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meat and stink of my new body disgusted me. But somehow, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I clung on. No matter how repulsed I felt, I kept on eating my meals with the joyless efficiency of a robot. I had decided to try to find something that tasted better than skinny felt.
     
    Recovery from an eating disorder is difficult to measure, because it involves so much more than putting on weight: you have to will yourself to believe that you deserve your place in the world, the whole mess and hunger of your flesh and brain and lust and ambition. Even when you hate your normal-sized body so much that you want to tear chunks out of it, you have to get up, eat your meals and get on with your day. You have to learn to say those two, terrifying little words: I’m hungry.
     
    These days, I’m always hungry — sometimes for a sandwich, sometimes for sex, or work, or travel, or a change; sometimes I just want someone to hug. I’ve learned that it’s OK not to be a good little girl, that it’s OK to break the rules, even when you are told that you ought to take up as little space as possible. I refuse to shrink myself to fit into the narrow coffin that society lays out for young women. From time to time, I still miss my eating disorder. I miss the sense of control that comes when avoiding food is your highest ambition. But today, after three years of recovery, I have a degree, a career and a huge appetite for adventure. I’m hungry, too hungry to go back, to ravenous and insatiate to submit and pare myself down again. I’m hungry, still hungry, and the flesh and disappointment of real life taste better than skinny ever felt.
     
Fear and loathing
    Fear of female flesh and fat is fear of female power, the sublimated power of women over birth and death and dirt and sex. In his essay The Roots of Masculinity, therapist Tom Ryan notes that “Most therapists have frequently heard complaints from men about fears of being dominated, controlled, swallowed up or suffocated. Underlying these fears…is a more basic fear about the disintegration of maleness. … Dave, a thirty year old professional man, wishes his partners to be ‘firm and sharp’. There must be no hint of softness or largeness, particularly in the breasts. On occasions when Dave has seen or been with a ‘fat’ or ‘large’ woman, he experiences a sensation of being lost or enveloped by their ‘layers of flesh’.” 11
     
    Over the course of the 20th century, escalating female emancipation has offset by a growing taboo against female corpulence – not just of women who are overweight, but of any female fat, anywhere. Cellulite, saggy bellies, fat around the arms, natural processes which affect all female bodies, even the leanest, after puberty, are particularly loathed. Where female bodies are permitted, they must be as small and as ‘sharp’ as possible. The threat that patriarchal birthright will be ‘swallowed up or suffocated’ by gender equality is made manifest in the fear of female fat, and that phobic response to the reality of physical femaleness has been internalized by women and men across the western world. As soon as the female child becomes aware of her physical and spiritual self, she learns that her self is excessive, and must be contained.
     
    It is not coincidental that contemporary media fascination with eating disordered female celebrities is explicitly set against the success of women in the public eye. It is not enough for women such as Victoria Beckham and Angelina Jolie to be preternaturally thin; they must be seen to be suffering to be thin, to be starving themselves, so that their starvation and suffering overwhelms their personal success in the popular imagination of their personae. Conversely, the actress Keira Knightley, whose slender frame is by all accounts a fluke of genetics, has been forced to spend a great deal of her career refuting claims that she is anorexic. In 2007 Knightley successfully sued the Daily Mail newspaper for