Beyond the Bone

As a ballet dancer in my youth I was naturally obsessed with my weight and did some pretty extreme things to keep the weight off, including eating nothing beyond breakfast for six days of the week and binge-eating on the seventh, as well as using laxatives when I broke this strict diet even with just a spoonful of food beyond breakfast. And I exercised more or less all day. I weighed 37 kilos from when I was 15 to 17. I loved my hip bones and my thigh gap, though I wanted more of a gap, as well as bonier shoulders and arms.

To the Bone

This extreme dieting kind of worked for me at the time, as it does for many ballet dancers - and models and actresses - which is a problem for these art forms and one that is reflected, with slightly less intensity, in the wider experience of growing up female in a culture that values the aesthetic of female thinness and bones.

If I'm honest I still value this aesthetic to a degree, though I have not dieted - nor been thin - for many decades now, and I think my values have changed somewhat since I was a skinny teen. I can see that Keira Knightley is too thin here. Much too thin.

The Netflix movie To the Bone tackles this issue head on, with a story featuring a girl struggling with anorexia who is played by an actress who is clearly too thin (she lost 20 pounds for the role), and who has suffered from eating disorders in her past, as have the women who wrote and directed the film.

It's a pretty common female story to be sure, and for this reason it should be told in film. But the fact that the actress had to dice with this disease by losing so much weight when she was thin to begin with and had experienced eating issues in her real life, is rather problematic, as it kind of suggests that the disease is not as serious as it is, if you can just come in and out of it like that, an assumption all too easily made when the cure seems to be to just eat.

But the disease kills a high number of sufferers and the cure is far from simple. Indeed the only real cure is prevention, which is the opposite of easy as it means undoing all those messages that tell us in Western culture that thin girls are prettier than not-thin girls.

The film's inclusion of a not-thin girl as one of the patients in the clinic for treating eating disorders was a progressive - if slightly awkward - move in that it helps us to see that thin and fat are really the flip sides of the same disordered, food-preoccupied mind that is the reality for so many western girls and women, a perspective that shows, indeed, that eating in itself is no cure.

I don't think I have been a particularly good mother to my daughter in her struggles up and down with weight, no doubt partly because of my own weight issues and preoccupation with bones as a young dancer, but I think I am getting better at seeing it is preferable for women to be overweight than underweight, or at least realising that this mental adjustment is the first step towards developing a healthier perspective on women and weight.

To the Bone is, on balance, a story worth telling on film, largely because it shows the unattractiveness of being a thin and bony woman, in contrast to its usual glamorisation, without simplifying the cure or blaming the thin woman - or deflecting blame, either. There is no finger-pointing; 'blame' is diffuse and shared, a novel concept in itself.

I hope this cutting-edge, female-centred film helps anorexic girls and women - indeed all girls and women - to move beyond anorexia and other eating disorders, including bulimia and obesity. It has helped me already.  

  

Make me

So I was in our local department store (Farmers) recently trying on a black woollen skivvy because my existing one has lost its elbows and at my age you need elbows, and the lights in the changing room were so harsh white they were practically racist.

Indeed these lights judged my skin as cruelly as white-pink skin ever was judged, which might be fair enough, if it wasn't for the fact that it was clearly aimed at women of a certain age, and our skin has had more than its fair share of harsh judgement.

You can't enter these giant glaring glamour stores, most of the stock of which is aimed at 'older' women, without passing through a gauntlet of white-lit makeup stalls staffed by an army of heavily made-up and uniformed women who glare at you as a drill sergeant might glare at his (her) soldiers to see if their kit is up to muster.

Only soldiers sign up for that level of scrutiny, we don't, and it is our skin wrinkles, the work of mother nature, being judged wanting, not our clothes wrinkles, the work of sloppy laundry. There is only so much we can do to improve the situation, and whatever we do is only a stop-gap measure, and a bloody expensive one at that. So we have much more to lose than to gain by going down that made up road.

And the only reason I can think for why they continue the glaring lighting beyond this vast cosmetics gauntlet into the changing rooms where it simply cannot improve your response to the clothing tried on there, is that the money to be made in convincing middle-aged women they need a full facial cosmetic upgrade is so much more than they can make in selling clothing that they are actually willing to sacrifice their clothing sales to sell cosmetics, by reducing your self-esteem far enough in the changing rooms that on your way out, back through the gauntlet, you succumb to the pressure and stop to ask one of those heavily made-up manikins to make you up a face. Then, once you see your made-up self in the mirror, there's no going back to the old, low-resolution, blurry, blotchy you.

And after flinging my skivvy in disgust at the assistant on my way out and telling her: 'Those lights in there aren't helping!' refusing to buy the thing on principle even though it fit, I passed through that glaring cosmetics gauntlet and despite myself found my feet hesitating: perhaps just an eyebrow pencil? But no; it's a slippery eyebrow slope.

So its no eyebrows or elbows for me for now. However I do fear that as I am trying to return to the stage at a rather advanced age, it is only a matter of time before I do go down that slippery eyebrow slope. But not yet.

   

Animal sex?

Not as animal as all that

When I read recently about the female star (Emily Watson) of the latest BBC drama series Apple Tree Yard having ‘hot, animal sex’ on screen with a stranger at the age of 50, my first thought was: what do they mean by ‘animal’? 

Unfortunately I was unable to find out because this so-called 'animal' sex occurred in the first episode that we missed on account of attending the comedy performance Feminists are Funny. Clashes do happen, sometimes they are a little ironic. 

The performance was great; feminists are funny indeed, but even so I was disappointed to have missed episode one of the series that I had planned to watch and have since watched subsequent episodes of (no animal sex in those, at least as far as I could tell).  

It's not that I wanted to watch 'animal' sex especially, only that I am curious about the term, because, as it happens, during the course of my advanced political research, I have had occasion to watch sex between creatures we more routinely describe as animals, if not as the king and queen of the animals, namely lions, and the sex they had was not what I would call 'hot' or 'animal', indeed. Very little heat seemed to be involved, it was all but perfunctory and over in less than ten seconds, though often repeated in the course of five minutes, and each time it was the female who initiated it - by squatting down on her front - and ended it by roaring over her shoulder to get her chap to look lively and hop off (he would otherwise have stayed there all day and fallen asleep; that bit seemed quite animal, actually) so she could stretch her legs, circulate his semen, and begin the whole sequence over again.

My second thought was: 'Is she really younger than me?' Emily Watson, that is, not the lioness in the video. She was definitely younger, having animal sex five times in five minutes.