Bodies

Title:

Bodies

Author:

Susie Orbach

Subject:

Eating Disorders

Psychology

Women's Studies

Physiological Psychology

Psychopathology

Social Science

Date:

2009-03-03

Summary

Esteemed Psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach diagnoses the crisis in our relationship to our bodies and points the way toward a process of healing.

Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in their bodies. Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us. Challenging the Freudian view that bodily disorders originate and progress in the mind, Orbach argues that we should look at self-mutilation, obesity, anorexia, and plastic surgery on their own terms, through a reading of the body itself. Incorporating the latest research from neuropsychology, as well as case studies from her own practice, she traces many of these fixations back to the relationship between mothers and babies, to anxieties that are transferred unconsciously, at a very deep level, between the two. Orbach reveals how vulnerable our bodies are, how susceptible to every kind of negative stimulus--from a nursing infant sensing a mother's discomfort to a grown man or woman feeling inadequate because of a model on a billboard. That vulnerability makes the stakes right now tremendously high.

In the past several decades, a globalized media has overwhelmed us with images of an idealized, westernized body, and conditioned us to see any exception to that ideal as a problem. The body has become an object, a site of production and commerce in and of itself. Instead of our bodies making things, we now make our bodies. Susie Orbach reveals the true dimensions of the crisis, and points the way toward healing and acceptance.

Author Notes

Susie Orbach is the co-founder of the Women's Therapy Centre in London and New York. A former Guardian (UK) columnist, she was visiting professor for ten years at the London School of Economics and is the convener of www.any-body.org. She is a consultant and co-originator of the Dove Campaing for Real Beauty. The author of a number of books, including On Eating , The Impossibility of Sex , and the bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue , she lectures extensively worldwide.

Reviews (1)

Guardian Review

Jawbone shaving, gene therapy cosmetics, robotics... What will our bodies be like in the future, asks Susie Orbach There's a war going on over our bodies. There are unexpected players and uncertain outcomes. As in any war, resources go from one side to the other. As in any war, the ideologies that are involved make the players and the playing field fuzzy: sometimes we see what's in view and other times it's just our normality, like gravity, unrecognised but inescapable. The terrain of the body is changing. New developments - #MeToo, artificial intelligence, epigenetics, egg freezing, selfies, Snapchat dysmorphia, the Kardashians, gut politics, womb rentals, implants, sex dolls - require new thinking. Two trends are butting up against each other: the difficulty of living in the bodies we currently inhabit, with their many predicaments, and the promise of trouble-free, almost body-free existence as we move towards futures constituted by algorithms and synthetic biology. Add to this the likelihood of a conservative US supreme court trumping the rights of the foetus over the rights of the mother. Now, as certain states have banned abortion and switched the rights in this way, drinking and smoking during pregnancy could invite prosecution. One woman undergoing surgery for breast cancer discovered that she would have her cancer treatment withheld if she were found to be pregnant as the foetus's rights were deemed paramount. An understanding of the bodies we inhabit as biological organisms with limits is no longer enough. As late capitalism and social media rewrite the terms of engagement and what it means to be seen and heard, so too the body becomes a battleground. It is being stretched and pressed into new forms of service, display and identity as, at the same moment, we are coached towards a dematerialised existence where almost everything we understand about living - eating, breathing, moving, feeling, relating - will occur in the realm of thought, not in the physical, worldly body. In South Korea, jawbone shaving is such a common cosmetic surgery procedure that artworks made of glass towers containing the sawn-off bone fragments are displayed. The YouTube star Anastasiya Shpagina from Odessa, who drew 5 million viewers to her instructional video on how to look like Miley Cyrus, and Kandee Johnson from Los Angeles, whose human transformation into a Barbie has had some 33 million viewers, meticulously demonstrate how to change your look. Justin, another YouTuber, has undergone 125 procedures and spent $158,000 to make himself resemble Ken by transforming his torso, face, biceps, triceps and hairline; over 16 million people have seen his video. Closer to home, influencers are finding some commercial value in selling themselves doing beauty, doing bodies. This type of work is unrecognised as beauty labour, but that's what it is. Not just the sell of the bloggers but the work we are all doing when we make ourselves up. Beauty labour is increasingly deemed essential to girls, women and men. The question is: why? And how has this work, whether it is supplied through surgery, dentistry or visual filters, become desirable? Teenage girls sculpt their appearance to garner 'likes' and approval, which, sadly, they rarely achieve Bodies are made. They are no longer seen or experienced simply as things to be washed, deodorised, dressed and perfumed before getting on with our day. Bodies now are our ever-malleable calling cards, either erasing or articulating our class, geographic and ethnic backgrounds and gender aspirations. Appearance is crucial and the look, once achieved, has to be endlessly shared and approved through selfies and sexting. Teenage girls sculpt their appearance to garner "likes" and approval, which, sadly, they rarely achieve. Research done for Dove showed that it takes 124 likes to feel OK, but most tend to receive under a fifth of that number, not because they aren't likable but because everyone is chasing a like, and time is against them. Living online, seeking recognition online, living through identification and wanting to emulate celebrities such as Kim Kardashian are now commonplace for girls and young women, but again we have to ask: why? Simultaneously there is a craving in the exchange of sexualised body parts in the sexting between teenagers - an updated version of "If you show me yours, I'll show you mine." Only mine doesn't remain yours, but ends up in the phones of your classmates and travels across continents, sometimes to end up as porn fodder for paedophiles and for a more generalised translation of sex into seeing - an erotic that is all the less for being generally fetishised. Meanwhile, highly profitable industries wage war on us, including the cosmetic, fashion, style, food, diet, health, anti-ageing, wellness, surgical, pharmaceutical and fitness industries, as they promote the body beautiful. Beauty and fashion dominate our department stores - both the real and the virtual. And as they do so there are deadly psychological costs for us as individuals, as well as environmental costs for the planet. There are also social costs for society as appearance ideals eat away at girls, and increasingly boys, and detract from their wellbeing and academic performance. When we learn that one in three girls won't go for a smear test because they feel so bad about their bodies, we can see how being primed from early on to critically assess themselves makes for pervasively abject bodies. A 2010 study showed that 15% of American girls now begin puberty by the time they are seven Just as childhood has become commercialised, so it continues later on. A young woman may take the pill continuously to stop having periods and then take hormone boosters to have her eggs extracted. By the time a woman is in her 50s she has already learned that the menopause is an inconvenience, not the marker of passing from one stage of life into another. Ageing and dying are now being reconceived as infirmities and potentially unnecessary. It won't be many years before gene therapy cosmetics hit the marketplace, claiming to reverse the disability of looking one's biological age, while AI helps us retrieve memories and capabilities that have been lost. Meanwhile chemicals are changing bodies. As Penelope Jagessar Chaffer detailed in her 2009 film Toxic Baby , Puerto Rican children living near the chemical plants that manufacture birth control pills are menstruating before they start school. This is a serious finding. A 2010 study published in Pediatrics showed that 15% of American girls now begin puberty by the time they are seven years old. Why? Bodies are and always have been shaped according to the cultural moment. There has never been a "natural" body: a time when bodies were untainted by cultural practices. How we move our hands as we speak, the way we walk, our table manners, our gait, the food we eat, whether we mark babies at birth via circumcision or later with facial markings: all these tell us that bodies belong to a specific time and place. We are judged physically and our social and economic position has depended on how our bodies are seen and where we are then placed socially and economically. That people now challenge limitations of class, race and, latterly, the biological and gendered designations of male and female is welcomed. What may be less welcome is that globalism, which by its nature exposes the deep inequities of race and class throughout the world, simultaneously offers a story of belonging if one can superficially erase an economic poverty of background by expunging its physical markers and securing the right look, the right kind of body. But what is happening to bodies in our time? We may well be the last generation to inhabit bodies that are familiar to us. In reproduction we are on the brink of cell manipulation before implantation, gene modifications and different kinds of wombs being used and rented. And after fertilisation, there are surgical interventions, biological replacements, personally tailored pharmaceuticals. The legal and illegal trade in body parts, from hearts to stem cells and kidneys, exposes the commercial nature of our bodies. Our embodiment today stands between a post-industrial moment and a time when bodies will be precision-bioengineered or, as the AI proponents argue, we will be bodyless - a set of electronic algorithms situated in a case, one that now masquerades as a woman with come-hither lips and fluttering eyelashes. This is Hanson Robotics' Sophia, whose uncanny appearance is similar to the articulated lifesize sex dolls being manufactured in China and the US. The standardised youthful body we see promoted and which we then endeavour to create individually is not a stable body. It can't be. Even if one happens to have an approximation of the idealised body, the scrutiny of women's size, shape and features, with the yearly modifications to the model, means that the girl or woman with a thin body can feel just as insecure. While slim has been a dominant motif since the 1960s, recently tall has been added, as have big breasts and now the big, firm bottom. The slim body is easily felt to be precarious and, all too often, a source of anguish to the individual. The athletic, fit body of the man is increasingly subject to similar strictures to exhibit both strength and now a new sense of needing to be protected, almost wan. We cannot, of course, yet escape the body. Even as we take on imagined identities online to make virtual connections with others, we cannot live in the material world without bodies. From my own clinical practice, the variety of body difficulties I encounter - anorexia, self-harm, the wish to do away with a body part, eczema, sexual identity confusions, fear of ageing, compulsive exercising - can be seen as the individual's constant attempt to search for a reliable body and to rid herself or himself of body shame. But body anxiety is as fundamental as emotional anxiety and we need to recognise this. It is essential, especially for therapists, if they wish to be of use to those who consult them. To address these dilemmas, restoring the body as a reliable place to live from, requires a challenge to our current beliefs and aspirations. The conditions of late modernity are not inevitable. The very tools that have given rise to the narrowing aesthetic could be redeployed to include the wide variety of bodies people actually have: diversity not conformity. In our belief that the body is almost infinitely modifiable, we have become prey to industries and practices that frequently increase our sense of insecurity. We aren't being creative with our bodies and having fun with them. We are, rather, attempting to create bodies that make us feel better about ourselves. In addressing the pressures on today's body, we would also do well to prosecute the diet and wellness industry for false advertising and for failing to meet trading standards. We need to expose suspect practices on the part of the food and pharmaceutical industries, which make food such a painful and emotionally dangerous area for many, and we need to expand the range of body sizes included in visual culture and fashion design so that they become more reflective of bodies as they actually exist. We need to be vigilant about our rights to have a body. Between a US supreme court that may institute federal anti-abortion legislation and the transhumanist argument that those with diseased or troubled bodies can be cured (if they have the money) by new technology or psychopharmacology, bodies are under threat. But for as long as we are embodied, I end with a plea for us to rethink the body in such a way that we can both take it for granted and enjoy it. Our struggle is to recorporealise our bodies so that they become a place we live from rather than an aspiration always needing to be achieved. We urgently need to curtail the commercial exploitation of the body and the diminution of body variety, so that we and our children can enjoy our bodies, our appetites, our physicality and our sexuality. Our bodies should not be turned into sites of labour and commercially driven production. We need to be able to experience our diverse bodies - the varied ways we decorate and move them - as a source of taken-for-granted pleasure and celebration. We need bodies sufficiently stable to allow us moments of bliss and adventure when, secure in the knowledge that they exist, we can then take leave of them.

Excerpts

Introduction Every day, my inbox, like most people's, fills with invitations to enlarge the size of my penis or my breasts, to purchase the pleasure and potency booster Viagra and to try the latest herbal or pharmaceutical preparation to lose weight. The exhortations have fooled the spam filter and the popular science pages, which too sing of implants and pills to augment body or brain and new methods of reproduction which bypass conventional biology. Meanwhile young girls can go on the Miss Bimbo website to create a virtual doll, keep it 'waif ' thin with diet pills and buy it breast implants and facelifts. They are being primed to be teenagers who will dream of new thighs, noses or breasts as they peruse magazines which display page after page of a look that only ten years ago still had the power to evoke horror in us as we recoiled at skeletal models reminiscent of famine victims. Simultaneously, government pronouncements grimly warn of an epidemic of obesity. Your body, all these phenomena shout, is your canvas to be fixed, remade and enhanced. Join in. Enjoy. Be part of it. As a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, I see the impact of calls for bodily transformations, enhancements and 'perfectibility' in the consulting room. People do not necessarily come in with particular body troubles, but whatever their other emotional predicaments and conflicts, concern for the body is nearly always folded into them, as though it were perfectly commonplace to be telling a story in which body dissatisfaction is central. Like many of us, the people I work with wish to and do reshape their bodies in both small and dramatic ways. They find fault with their bodies and say it makes them feel better, more in control, to improve them. Like most of us, they do not like to believe that they are being unduly influenced by outside pressures and may disdain such an idea, with its crude sense of manipulation. Whether followers of fashion or health trends or not, we take for granted that looking good for ourselves will make us feel good. And yet there is a subtle tracery of outside urgings which works on us, creating a new and often dissatisfied relationship with our bodies. The sense that biology need no longer be destiny is gaining ground and so it follows that where there is a (perceived) body problem, a body solution can be found. A belief in both the perfectible body and the notion that we should relish or at least accede to improving our own body has not, however, solved the problem. On the contrary, it has exaggerated the problem and contributed to what we observe today - a progressively unstable body, a body which to an alarming degree is becoming a site of serious suffering and disorder. Our bodies are increasingly being experienced as objects to be honed and worked on. Men are targeted with steroids, sexual aids and specific masculine-oriented diet products. Children's bodies, too. Photographers now offer digitally enhanced baby and child photos - correcting smiles, putting in or removing gaps between the teeth, straightening out wobbly knees, turning little girls into facsimiles of china dolls. The web addresses of these conjurors show no sense of irony, since they believe that enhancing photos is a version of natural beauty, the real thing. Girlie-sexy culture now entrances more rather than fewer of us. Putting the body on show and making it appear 'attractive' are presented as fun, desirable and easily accessible. Body beautiful and the goal of perfectibility have been democratized: invitingly set out as available to every-one in any country whatever their economic situation, the right body is trumpeted as a way of belonging in our world today. This democratic call for beauty, disconcertingly, wears an increasingly homogenized and homogenizing form, with the images and names of the global style icons pressed on the lips and the eyes of the young and the not so young. While some people may be able to opt in and do so joyfully, a larger number cannot. For the democratic idea has not extended to aesthetic variation; instead the aesthetic has paradoxically become narrower over the last few decades. The slim aesthetic - with pecs for men and ample breasts for women - bedevils those who don't conform, and even those who do happen to fit can carry a sorrowful insecurity about their own bodies. A constant fretfulness and vigilance take hold for many from the moment they wake until the time they fall asleep. Their bodies are on high alert. The norm has become to worry. In another time, we would have called such anxieties an illness and, seeing how many suffer, we would have called it an epi-demic. But we don't. We have become so implicated in variants of body preoccupation ourselves, and girls and women in par-ticular so colonized by it, that the preoccupation has become second nature - almost 'natural' and invisible. If, however, we do look, we see that the preoccupation with the body is disturbing in its capacity to affect almost an entire life, from childhood through to old age. Young boys' yearnings to emulate a great sportsman's agility are now focused on the desire for the look of a six-pack. Girls as young as four have been made bodily self-conscious and are striking sexy poses in their mirrors which are more chilling than charming, while greater numbers of women in old age homes are showing signs of long-term eating disorders. Few would say that such concerns come only from outside pressures. We experience the wish for more perfect bodies as our own desire, as indeed it is, yet it is hard to separate out the ways bodies are seen, talked about and written about and the effect of that on our personal perception of our own bodies and other bodies. In essence, this kind of focus makes the body today no longer something secure or ordinary in itself. The body has become a new focus in both women's and men's lives. A new rhetoric of detox, weight training, brushing, irrigation, cleansing is pro-posed, inclining us to watchfulness and determination where our body is concerned. Those who had previously paid little heed to fashion or health now find themselves caught up in attempts to make the best of themselves and to take responsibility for their health and well-being. The individual is now deemed accountable for his or her body and judged by it. 'Looking after oneself ' is a moral value. The body is becoming akin to a worthy personal project. Feature writers fill endless column inches with advice about how we should care for ourselves. Television programs focus on the bonuses, the necessity and the moral superior-ity of paying attention to individual health and beauty. Politicians urge us to take personal responsibility. Meanwhile our visual world is being transformed through an intensification of images which represent the body and parts of the body in ways that artfully convey a sense that our own bodies are seriously in need of reshaping and updating. Without even noticing we may willingly accept the invitation, eager to stay up to date. The preoccupation with thinness and beauty which has been eroding individual self-worth for years has recently been joined by another fixation: the rising rate of obesity. An ordinary reliance on one's body to signal its dietary needs appears to have evaporated, to be replaced by scrutiny and despair as one struggles to control a body now designated as rapacious. Diet companies are growing, with a newcomer, NutriSystem hitting the ' Fortune 500 fastest-growing companies as it moved from profits of $1 million in 2004 to $85 million in just two years. New gyms and health bars keep opening. New foods keep being invented. Magazines devoted to weight, shape and health expand their circulation. A relentless desire to reshape the body is evident everywhere. Cosmetic surgical proce-dures are occupying more of our television screens and our purses (with a growth rate of $1 billion a year), implying that resculpting is easy and an expression of self-worth. On top of all this, reproduction is being reconfigured: young women are freezing embryos for future use, having access to IVF at ever-younger and ever-younger ages, and a new phenomenon, the transgendered man, is reproducing. Late capitalism has catapulted us out of centuries-old bodily practices which were centered on survival, procreation, the provision of shelter and the satisfaction of hunger. Now, birthing, illness and ageing, while part of the ordinary cycle of life, are also events that can be interrupted or altered by personal endeavor in which one harnesses the medical advances and surgical restructurings on offer. Our body is judged as our individual production. We can fashion it through artifice, through the naturalistic routes of bio-organic products or through a combination of these, but whatever the means , our body is our calling card, vested with showing the results of our hard work and watchfulness or, alternatively, our failure and sloth. Where once the body of the manual worker could be easily identified through brawn and muscle, now it is the middle-class body that must show evidence of being worked on at the gym, through yoga or any number of body practices which aim to display what the individual has achieved through diligent exercise. For young people it is very much a case of take care or beware. Users of social networking sites often post unflattering pictures of individuals which are then 'snarked' and negatively commented on. Commercial pressures delivered today by celebrity culture, branding and industries which make their profits by destabilizing the late-modern body have eradicated most of our prior feeling towards and understanding of the body. Our bodies no longer make things. In the West, robotics, mechanized farm equipment, pre-prepared goods from food to building packs, motorized transport, high-tech warfare and so on have replaced much ordinary physical activity and labor. We don't tend to repair things either, for mass production means it is cheaper to replace them. Our relations to the physical and physical work are shifting. Where working-class bodies were shaped by the musculature of heavy physical work, low-paid jobs in the service industry and computer-based jobs across the class spectrum leave no such physical indicators. Indeed, many of us have to make an effort to move about during the day or as we work. In an updating and democratizing of the habit of the leisured classes (who didn't do physical labor) of decorating themselves as amusement and social marker, we are invited to take up this activity too. Thus we can observe something new occurring. Our bodies are and have become a form of work. The body is turning from being the means of production to the production itself.... Copyright (c) 2009 by Susie Orbach. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Bodies: Big Ideas/Small Books by Susie Orbach All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.