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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Knapp isn't, however, perfectly immune to cliché. She begins the book with a favorite device of writers protesting contemporary body image woes, a paean to Renoir's "Bathers," a painting in which "there is love for women in each detail of the canvas, and love for self, and there is joy, and there is a degree of sensual integration that makes you want to weep, so beautiful it seems, and so elusive." If Renoir's women could speak, perhaps they'd elaborate on the elusiveness in their time (1918) of effective birth control, meaningful and remunerative nondomestic work, and the vote, among other things. It's been damnably hard to get both forms of liberation at the same time.
Knapp knows this. She describes herself as belonging to a generation of Americans who were "heiresses of the women's movement, of the sexual revolution, of relaxed gender roles, of access to everything from abortion to education, and to a large extent, that legacy blasted open female desire." An unabashed, if somewhat baffled feminist, Knapp observes that "we had more opportunities and freedoms at our disposal than any other group of women at any other time in modern history; we could do anything, be anything, define our lives any way we saw fit. And yet by the age of 21, I'd find myself whittled down to a skeletal form." All of the energy and attention she might have spent on doing or being "anything," she instead devoted to getting through the day on 800 calories or less.
I think Knapp hits the bulls-eye when she attributes her anorexia and the other distracting and soul-sapping disorders and addictions that sidetrack her generation (and mine) to "the anxiety that crops up alongside new, untested freedoms, and the guilt that's aroused when a woman tests old and deeply entrenched rules about gender and femininity." She's less convincing when she's railing against media imagery and "seeds of self-denial" that "are still planted and encouraged" in girls during childhood.
It's not that these forces aren't noxious -- the imagery is manipulative and phony, the subtle cues to put others first are real. But the world is rife with sabotage, conflict and temptation no matter who you are, and that's not likely to change, ever. Society may eventually overcome its "ambivalence about female power," but power, whenever it's exercised, tends to push aside someone else's ideas or plans, and that's seldom wholeheartedly welcomed. It's hard to do anything significant in the world without making yourself unliked in some quarter (even if it's only among the ranks of the ineffective). Accepting that is part of the art of exerting authority, and it will never be easy. The real question is less "Why doesn't society encourage women to exert their will?" than "Why are women so easily discouraged?"
Is the lack of "entitlement" Knapp detects everywhere among her cohort imposed from without or assumed from within? The author herself seems unsure. She can readily see that her own anorexia provided an overarching and all-consuming structure for her life at a time when she literally did not know what to make of herself: "I did not think, during those years, about how scared I was of the world, or how lost and shapeless I felt." The lifting of many of the traditional rules and regulations of femininity led to this sensation (surely unknown to Renoir's bathers, or any previous population of women) of being "untethered."
For a feeling of "power and competence" to really take hold at the "visceral level," Knapp insists, "entitlement must exist beyond the self; it must be known and acknowledged on a wider plane." When it's not, as was the case with her generation, the result is a freedom that is "both incomplete and highly qualified, full of risks." But how can freedom ever not be risky? And whose freedom is ever "complete"? The dilemma facing the youthful Knapp and millions of other Western women is universal to the human condition: Freedom is not safe.
Sometimes Knapp seems to get this. "The freedom to choose," she writes, "means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with our own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of the self." On the other hand, she keeps slipping back into victimology, blaming the media for beating down women with "images of femininity that infantilize them, render them passive and frail and nonthreatening." Yet passive and frail and nonthreatening is often exactly how Knapp describes herself and the afflicted women who populate her book, so crippled by anxiety and the addictions and disorders that arise from it that they can barely keep themselves alive and functioning.
