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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Furthermore, though Knapp complains that when "women get psychically larger ... they're told to grow physically smaller" by "a culture that was (and still is) both male-dominated and deeply committed to its traditional power structures," every instance she lists of the monitoring and dunning of women is perpetrated by other women. From the gang of friends she hung out with in high school who occupied themselves with detailing other girls' best features and worst flaws to mothers who chip away at their daughters' self-esteem to the semi-deification of model Elle MacPherson on the cover of Shape magazine, it's always a female hand that's holding the lash. The photograph of the preternaturally gorgeous MacPherson is, Knapp maintains, "as inviting to men as it is shaming to women," but let's face it: Men don't buy or read Shape magazine.
If the image of MacPherson feels like a "visual slap" to the women who see it -- and, by all accounts, for many it does -- then why do they keep coming back for more? (Memo to the disgruntled women's magazine readers of America: Stop buying this stuff, and they'll stop putting it out there.) If it's true that "ads tell us who we are supposed to be," is it also true that we have to obey them? Even the very personal factors that contribute to anorexia, what Knapp sees as a widespread inability of mothers to sufficiently love their daughters and "model" a life of fulfillment and confidence, are not ironclad determinants of women's lives. It's possible to come to terms with a difficult childhood and still attain a good measure of happiness, after all.
Or maybe we're just unlucky, born at the wrong time. Knapp laments that she "missed the feminist boat" and writes that she has "always believed, perhaps naively, that if I'd reached my college years in 1968 instead of 1978, I might have turned out quite differently, developed a more radicalized view of myself and other women." Is this -- wishing that a movement had come along to direct her life in a good way -- so very different from wishing that women's magazines would stop trying to direct it in a bad way? Either way, she would still be what she jokingly calls a "zeitgeist sheep," clay to be molded by someone else's hands.
Here's another way Knapp might have looked at it: The previous generation of feminists had the task of fighting with an entrenched power structure to secure for women the freedom of first-class citizens. It was (mostly) a public, external battle, and they triumphed on many, if not all, fronts. Knapp's generation is the first of many charged with figuring out how to live the life that's been won for them, to expand its perimeter a bit further here and there, but mostly to inhabit a liberty that is scary, confusing, perilous and demanding -- as all liberties are.
The dilemma is textbook existentialism. Some preferred the predictability and anonymity of the old prison and found a way to return to it, or, failing that, forged a new set of chains, this time imposed from within. Knapp started out wearing just such a set of self-created bonds, but eventually managed to work her way free -- almost.
Knapp is such a thoughtful and big-hearted writer I wanted her to end "Appetites" on a note of sharper clarity about women's responsibility for their own misery in this area, an inkling that she can do more than just fret about it, if only by resolving to stay away from women's magazines and abstain from participating in critiques of other women's bodies (two simple ways of counteracting the negative forces she decries). Instead, she ends on a tremulous note of hope: Maybe "feminism" will someday explore the "least-touched frontier" of female appetite, maybe her newborn niece will get to participate in "a new tide of agitation." In turn, I found myself hoping that sometime after she finished writing those words, Knapp realized that she was gazing out over a well-tended stake on that frontier, and gave herself credit for just how far she'd come.
