"Eat, spit, eat, and spit again. It was late at night when the *** slumped on the toilet for the 10th time. His throat was burning like fire, his eyes were so swollen that he couldn't open his eyes, the back of his hands were rubbed by his teeth, and his stomach The excruciating pain in her back went straight to her heart. She hated herself and vowed again that she would "never throw up again tomorrow." However, for the next 11 months, there was not a day where she struggled with the cycle of eating and throwing up."
This is an excerpt from the real account of a patient with anorexia, perhaps one of the most underrated mental illnesses in the world. In 2016, the internationally renowned medical journal "The Lancet" published an article "The Big Problem: Eating Disorders", which pointed out that there are about 20 million people with eating disorders in the European Union, and one in every 6-7 young women suffers from eating disorders. To make matters worse, however, eating disorders have ravaged nearly the world. Due to insufficient popular science and prevention, many people do not understand this emerging disease at all, and even misunderstand that eating disorder is a disease of free and subjective choice. torment.
Anorexia is classified as a major condition of eating disorders, which refers to the behavior of weight control, accompanied by abnormal eating habits, and can produce physical disturbance. There are four main types, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, atypical eating disorder and binge eating disorder. Because the film focuses primarily on anorexia nervosa, we'll just focus on the bio-psycho-social model of anorexia. First, the biological models behind anorexia have important roles in eating disorders, particularly the nervous, endocrine and immune systems. For a typical healthy population, their relationship is interconnected, and their complex feedback regulation is interconnected to form a complete and orderly feeding system. But for patients with anorexia, excluding the genetics of "man is determined to conquer the sky", it is also reflected in the influence of central neurotransmitters on anorexia behavior. Second, the mental model of anorexia is also not to be underestimated. Personality traits, for example, are significantly associated with anorexia, with psychopathology and depression and OCD personality disorder being the most prominent. There are also many stressors that can directly lead to anorexia or binge eating. For example, individuals who are severely frightened, are extremely uncomfortable with the new environment, are too nervous in work and study, fail in relationships, and have a high stress index. And "fat fear" is considered to be the core pathology of anorexia! For individuals, patients are mostly jealous and fearful of maturity, they are afraid of weight gain, fear of puberty, fear of sex, and anorexia can prevent the occurrence of these fearful worlds, reduce fear, low self-efficacy, Thereby obtaining a great sense of security. But any crude attribution is hooliganism, "fat fear" is a cultural concept, and culture as a differentiating variable creates a lot of inconsistency. For example, some countries are not caused by fat fear, then we can not fully require this consistency to ensure that each patient's experience is the same. Therefore, it can be further explored in the following socio-cultural factors.
Under the social model of anorexia, "fat fear" comes directly from the media hype and the fashion industry's advertised "thin culture". The current social and cultural concept advocates thinness as beauty, and women deeply agree with this cultural concept, branding slenderness as their ideal body shape, pursuing a slender figure, the weight loss culture that can be seen everywhere, and media publicity. cultural pressure. In addition to the "thin culture", the family unit is also an integral part. Family is a complex dynamic organization with many dimensions. For example, the predisposing factors for the selection of movies mainly come from Ellen's extremely distant family relationship, but there are also many factors such as family inheritance, family eating concept and family education.
In today's "thin culture", the modern body has become an important tool for individuals to shape their own style, which also supports Brian Turner's statement in "Body and Society": "From a sociological point of view, anorexia The importance of anorexia nervosa is that it cannot be separated from social pathogens, the standard for measuring social deviance, and the symbolic meaning of society.” Anorexia nervosa expresses the aesthetic requirements of the mainstream of society, especially the requirements of men for women, and the requirements that women should Beautiful with a slim body. This kind of constant gaze on women's bodies has become the external pressure for women to constantly examine themselves. When they choose to succumb to this kind of pressure, they will implement ascetic supervision on their diet and force their body to be transformed, and this process has evolved into women's self-evidence, self-resistance, Even a means of praying for social cues. Although such a change is surprising at first glance, it has its deep historical roots.
Roland Barthes once said when talking about the semantics of food, "Food is not only a collection of many products, but also a system of communication, a large number of intentions and a ritual of customs, situations and behaviors." And food is most closely related to women. , as food producers, gatherers and processors, and because of their own production and reproduction characteristics, they deal with food all their lives. This just explains the biological similarity between women and nature in giving birth to life - "the earth is our mother", "we suck the milk of the mother of the earth", "the mother's blood is flowing" - etc. This series is a metaphor for the motherhood of nature and the objectification of women. And how much warmth this kind of metaphor conveys, this setting makes women fermented into naked exploitation under the patriarchal social system. Especially now with the widespread dissemination of modern media tools, women's bodies are being objectified again. When every anorexic patient examines herself in her own room and uses scientific and rational tools such as measuring rulers and weighing scales to measure her diet and weight, she has actually internalized the value system and moral norms of the patriarchal society, and dares not One step beyond the pond. As Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punishment, "The 'gazing' is the setting of a one-way gaze, the result of which is the inner self-imprisonment of being stared at." This "gazing" is so destructive power, making dieting a war between self-control and indulgence. But any war will never be for nothing, as in the movie's diet symposium, the female doctor vividly describes the pleasure of self-control.
It is through this war that these girls construct their own gender identities, trying to control their bodies through the control of food, and then strive for the right to realize their personal identity. Well, that's exactly what Ellen did. When she stood on the scale and conveyed her expression of amazement and surprise, she felt as if she... won!
We pity Ellen, who is scrawny, but Ellen sees the shriveled and deformed body as a rebellion against patriarchal desires, dragging baby-like immature bodies from staring, play and devouring fate. But if dieting was originally about gaining the attention and recognition of others, then the dieting later became a competition for oneself, a game of self-consuming solitaire.
The injustice of the modern value system, and especially the symbolic value of the female body, is so absurd! When women live in a material-rich world, but the individual walks around in the body of a "living dead" and is powerless to try to control the body and make the body a symbol that conforms to social standards, they use their bodies to fight hard, but in the end they can only use their bodies form of death to end the struggle. . .
This article mainly starts from the perspective of female anorexia, and does not comprehensively cover both genders. I sincerely hope that male eating disorders will actively participate, discuss and solve together.
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