What Drives Us To Hate Our Bodies?

On Mar. 11, writer and psychologist Susie Orbach will appear at the 92nd Street Y in conversation with science writer Gina Kolata for a session called "Loving Our Bodies" where the two will discuss the ideas put forth in Orbach's new book, Bodies.

Stephanie Lee caught up with Orbach to discuss the new book, why diets don't work and what she thinks it will take for the modern world to get comfortable in its own skin.

New York Press: You just came out with your book Bodies. Can you tell me more about it? What inspired you to write another book?

Susie Orbach: I think I’ve been concerned for a long time with a whole range of issues that are around the body that is everything from noticing little girls already performing for cameras as though they’re sexy models when they’re only six to men having cosmetic surgery to the concern with the diet industry. It’s the preoccupation and hyper-vigilance about the body in general and the functions of the body. And what the body has become today in the face of globalism and capitalism

So do you now feel that fat is a gender blind issue?

I don’t think it’s entirely gender blind. And I don’t think that the term “feminist” apply entirely to women. What concerns me is that fat has become a disease entity from which people who are designated fat have become pariahs, and the rest of the population may have equivalent eating problems but don’t show them by being fat are considered just fine or exemplary.

In my experience, the emotional, political, psychological and social issues that are involved in eating problems could be expressed in any way from anorexia to vegetarianism to skipping meals. [These issues] could actually be expressed in many different ways that pass as normal eating for women. That isn’t seen as a problem in the way that fat is, but both of those ways of being express eating difficulties.

Who is most vulnerable to warped self-images?

I think girls and women and increasingly boys and men are vulnerable. What I try to talk about in Bodies is a situation in which the mother’s body has been so undermined and that that has been projected on the child. That they are inadvertently passing on their own distressed relationship with their bodies along with their nurture.

If mothers have increasingly been told that they need to get back to their pre-pregnancy weight or any fat is terrible, they get uptight about their own bodies at a time that they need to be lactating and eating well. They need just to be concerned with the relationship with their baby.

We see photos of celebrities who don’t go into pregnancy because they’re so terrified of getting fat. So a mother may not respond to her own body’s needs to eat or rest or to the needs of her baby’s body. She may just be worried about all of the rules and regulations

What caused you to take on this issue with such passion? Have you suffered from an eating disorder?

No, I haven’t. When I wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue, I was writing about the phenomena of dieting and feeling that you needed to be watchful of your body. To me, that would be so normal today. And when I wrote

Fat is a Feminist Issue, I never really thought I’d write anything else on the topic, but it spoke to a lot of people. So I wrote three more books on the subject. But I’ve written about all sorts of aspects of psychology too.

It was seeing all sorts of people in pain and anguish so it made me write this book to put on the public agenda what the hell we are doing to our body. It’s almost as though we’ve become a slave to an image of what our bodies should be like, instead of our bodies working for us.

What do you think contributes most to our conceptions of beauty?

There’s the aesthetic of the style industries from the fashion industries to beauty industries that are fixed on a very narrow aesthetic. What’s very new about today is not that there’s an aesthetic, but that it’s one where you can barely look out the window without advertisements and billboard screens pumping images into us all the time. It’s these digitized images of bodies that don’t actually exist. It creates self-hatred with body. Your body feels that it doesn’t stylistically fit.

So, you don’t believe in diets. In fact, there has been talk of you wanting to sue Weight Watchers for its ineffectiveness. But between the organic all-natural food craze and all of the unhealthy food out there—fast food, junk food and what have you—what do you suggest? What is a realistic way for Westerners to go about eating?

I think we’ve gone mad in relation to food. The food industry has increased the amount of money we spend on it by diversifying the industry from all-natural to low fat to organic. It segments everything. So you sell low fat food, and then you sell the fat back as ice cream. So the whole of the food industry is involved in making sure we spend more and more on food.

The industry is not interested in very much. I mean, it’s got to keep minimal standards of cleanliness and health, but we know an awful amount of food out there is trashy food—it’s chemicals and corn syrups that don’t really get processed properly by our bodies. It’s very hard—when you have a population that is disturbed by eating—to know how to eat the right amount of food without going nuts.

The only way out of that is knowing what hunger is and what satisfaction is the same way we know what peeing is. That could be the only guide.

Do you really think it’s possible for us to shift our beauty paradigm?

I think there is a kind of tussle in the sense that I think from what I hear from young women more than young men is that they feel so weary with all these body struggles. And they wish that there was a much more democratic notion of beauty which is inclusive, and stylized. Not boring for goodness sake, but beauty that represents the variety that they are.

Can you tell me more about the connection between capitalism and our bodies?

Well I suppose one way to look at this is that our bodies have become a site for consumer activity. There are industries that are suggesting that our products should be our bodies. So we’ve got plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery. You’ve got a diet industry that’s telling us to transform our bodies all the time even though if dieting really works, we would only have to do it one time. So dieting works on our failure.

But it takes the body as the thing that we need to make rather than our bodies are where we live. That’s where we are in terms of capitalism and globalism we are exporting the kind of body hatred that people experience in the West all around the world.

What is the phenomenon body hatred?

Body hatred is an experience of dissatisfaction with the body. It’s far more than a mild hatred because it propels people to do things that interrupt normal bodily processes like hunger, appetite or satisfaction—none of those things are on the agenda. It’s what we have to do to our bodies—discipline or empower in one way or another.

Any parting advice to the Western world?

Well, I guess I’m a campaigner as well as social citric and psychoanalyst, so there’s the personal issue of daring to accept our bodies. If you look at pictures of yourself from a few years ago and you notice you find them quite nice, you might remember, Oh god I didn’t feel that at the time. So it’s important not to miss out on enjoying the body.

I think at a political level, I would say we need to engage with magazine editors and art directors so they have broader representations of beauty.

We should take on the diet industry and say wait a minute, “What are you saying? You’re saying people should eat impossibly, and eat as though they are being policemen, rather than listening to internal cues of hunger.”