinny. Women’s magazines have a massive vested interest in pushing this message, after all: Closer magazine even has its own spin-off weight loss website, Closer Diets.
Weight loss is society’s favourite female problem. In the UK, statistics indicate that most women have been on a diet at some point, while a fifth of us are said to be on one most of the time. This amounts to one hell of a lot of women saying, ‘No chocolate torte for me, thanks, that spinach salad filled me right up.’ And yet, the fact that so many of us persist in our dieting quests can mean only one thing: that most of these diets don’t work. At all. Hence the need for newspapers and magazines to continually feature new eating plans and regimes, lest your attention lapse for a moment and you take stock of the fact that your bum is the same size as it ever was. ‘LOOK! PALEO DIET!’ they scream, drawing you in with clinical trials that have been performed on mice (but my God were those some mad hot, skinny little mice). We are, as we write this, in the midst of an ‘obesity epidemic’, and yes, that’s something we should be worrying about. Yet at the same time, thousands of healthy-sized women are going about their days hungry, buying books such as Six Weeks to OMG: Get Skinnier Than All Your Friends (Venice A. Fulton, 2012) which could presumably lead to a national case of competitive starvation if all your friends buy it. If we’re to have that ‘taut body’ and all the ‘self-confidence’ that comes with it, we shouldn’t let ourselves go for one second, let alone throw the baby food out with the bathwater by scoffing something as sinful as broccoli (declared ‘carbier than you think’ in 2013).
The well-known phrase ‘A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips’ has been the unofficial mantra of the women’s magazine for many a year now. For a while, it seemed like men had escaped this twilight zone of strict rationing and routine guilt induction – after all, a man never has to suffer the indignity of a bitchy picture caption describing how he ‘poured his enviable curves into this season’s tuxedo’ – but where once men ate five jacket potatoes of an evening and failed to give it a second thought as their girlfriends wept in the corner with a teacup of carrot soup, now the times are rapidly changing. September 2013 even saw the Evening Standard speculate about whether Colin Firth, Jude Law and Harry Enfield were on the 5:2 diet under the headline ‘The chaps are going from chunky to chiselled – but why?’
And increasingly we now see similar content in places like Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness magazines. Some articles – such as ‘Your ultimate smoothie guide’ or ‘12 Foods to remove from your fridge forever’ (both found in Men’s Fitness) – would be welcome on the cover of any of the female counterparts. ‘Some refrigerator staples, like pickles, lunch meat, and milk, could explain why your abs are in hiding,’ simpers the introduction to the latter article, in that infantilising tone which is almost ubiquitous in its female-oriented counterparts. Meanwhile, Men’s Health promises ‘A year of weight-loss cheats’ and holds competitions like the ‘Men’s Health Fat-Burners’ (‘How much weight do you think you could lose in one year? … One year ago, we asked four Men’s Health readers to find out. We gave them those 12 months to shed as much fat as possible, armed with nothing but advice from @MensHealthUK Twitter followers.’) While men’s magazines tend to have much lower circulations than women’s magazines (in the first half of 2013, for instance, the UK readership as measured by ABC totalled 400,371 for Glamour versus 203,741 for Men’s Health), it’s still a worrying trend that sets a dangerous precedent for both sexes.
However, thanks to centuries of body fascism, women have a pretty hefty head start as far as media scrutiny of their appearance is concerned. Let’s not forget that even the buffest of male celebs never really get asked what it is they’re consuming and excreting. Until one of them appears in his trunks on the cover of heat, you can consider our sympathy extremely limited. Women have been encouraged to poke around in their own faeces to work out their ‘intolerances’ for decades. Really want to join us down here, boys? It (literally) stinks.
Celebrity-focused magazines such as Closer have made food and body obsessing their central selling points, and word of mouth has it that it can be a pretty lucrative business for those stars who are willing to monetise their yo-yo dieting in the form of pap shots and interviews. Focusing on the diets and fitness regimes of Z-List celebrities and reality TV stars, cover stories have included ‘I’m not too thin – Pete loves my size zero body’, ‘I’ve gained a dress size but I’ll stay curvy for X Factor’, ‘I’ve dropped a dress size & I’m back in love – sex is amazing’ and ‘LOVE SPLIT DIETS: it’s been a hellish month – I’ve no appetite’ (note the frequent correlations drawn between the quality of your love life and the emptiness of your kitchen cupboards). Inside, where the minutiae of the daily dieting grind are detailed, is even more disturbing. The magazine is full of so many tips on how to be skinny that they often contradict one another – one minute you’re being told that Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas is a size 8 thanks to her burrito diet, or that you can ‘DROP A DRESS SIZE IN TWO WEEKS’ using their slimming plan which includes, as a real-life example, pork kebabs and cream cheese bagels – and the next, you’re being told to ditch the junk food and that Kim Kardashian (who, has just been fat-shamed by a rival publication) ‘hits the gym five times a day’. It’s a minefield of misinformation and manufactured self-loathing.
And then you have the interviews. More common in the higher-end magazines (trash rags will usually just run shamelessly with the diet angle), these features often purport to be interested in the subject’s personality, intellect and contribution to society, only to then reveal an obsession with diet to rival the lowbrow offerings. The journalist will be at pains to prove that not only is said celeb refreshingly normal, but she has a normal diet too, and all while maintaining the ‘tight little body’ (quite probably one of the most unsavoury phrases in the entire English language) required of her as a female in the public eye. ‘A model who actually eats?!’ the journalist will scribble faux-incredulously, as though the correspondent for (Fame) Hungry Monthly hasn’t been through the whole monotonous routine a million times. ‘Oh, I eat all the time,’ the celebrity will jovially insist. ‘There’s nothing I love more than cooking a full Sunday roast for my nearest and dearest on the weekend. In fact, I hate the whole celebrity circus … Her beautiful nose crinkles slightly as she stares into the middle distance, possibly envisaging the tedium of the red-carpet press junket. ‘No, I’d much rather sit at home in Primrose Hill in my pyjamas consuming whatever refined pork product is my current endorsement. I guess I’m just lucky – I’m one of those girls who never puts on weight.’ The silk of her dress flutters over her sample-size frame as she adjusts herself in her seat.
The pervasiveness of this ‘I’m just normal, me’ charade was perfectly encapsulated by a headline in Glamour that read, ‘Heidi Klum is OK With the Occasional Burger’ (BREAKING NEWS). This is the sort of editorial that Glamour holds particularly close to its cold, dead, sparkly heart. We’re talking about the magazine that once featured a full-page picture of spaghetti and meatballs accompanied by ‘Some women eat this and stay slim’.
Of course, every now and again a celebrity comes along who makes no bones about the kind of tortuous diet and fitness regime she has to follow (Gwyneth Paltrow, with her ‘best green juice’ and arugula meatballs is a prime example, though despite saying that she’d ‘rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup’ she does, scandalously, allow herself one cigarette per week. ‘It’s about finding a balance between cigarettes and tofu,’ she said. Natch), and when this happens, it’s the magazine’s official duty to ensure that the minutiae of that celebrity’s diet and fitness regime are exhaustively recorded, while obviously ‘not endorsing it’ at all. More often than not, said sleb will be following some awful fad diet or detox regime at the behest of a spaff-peddling expert with a made-up qualification from an uncredited institution. (We have Dr Ben Goldacre’s excellent takedown of poo-rummager Gillian McKeith to thank for accurate knowledge of her educational attainments.)
Charlatan nutritionists are always harping on about about this or that superfood (which coincidentally just happens to be the one which last year you were told would give you cancer) and how it removes ‘toxins’, which usually take the form in this context of non-specific nasties which need ‘flushing out’ through a punishing liquid diet regime intended to give you the trots for a fortnight. Enter stage-right the ‘Saltwater Flush’ – an inexplicably popular detox process which involves downing warm, salty water and then spending an agonising half an hour waiting for it to shoot out of your rear end with more kinetic force than an Icelandic geyser.
Or consider ‘wild blue-green algae’, with which Gillian McKeith was obsessed (so obsessed, in fact, that she wrote an entire book on the subject called Miracle Superfood: Wild Blue-Green Algae which is still available for purchase. Form an orderly queue). Unfortunately, as one writer in the New Scientist pointed out, wild blue-green algae – also known as cyanobacteria – are toxic. But you know what’s really guaranteed to slim you down? Being dead. She could still be on to something.
Alarmingly, this trend for extreme regimes and intense diet scrutiny seems to have extended to the general public. Gone are the days when celebrities were the only ones who had to worry about having their eating habits laid bare; ordinary civilians have to face the nutritionists’ food-shaming too. Red magazine, for example, ran a feature in June 2012 that saw a variety of perfectly healthy young women berated for their lifestyle choices. Natasha, a lady with a healthy BMI of 21.3, was told to ‘swap chocolates and biscuits for a raw bar’, while Katie, a gym bunny with an equally healthy BMI and a very healthy diet, was told to ditch the biscuits in exchange for crudités and houmous, because she won’t get pregnant unless she loses weight. Pages later, the reader was informed about ‘mindful eating’ and instructed to ‘eat like a calm person’. How the hell can one eat like a calm person when the rules are constantly changing, thus placing you in an endless state of nutritional panic? Poor Katie probably read Mireille Guiliano’s bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat and thought a little bit of chocolate was OK, but now she’s being told by some twat in a national magazine that she’s basically a pig in knickers, and a barren one at that. Where do these people get off?
Indeed, it’s these fleeting fad diets that really are the most worrying aspects of this hunger-led culture. We’ve all seen our nearest and dearest make themselves miserable through starvation and deprivation, despite some often unsavoury, and occasionally malodorous, side effects (yes, it’s true what they say about the cabbage soup diet).
Back in 2007, Marie Claire was singing the praises of what it dubbed ‘The Baby Eating Diet’, which, despite the name, does not involve the cannibalistic ingestion of infants, but rather ‘A-list stars [Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Marcia Cross] going mushy over the latest diet craze to hit Hollywood – eating jars of baby food’. The article ended with the sentence: ‘Sounds like we should all jump on the “choo-choo train” school of eating.’ Here, we give you permission to look down at your adult-sized burger and weep for the future of humanity.
Often these diets, the latest being the ubiquitous ‘fasting’, or 5:2, diet (suggested tagline: ‘Making your colleagues even more unpleasant to be around since 2012’), stipulate that you go without the recommended number of calories a day, ensuring that, unless you’re a Victorian lady able to spend the working day lolling on a chaise longue, you end up passing out. Not to mention constantly grouchy. Trust us – try one of these fasting diets and you’re guaranteed to get to the point where you end up screaming, ‘GIVE ME A FUCKING BISCUIT!’ in hypoglycemic rage at the supermarket cashier with the wild, yellow-tinged stare of a woman driven mad by malnourishment. But that’s cool, right? At least you’ll be in ‘great shape for a new man’, as Closer would have it.
It’s not just baby food and fasting, either. Take magazine-recommended product Herbalife, which despite sounding like a pretty accurate description of the three years you spent stoned at college is actually the name of a yummy-sounding ‘meal replacement programme’. Then you have all the ‘beach body plans’ which promise to help you drop four dress sizes in four weeks by taking advantage of your anxiety about getting your baps out in a bikini and telling you that the key to shrinking that muffin top lies in something called a ‘breadless sandwich.’ A breadless sandwich. Medical professionals say again and again that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is an oh-so-boring-but-effective combination of healthy eating and regular exercise, yet we’re all still hoping for that quick fix.
Despite what mendacious, turkey-dinosaur-obliterating tosspot Jamie Oliver would have you believe, a healthy diet combined with frantic Zumba-ing won’t be enough to shift your gelatinous arse. Instead, why not try one of these 100% clinically proven diets as invented by an expert near you:
1. The Tapeworm Diet – early 1900s to 1950s: If you have a big event coming up and are praying for a spot of slimming norovirus to help you on your way (hot tip: try the oysters), you could do a lot worse than a tapeworm. How exactly you’re supposed to go about ‘catching’ a tapeworm doesn’t really bear thinking about (although according to our research on the internet it invariably involves giving a Mexican $1,500 for some parasite-containing pills – a bit dear, considering pig shit costs nothing), but once you’ve got the bugger in, it can apparently lead to a weight loss of 1–2 lb per week. As recently as August 2013, one woman made the news for buying and ingesting a tapeworm for this very reason. Side effects may or may not include the tapeworm bursting out of your stomach while you lie on a spaceship breakfast table after an artificially induced deep sleep. Once you’re skinny enough, sitting in a bath of milk and waiting for it to slide out is apparently one of the few options at your disposal.
2. The Sleeping Beauty Diet – circa 1966: This crackpot diet has been peddled for over fifty years on the basis that your body is forced to use up extra reserves of fat while you sleep. Perfect for the ultimate lazy dieter, it involves the bare minimum of effort and crops up every so often in newspapers and women’s magazines. When taken to an extreme conclusion, however, it involves 24/7 sleeping following medically assisted sedation, in order to get your abs fairy-tale firm. Apparently a favourite of Elvis Presley’s.
3. The Lemon Detox, or ‘Master Cleanse’ Diet – popular since the 1940s: Starvation is the name of the game, with dieters replacing food with a lemon juice and maple syrup mixture that bungs you up and rots your teeth (Beyoncé is reportedly a fan). Going to a restaurant with anyone on this diet is a miserable experience as they sit there sipping their ‘master cleanse lemonade’ with barely enough energy to converse.
4. The Cabbage Soup Diet – circa 1980: A must-try for the slimming masochist. Everyone knows that cabbage smells like arse, but not only does this diet make you shit molten cabbage-lava, it also makes your house (wherein you have been preparing the devilish concoction) extremely unpalatable to gentleman callers. If you’ve been craving celibacy as well as IBS, and are prepared to eat unparalleled quantities of the vegetable (perhaps you are a Russian peasant from the 1880s?), then this is the diet for you.
5. The Hallelujah Diet – popular since 1992 (developed in the 1970s): The regime of choice for Bible-bashers, this diet is based on something God apparently said in Genesis about how 85% of your food should be raw and plant-based (it’s essentially veganism with added sanctimony). It’s not the most balanced of diets, revolving as it does mostly around mung beans, and it flagrantly ignores the fact that cooking kills off some of the bacteria that live in food. God also later reneged on the veggie deal by saying: ‘every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you’, which basically means that you can go ahead and eat that tapeworm mentioned earlier.
6. The Dukan Diet – 2000: Offer someone on the Dukan Diet a sausage sandwich and they’ll reply, ‘No. I’m on phase two of the Dukan Diet and can only eat pork on every second Wednesday providing it’s a full moon.’ This diet’s various phases are harder to grasp than the most complex branches of theoretical physics. Even understanding the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment while drunk (comprehending a cat in a box that is simultaneously both dead and alive is no picnic at the best of times) is liable to become as unchallenging as an episode of Button Moon when compared with a Dukan dieter trying to work out whether they’re allowed yoghurt on Tuesday. It’s based entirely around cottage cheese, which is made from the waste removed during lipo, hence its texture (probably).
7. The French Women Don’t Get Fat Diet – 2007: Ooh là là! Looking a bit portly? Why not take advice from the nation that that eats chocolate bread and cheese for breakfast and loves nothing more than a pig’s head fried in butter crowned with baby birds? Apparently, French women are able to enjoy the country’s gourmet delicacies, such as baked Camembert, in moderation, while spending every weekend subsisting on leek water that literally makes them poo themselves thin. How the French have managed to combine faecal incontinence with a reputation for chicness remains one of life’s great mysteries.
8. The Air, or Breatharian, Diet – 2010: Perhaps tiring of its daily leek juice, French Grazia once featured the Air Diet, an eating plan which involves not eating. Basically, you hold your food up to your mouth – and pretend. It’s a regime that sounds even less satisfying than the well-publicised Mastication Diet, in which you chew food before spitting it out. In November 2013, the Telegraph reported that Michelle Pfeiffer had become a ‘breatharian’, believing that she could survive ‘on air and sunlight alone’.
9. The Purple Diet – circa 2011: This diet involves the consumption of only purple food (can you tell that we’re losing the will to live?).
10. The Liquid Diet – since time immemorial: This is the part where, after exhausting all dieting options, you drink two bottles of Pinot and four tequila shots, while weeping to your best friend about how your life is so miserable and devoid of joy and chocolate mousse that you have become an empty husk of a person. ‘Eating is cheating’, as the mantra goes, and it’s chicer and cheaper just to drown your sorrows in Buckfast than it is to face up to decades of unhealthy eating patterns sanctioned by the mainstream media. In a sense, you have become a human Schrödinger’s cat: alive, yet dead, and lying in a box filled with cyanide.
Considering the continual cupcakeisation of the media, it’s somewhat ironic that they are so keen on preventing us from eating. The way the fash pack have fetishised brightly coloured girlie foods such as macarons, behaving as though these sugary treats are a kind of fashion accessory, begins to look very confusing next to the constant messages we’re also sent about hunger and how to manage it. Online magazine Jezebel ran a story in 2012 entitled ‘A cupcake is never just a cupcake: The psycho-sexuality of a twee treat’, pointing out the sudden deluge of teeny tiny iced goods in TV programmes, books and movies, where they apparently often stand in for femininity and even the female orgasm, being as they are a ‘private and delicate affair’.
While we may not buy the ‘cupcake-as-orgasm’ theory, these glorified fairy cakes nonetheless crop up in any number of female narratives. Think about it: Miranda iced cupcakes for Steve’s girlfriend Debbie way back when Sex and the City was a blazingly honest TV programme rather than a disappointingly consumer-oriented movie franchise for those with hollow eyes and stomachs. Even the brilliant 2011 film Bridesmaids featured a love story centred around a cupcake shop, yet this modern obsession with baking is completely at odds with society’s current slimming preoccupation, especially in an age when (perfectly healthy-sized) Great British Bake Off winner Ruby Tandoh is told by Raymond Blanc that she is ‘so thin’ it makes him ‘doubt her love for great cooking’. (If there was ever a perfect illustration of You Can’t Win syndrome for women in the media, this was it.) Then again, when compared to a big fuck-off Victoria sponge, cupcakes aren’t really about stuffing your face to satiation – especially the mini ones you get at fashion parties. Likewise, the canapés women are supposed to covet are hardly KFC tower burgers or casserole dishes filled with macaroni cheese. This is girlie food for so-called girlie appetites. And it’s probably only a matter of time before someone dreams up the Cupcake Diet.
The continued existence of supposed quick fixes and the enthusiasm they are met with in the media hints at a darker edge to the industry. We’ve read thinspiration articles in magazines which recommend that you leave the windows open while sleeping because the shivering of your unconscious body will help to burn off calories while you sleep (Marie Claire), that you replace food with powder (and not the kind media darlings get on a street corner for £40 a gram, but actual powdered food), and tips ranging on the madness scale from taking cold baths every morning to blowing up balloon after balloon to firm up your abs (this from ‘Six weeks to OMG’). Celebrity interviews, especially with celebrities who have recently been pregnant, have produced such hyped-up nonsense as the Jessica Alba claim in Net-a-Porter magazine (25 April, 2013) that you can ‘wear a double corset for three months’ after giving birth and, presumably, magically pop back to a size 8. (‘It was sweaty, but it was worth it.’) Look magazine was quick to pick up on this titbit and run it as ‘Jessica Alba reveals the secret to her post-baby body: a corset!’ The Mail Online went with ‘Jessica Alba’s right – a corset can help you flatten that post-baby bump’, and Today.com rather tastelessly ran ‘Corsets after pregnancy? It’s a thin thing’.
But it’s not just celebrities who come under this sort of scrutiny: increasingly, ordinary women are also wheeled out to demonstrate their body flaws and celebrate their dieting techniques. An example of this would be the features which compulsively claim to reveal ‘slim women’s secrets’. Cue a group of non-celebrities being paraded in front of their readership merely for the supposed virtue of being thin. The slim women in question are always quoted alongside their dress size and weight, for example ‘Stephanie (size 6, 8st.)’ or ‘Chloe (size 6–8, 8st. 7lb)’, encouraging you to hold your own weight and dress size up for comparison. Heights are often added too. A feature last year in Marie Claire called ‘Real women: amazing bodies’ informed us Shona is ‘5ft 8in. tall, weighs 9st 2lb and is a size 8–10’, before chronicling her daily diet and exercise regime, just to make all the 5ft 8in. women out there who weigh ten stone and over feel extra, extra shitty. ‘I’ve dropped a dress size and four bra sizes,’ continued the article, its photographers lingering over the women’s taut muscles. It may be in the health section, and many may describe it as more ‘fitspiration’ (a mainly internet-based trend that emphasises physical fitness and muscle mass) than thinspiration, but it comes from the same place (‘Strong is the new skinny’ says Woman & Home, as if we were in desperate need of ‘the new skinny’) and that place is Your Body Isn’t Good Enough Central. Which, incidentally, hosts some of the worst nights out of your life.
Magazines which are supposedly aimed at women beyond their twenties and thirties, such as Women & Home (a smorgasbord of weight loss advice, recipes, and articles about the perimenopause) and Good Housekeeping, don’t let up either. Suddenly it’s less about ‘what’s in this season’ and more about ‘what’s in season’: food porn mixed in with ‘analytical’ articles with titles such as ‘What’s your tummy type?’ (Do you have an ‘apple tum’? A ‘pouty tum’? Or a ‘wobbly tum’? If it’s the first, then ‘Drop all sugar, wheat, processed foods, caffeine, alcohol.’ And fun, presumably.) Much like the features listing women’s heights and weights, these mags seem to go out of their way to encourage competitive non-eating. As a gender we should all give our thanks to magazines such as Good Housekeeping, whose gloating article ‘Guess which of us lost the most weight?’ last year detailed how weight loss has ‘transformed the lives of these four women’ while no doubt making its readers want to eat their own faces off in despair (if they weren’t so fattening, obvs).
‘When I was in my 20s, I was a couple of stone heavier than I wanted to be – at 11 stone I may not have been extremely overweight, but it definitely affected my confidence,’ says Jane. ‘It was when I started seeing a boyfriend who weighed less than me that I knew something had to change! … I signed up for a meal replacement plan – the food tasted completely vile, which probably helped with the weight loss.’ Sounds healthy. She continues: ‘By ignoring my taste buds I lost two stone over three months, reaching my goal weight of 8 st. 11 lb. Then I married the skinny boyfriend!’
Is this how we now define success: by our ability to deny ourselves pleasure and starve ourselves down to our goal weight? The fact that these magazines aimed at women middle-aged and beyond are still banging the weight loss drum gives us very little hope of ever being at ease around food, but then, it’s that insecurity that keeps you coming back for more. A few pages later, in the same magazine, there is an article called ‘Beat biscuit o’clock’ (why on earth would you want to?) which could have been taken pretty much verbatim from a ‘pro-ana’ message board. It teaches you how to resist cravings by drinking water, ‘re-training your taste buds’ and building a ‘mental shield’. ‘Try imagining eating chocolate before you eat it … you’ll end up eating less,’ it parrots, before – and this is the killer – telling you to sniff the chocolate. Indeed, one of our friends who worked in fashion told us that her colleagues used to sniff birthday cake before throwing it out. When did we stop celebrating birthdays and biscuit o’clock, for God’s sake, and why are offices up and down the country now filled with women on ‘fasting diets’ who chew gum rather than having milk in their mid-morning coffee?
It’s important to eat for a multitude of reasons, not least because if you don’t you eventually die, and, despite what some high-end fashion mags may imply in their photographs, a dead woman never looks good in a dress. The magazines which recommend that women starve themselves are fatally irresponsible: even the ones intended for adult women will make their way into the houses of teenage girls who may already be struggling with low self-esteem and peer pressure at school. Indeed, magazines know that a significant proportion of their readership consists of these young women, although they’d never let slip to advertisers that an economic group with such little spending power makes up their main customer base. But they continue to idolise the hunger deity, and it’s not just magazines but newspapers and their columnists too. Back in 2003, prominent journalist Polly Vernon wrote an article for the Observer Food Monthly entitled ‘Admit it. You hate me because I’m thin’. It detailed her extreme weight loss and how she went from a size 12 to a 6 in a matter of months, concluding that ‘contrary to popular belief, being thin has made me happy’. It should go without saying that to equate slimming with happiness so explicitly can be hugely damaging, and when we tweeted about this article, a surprising number of our readers came forward to tell us about the negative effect it had on their eating habits.
Ten years on from Vernon’s article, there are magazines which, through their coverage of fasting diets such as 5:2, aim to teach you how not to feel hungry, about how being hungry can be ‘addictive’, and about the psychological high that you get when you fast. In other words, what used to be the kind of stuff you saw in the darkest depths of the internet is now making its way into our bedrooms, and the impact this could be having on our confidence, our health and our well-being is genuinely terrifying. No matter how we try to combat it, it seems that women are always in the front line for this food-related warfare.
In a world of ‘bitesize’ chocolate bars for women and ‘man crisps’ for men, what we eat remains stubbornly gendered. Years after Susie Orbach’s famous treatise on body image, fat is still a feminist issue – and how many lipids you’ve got to your name can still send the media into a spin. Try looking back at the adverts that launched Cadbury Crispello bar in 2012; most of them had the audacity to suggest that a ‘chocolate bar overhaul’ had been necessary to cater to women’s teensy little feminine hands and their delicate little stomachs which can barely take two bites of pasteurised cocoa butter without recoiling in nauseated horror. In contrast to to a big, imposing rectangular structure stuffed with caramel, raisins and pieces of biscuit, the Crispello was a couple of wispy fingers which was by all accounts more packaging than anything else. ‘A Chocolatey treat for you,’ the ads cooed, in that patronising, faux-soothing tone reserved for food that’s geared towards gals. ‘They’ll make your boyfriend’s hands looks bigger.’ Wait, what? And let’s set the record straight here: if you’re eating a chocolate bar that’s smaller than the size of your finger and you take a couple of bites and then ‘save it for later’ (as their adverts suggest you’ll want to), then you’re doing it wrong. To eat a Cadbury Crispello in the way it was apparently intended is basically akin to punching Willy Wonka in the face. In the Chocolate Room. Next to the chocolate fountain. In front of all of his Oompa Loompa friends, you sadist fuck.
Of course, we’ve experienced this sort of chocolate-based idiocy for years from advertisers: Maltesers commercials where the sweets are so ‘light’ on your stomach that they float, for instance, or ads where scantily clad models skip around in silk and hide their Galaxy bars in drawers like sex toys, to pull out and consume in masturbatory glory only when they’re hidden from the judging eyes of others. It’s not difficult to imagine a future wherein Cadbury just charge female customers for buying an empty wrapper to parade in front of their friends and occasionally sniff. As far as turning a profit is concerned, it would be genius.
On the other side of the fence there is the marketing that has long suggested our male counterparts (much like the guy off Man v. Food, who unsurprisingly had to retire due to ill health) take big chunks of various forms of junk food and push them into their gigantic, slathering mouths, which are naturally open in perpetual expectation of something nutritionally masculine. What the hell is nutritionally masculine? Well, it’s preferably meaty (shoving your entire face into a plate of Double Whoppers = manly. Table manners over your tofu curry = icky girlie suspected homosexual). The division even goes as far as your taste buds – beer and whisky are man drinks through and through, while for us lot it’s sickly sweet pina colada or Bailey’s; ‘slag drinks’, as they’ve been dubbed by the Sunday Times. If man food absolutely has to be something that was formerly a living, breathing vertebrate, then lady-food consists of a candy treat delivered in pieces that are far too big for spindly little girl-fingers to get a proper grip around (which the Crispello would know all about). ‘Man food’ in marketing speak – and ‘man chocolate’ and hot dogs, especially – is usually all about handling a big, hard, substantial substitute for a penis, particularly if it used to be alive.
As hilarious and self-parodic as this sort of food PR can become (tattooed truckers chomping away on Yorkie bars under the tagline ‘It’s not for girls’ lent themselves willingly to satire), it’s the more subtle targeting of female demographics that gets our backs up. Low-fat spread on a seeded piece of cardboard is supposed to help ‘while you’re getting into shape for summer’ – of course, if you weren’t ‘getting into shape for summer’ during the spring months, but were otherwise busy living your life, then this presumption might seem rather insensitive. Probiotic yoghurts such as Activia (known to all as ‘that yoghurt that makes you poo’) are necessary because your dainty constitution probably can’t handle digestion, despite having been honed by millions of years of evolution – including times when we lived in caves, ate speared buffalo rather than leek and potato soup, and snacked on nearby twigs – to do exactly that. Vitamin supplements (at the time of writing it’s the pleasingly pink Raspberry Ketone) are a must (see again: ‘dainty constitution’). Kale, celery and flax seeds should be the staples of your diet, while the resurgence of the ‘no sugar’ ideology (up there with fascism as probably one of the most evil ideologies ever posited) means that fruit is plummeting in popularity. No more blueberry porridge for you, babes; this artificial sweetener in a box that looks kind of like a packet of fags should do you fine instead. It’s enough to make you want to pick up one of those ‘calorie conscious’ pizzas with a hole in the middle from Pizza Express and scream through it, ‘Let me eat dough!’ You’d ruin a polite social occasion, but at least you’d be raging against a society which takes a disturbing interest in what moves through your intestines.
But, wait: perhaps you actually want to cook your own food, rather than spend hours explaining to the waiter that you want a pizza without a hole in it or a meal deal size large, please. (Holly once stood at a counter for fifteen minutes as the man behind it repeatedly asked, ‘Are you sure?’ to her request for a large falafel wrap, the bastard.) In which case, you’ll fit in nicely with the mantra ‘Men don’t cook, and women are naturally inclined’, even if your so-called natural inclinations have only ever resulted in burning the bottom of the pan when you didn’t realise that pasta needed to be cooked in water, or, on being asked to put a gigantic Camembert in the oven, making an executive decision to remove it from the box, prompting Camembert Armageddon (guilty). And yet, there’s still a presumption that vaginas belong in kitchens. (Just check out the internet meme ‘make me a sandwich’, a taunt regularly made to feminists by sexist a-holes and to which the only possible retort is ‘What? So you can try and shag it?’) Common mythology has it that whenever people with penises get in the lady-kitchen, they usually mess it up: women are supposed to be all over herbal garnish, of course, while the bumbling, incompetent men envisioned by the advertising output of Tesco, Iceland, Asda, Walmart et al. have to make do with microwavable burgers when their girlfriends aren’t around. Oh wait, did you forget about microwavable burgers? We know they sound like a piss-take and/or a vision of society’s inevitable slide into Matrix-like dystopia, but they’re not. They’re a food product dreamed up by Rustlers, a company whose advertising imagery compared the easy accessibility and convenience of sticking a pre-packaged piece of meat into an electrical appliance to a scenario in which a man takes a (fully clothed) woman home and, after she agrees to a coffee, presses a button that revolves the sofa once to reveal her in her underwear. Appropriately, the taste it left in our mouths was probably very similar to a Rustlers burger – but, being women, we’ve never tried them. (We’ve also never tried a Ginsters or McCoy’s crisps for that matter.) And if that isn’t ‘rapey’ enough for you, then there’s always the infamous Burger King blowjob ad (the ‘super seven incher’ will ‘blow your mind away’) or last year’s Piri Piri Pot Noodle campaign, entitled ‘Peel the top off a hottie’ and accompanied by two of the aforementioned Pot Noodles positioned to look like tits (the image in this advert was banned by the ASA in 2013). All these examples demonstrate that, when ad men think ‘convenience’, the first thing that comes to mind is ‘taking a woman’s clothes off’, whether she’s agreed to it or not.
Not only is the idea that men are way too busy and stupid to work an oven and that women have an inborn knowledge of casserole timings and sugar-to-flour ratios pretty equally insulting, but it’s also difficult to reconcile with the fact that most famous chefs are men, while Nigella and Delia can only aspire to being a ‘cook’ or ‘domestic goddess’. Granted, most successful anythings are men (with the possible exception of burlesque dancers), but the idea that everyday domestic cooking belongs to women, while skilled, career cooking is for men, is especially insulting. It was only in the 1950s that the idea of women’s inherent expertise with butter icing and cinnamon came to the fore, yet it’s been a persistent assumption since, and a dab of Worcestershire sauce is now seen as the most a man can do with his dinner (cheese on toast), yet the ladies are supposed to magically dispense béchamel from every available orifice. Unless there’s payment involved, of course – at which point, the men will step out from behind their veil of incompetence, don a chef’s hat, and head up their own TV show and cookware conglomerate.
The politics of hunger are undoubtedly complex, but one thing’s for sure: they’re disproportionately skewed towards women. Naomi Wolf, in her hard-hitting book on expectations of womanhood The Beauty Myth, referred to women suffering from anorexia as ‘political prisoners’, and her argument is compelling. She reminds us that, in the same year that women gained the vote, admonitions to ‘slim down’ cropped up for the first time in the media, after centuries of their celebrating the voluptuous female form as the social ideal. Since then, across all media and in our discussions with each other, this energy-sapping concern with losing ‘extra’ weight has reached fever pitch. Turning your concerns inward and expressing them via starvation dampens your voice and stamps out your activism. It makes you physically smaller and less threatening. As the potential to gain more power has become more and more real in the outside world, a magazine-driven obsession with diets, slimming and weight has rendered huge swathes of women inactive and ill. Without ignoring the very serious plight of many male sufferers, eating disorders are still much more common amongst women; in fact, they are at almost epidemic proportions (of 6.1 million UK sufferers, it’s estimated that 89% are women). And their murky associations with the mass media have begun to seem inherently political.
Where food is concerned, women are expected to tread a difficult line between control and guilt. If we’re not worrying about the pastries in the oven, then we’re being visually assaulted from all angles by the stock photos of perfectly toned women looking anxiously at the scales in every lifestyle supplement and magazine. Women’s bodies are all too often the sites of social discussion, and we’re supposed to negotiate the female domains of the cupcake stand and the kinky lingerie rack with exquisite style and no complaints. If an outsider really looked into the way we speak to each other – about ‘overindulgence’, about food that has an abstract morality (‘good’ foods, ‘bad’ foods, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days during diets and fasting periods, and cake-eating as ‘naughty’) – he or she might guess that we remained willingly chained to the oven or the kitchen sink, probably by an extra-strong length of kitchen roll. Being thin is sexy, supposedly, and it’s continually implied that being ‘naughty’ with your food will prevent ‘naughtiness’ in the bedroom. Rarely will you find your male friend describing his ‘man crisps’ as a ‘guilty pleasure’. But your strawberry cheesecake is exactly that, because it means that you might not fit into your push-up bra and your French knickers without your stomach becoming demonstrably convex, and you won’t fit into the role of slimmed-down, anxious, passive sexuality that you’re encouraged to conform to, either.
Don’t believe us? Then consider that the heartbroken woman, unlucky in love, is nearly always portrayed as having one hand on her weeping brow and the other on a spoon dipped into the nearest tub of double-chocolate ice cream. A woman without a man is a mess of calorific consumption, but a woman who’s happily coupled up or celebrating her sexy singlehood on the scene will be chomping the Ryvita at lunch, poising her fork over a cherry tomato and exercising the necessary restraint that comes with being a female adult. The distraught binge-eater is chubby and childish, you see; the powerful, ambitious woman, with her super-green smoothie and her tiny portions, shows self-control through the choices that she makes at the breakfast table. This is a demand not usually made of a man, who can happily slap a steak on the barbecue at a business picnic and be seen to enthusiastically devour it in a matter of spittle-showering bites without any qualms that his professional integrity will be called into question. The same can’t be said for his female colleagues – because when ‘diet’ equals ‘control’, this bleeds into all variations of life for the workaday woman: she’s not only sexually undesirable and probably newly dumped if she’s ‘pigging out’ on such normal fare as spaghetti bolognese, but she’s also likely to drop the ball in the boardroom. In other words, if you’re not mindful of your food intake, then society will punish you manifold.
An influential study from the International Journal of Obesity in April 2012 found that, when being interviewed or in the workplace, ‘fat’ women experience more prejudice than their similarly rounded male co-workers.16 Women who are perceived as overweight are judged to be sloppier in carrying out their tasks, lazier in their work ethic, and generally less able to control themselves in business situations. And this has a financial impact: Business Insider reported in the same month that research by the American Psychological Association had found ‘a fat woman makes $29,419 less per year than a skinny one’. However, this isn’t the case with men, where being overweight ‘can actually pay’; in other words, can even have a positive effect on their salaries. Little wonder, then, that women who have suffered from eating disorders say again and again how they saw starving themselves or purging themselves of the food that they’d eaten as a way of reasserting lost control. Thinspiration graphics with slogans such as ‘Stop stuffing your fat face’ and ‘Eat. Feel guilty’, are a painful reminder of the cycles of self-loathing that can occur. Conflating respect, control, and the restriction of complex carbohydrates results in a toxic social combination. As long as we’re being told that we speak primarily through the padding on our elbows and the size of our thighs, we will continue to self-destruct en masse wherever edibles are involved. It might be through a fully fledged eating disorder, or it might be through another hour poring over the seductively titled diet books in the local Waterstones – but either way, it’s a waste of talent and a chronic waste of time.
In this climate, where it feels like we drag the chains of social judgement to every leisurely lunch and working breakfast, where the food we eat is supposed to come with a gender attached, where diet plans are part of the average woman’s daily casual reading, and where outright hatred of our own constituent parts is normalised and marketed back at us, it’s difficult to imagine how to progress. But there is optimism amongst the clamour of the ‘chew it then spit it’ diets, the starvation inspiration, and the five-year-olds who call themselves fat. The ubiquity of social media means that most of us are now hooked up to a permanent stream of food rhetoric, and using it to promote awareness – and humour – is possible because, contrary to what we’re hearing, bread is not the new heroin, and thinspiration can kiss our well-rounded asses. The Twitter account for model Cara Delevingne’s thigh gap (@CarasThighGap, if you’re interested) has drawn hilarious attention to the idiocy of obsessing over an absence between your legs. And the heart-warming appearance of anonymous handwritten stickers across diet plan adverts in the London Underground in 2011 – stating ‘You ARE good enough’ or ‘You’re beautiful the way you are’ – not to mention the social media shares of posters proudly proclaiming ‘I EAT CARBS’ make for a smile on your daily commute. But so much more needs to be done.
We can start by challenging why this overemphasis on food is so tied up with the experience of being a woman. Once you start recognising that your dinner plate is seen as everyone’s business and that this is not OK, that the women pushing the message that you are what you eat are often in desperate need of help themselves, then you realise how profoundly unhealthy all this dietary fascism is. And once you realise that the focus on your stomach is bleeding away your ability to act in the real world, you start to call out anyone who tells you that it’s a woman’s job to focus on controlling her palate rather than her life. We need to arm ourselves with the same sort of scrutiny of the culture that millions of marketers and editors worldwide are affording our muffin tops, until the words that come out of our mouths become more important than the food we put into them.