Why do women want to look like skeletons? Is the media to blame, or is body-sculpting the new DIY?
BODY LANGUAGE
Gaby Wood
If you invented a game called fantasy glossies, in which imaginary magazines had to be put together using the most marketable elements of everything on the news agent’s shelf, you might, in the more surreal stages of it, come up with something that fused the popularity of dieting mags with the celebrity voyeurism of Hello! As a joke, to show the blatant truth of these publications’ appeal, you might call it Celebrity Bodies. Clearly, this game has been played in the offices of Emap Publications, and the winner has been put straight into production.
British magazine Celebrity Bodies was launched earlier this year with a cover that screams “Geri: the TRUTH behind this body!” and has instantly come under attack. The anorexia debate has reared its head again, while the magazine’s editor, Alison Hall, explains that her publication, which reveals slimming secrets of the stars, is encouraging exercise and nutritionally sound diets. “I think everybody wants a beautiful body,” Hall told me. “We are reflecting public interest. We’ve researched it. People want the celebrities, they want the diets.”
And that is precisely what is interesting: why is there a demand for it? The magazine itself is cheap, bright and cheerful, and therefore arguably less “damaging”, in terms of portraying an unattainable look or lifestyle, than something like Vogue. On the other hand, Vogue is clearly about dreaming of glamour, whereas Celebrity Bodies claims you can have it, if only you follow the meal plans.
There’s no point in attacking Hall’s new magazine as the root of something dangerous: clearly, it is a symptom rather than a cause. But what, exactly, is going on?
Celebrities are the saints and gurus of our age. They get thinner and thinner before our eyes. They are not the next Gandhi or Bobby Sands, they are not the descendants of medieval nuns and yet here is Geri Halliwell, performing a new kind of disappearing act for all to see, never saying if it is a protest or a prophesy. It is often said that the famous encourage anorexia in the rest of us, but the equation works the other way, too: with the eyes of the world upon them, who wouldn’t become obsessed with their looks?
In Franz Kafka’s short story The Hunger Artist, the eponymous hero sits in a cage in the centre of town for 40 days the longest his manager thinks he can remain popular in any one place then moves on to the next stop. At one time, the narrator tells us, the hunger artist was extremely popular: people would come to see him “because it was fashionable”. But the fashion wears off and he ends up a forgotten circus attraction. “Perhaps it was not his fasting at all that had made him so extremely emaciated,” Kafka writes, “perhaps what had so emaciated him was simply dissatisfaction with himself.” The artist’s last words are that his act should not be admired, because “I have to fast, I can’t help it”. It turns out not to have been a performative feat, but a psychological ailment.
Hunger artists, or body artists, is what celebrities have become. They are often admired more for their bodies than for what they do. But what is the nature of their “art”? Are we applauding something we should be helping to treat?
In her book The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann traces this phenomenon back to the end of the war in Vietnam. “Having left America in 1970 I found when I returned in 1978 that the anti-war protestors of the 1960s had become the health fanatics of the 1970s, and that all the passions that had fuelled their activism had been redirected inward into a preoccupation with their own physique, intensified by phobias about the toxins, like additives, cholesterol and calories, which threatened to invade the body, cloaked in the benevolent disguise of food. In a sense the war had come home, for it was now our bodies that were under siege, rather than those of the Vietnamese.”
You could extend this theory to suggest that the battle within women’s bodies is now raging because of the absence of any strong political causes. Equally, you could say that guilt is the most consistent feature of our relationship to our bodies.
Yet so much polemical attention is devoted to actual, physically visible eating disorders that evidence of something much more fundamental is ignored. To focus so obsessively on the body is already a form of mental disorder. As Florence Nightingale wrote, as early as the 1850s: “One would think women had no heads or hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.” The problem is that the female body is so much in the foreground not, like in the 19th century, as a vision to be admired, but as a theatre of the most self-destructive narcissism.
What is really dangerous about the omnipresent celebrity body is not that it causes eating disorders but that it makes them harder to diagnose. How can women who have a problem know they are ill when the whole world is colluding with them, and everything points to the idea that their beliefs about themselves are right?