Free The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields Page B

out.”
    â€œIn all the years I’ve been a therapist, I’ve yet to meet one girl who likes her body.”

    I was in my mid-20s. Before taking off her clothes, she said she needed to tell me something: she had herpes. Madly in love with her witchy bitchiness, I found occasional enforced celibacy insanely erotic, the way a chastity belt glamorizes what it locks out. We wound up living together, and as we fell out of love with each other, her herpes became a debate point between us. She suggested that we just get married and then if I got it, I got it, and who would care? I suggested she at least explore some of the possibilities of which modern medicine availed us.
    For a multitude of reasons, the two of us didn’t belong together, but what interests me now is what, for lack of a better term, a free-floating signifier the virus was. When I was in love with her, it eroticized her. When I wasn’t, it repelled me. The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it.
    As psychologist Nancy Etcoff says, in
Survival of the Prettiest,
“In a context where only a king can control enough food resources and labor supply to eat enough and do no physical labor so that he becomes fat, prestige is conferred by signs of abundance. A thin person is a person too poor to afford the calories, and maybe one who does so much physical labor that she cannot keep weight on. When poor women are fat (because junk food is so cheap and available, and they are less educated about its hazards and unable to afford expensive healthy foods), then it’s in to be thin and dietary restraint and physical exercise become prestigious.”
    â€œI can’t stand fat women,” a thin woman says in
The Obsession.
“If one of them has been sitting on a chair in a coffee shop, or on the bus, and there’s no other place to sit, I won’t go in there or sit in that place.”
    â€œIt’s like watching a death’s head,” another woman says about a fat woman at the market. “The co-op ought to pay her to get out of here. Who can go home to a good dinner with that in mind?”
    My father’s term of derision for big-bellied men: “watermelon smugglers.”
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    Laurie and I stage monthly dieting competitions, though neither of us is overweight. “Want a second helping?” “I made some banana bread for you.” What’s going on here? We’re each saying: you’re beautiful; I, though, am wanting; I will do anything for love.
    Fasting frees one from carnal needs and desires, prepares one for visions and trances. Moses fasted 40 days before receiving the Ten Commandments. Jesus fasted 40 days before his enlightenment. Medieval saints (especially women) fasted to demonstrate their purity and holiness, and if their fasting appeared to continue far beyond normal human bounds, it was proof of God’s grace. By controlling their breathing, nuns in ancient times were able to stop menstruating and limit their need for food.
    Fasting is a constant for female saints. In the thirteenth century, Margaret of Cortona said, “I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor.” Thérèse of Lisieux died of tuberculosis in 1897, just short of her 25th birthday. As she lay dying, bleeding from her intestines and unable to keep down water, she was tormented by the thought of banquets. Gemma Galgani died in 1903—also of TB, also at 25. She dreamed of food; would it be all right, she asked her confessor, to ask Jesus to take away her sense of taste? Permission was granted. She arranged with Jesus that she should begin to expiate, through her own suffering, all the sins committed by priests. For the next 60 days she vomited whenever she tried to eat.
    In 1859, an American doctor, William Stout Chipley, published an article describing a condition he called “sitophobia,” fear of food. In 1868, William Withey Gull, the English physician who