Free Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by Susan Bordo Page B

ashamed of their needs, and not entitled to exist unless they transform themselves into worthy new selves (read: without need, without want, without body). 4 The motherdaughter relation is an important medium of this process. But it is not mothers who are to blame, stressed Orbach, for they too are children of their culture, deeply anxious over their own appetites and appearance and aware of the fact—communicated in a multitude of ways throughout our culture—that their daughters' ability to "catch a man" will depend largely on physical appearance, and that satisfaction in the role of wife and mother will hinge on learning to feed others rather than the self—metaphorically and literally.

    For Orbach, anorexia represents one extreme on a continuum on which all women today find themselves, insofar as they are vulnerable, to one degree or another, to the requirements of the cultural construction of femininity. This notion provoked heated criticism from the (allmale) panel of commentators, two psychiatrists and
    one clinical psychologist. The political implications of Gilligan's talk had been missed by her respondents (and by Orbach's), all of whom chose to hear the paper solely as a lament for our culture's lack of esteem for the "female" values of connectedness, empathy, and otherdirectedness. Gilligan's talk was (mis)interpreted (as her
    work frequently is) as a simple celebration of traditional femininity rather than as a critique of the sexual division of labor that assigns "female" values to a separate domestic sphere while keeping the public, male space (and "masculinity") a bastion of autonomous selves.

    Orbach's talk, unambiguous in its indictment of the normative construction of femininity in our culture, was much more troubling to the panelists. It elicited from them a passionate defense of "traditional women," with Orbach the feminist portrayed as unsisterly and unmotherly and the panelists cast as sympathetic protectors of those groups that Orbach had abused. So, for example, David Garner, coauthor of Anorexia Nervosa: A Multidimensional Perspective, felt obliged to defend mothers against the "blame" Orbach had attributed to them and the "guilt" she had inflicted on them for ''choosing traditional values" and being fulfilled by "nurturing." Steven Levenkron, author of The Best Little Girl in the World, came to the rescue of the anorectic herself—that "skinny kid in your office," as he called her, whose suffering Orbach had failed to appreciate adequately (in suggesting that her pain could be understood on a continuum with normative female suffering). Here, the feminist critique was charged with sacrificing the care of "helpless, chaotic, and floundering" children in the interests of a "rational" political agenda. The panelists thus represented themselves both as better feminists than Orbach (that is, more concerned with actual women's lives), better "women" (more empathic, more caring), and at the same time dazzlingly masculine Prince Charmings, rescuing women from the abstract and uncaring politics of feminism.

    Even more provocative than Orbach's critique of the construction of femininity, however, was her questioning of the designation of eating disorders as "pathology." All the panelists, while remarking on how perfectly her interpretation tallied with and illuminated their own clinical experience, were uniform in criticizing her analysis for (as William Davis put it) its "[lack of] specific explanatory conceptions" and "indistinct and unconvincing" theorizing. How
    can it be that her analysis both explained and failed to explain? This apparent contradiction in the estimation of the panel can be accounted for only by the hidden stipulation that theory, no matter how well it illuminates a given phenomenon, is inadequate unless it also sets down general criteria to enable clear and precise distinguishing between "normal" and "pathological" members of a population. This, of course, is what Orbach's theory