Only now that I am pregnant do I realise how much – and how routinely - women are discouraged to eat!

[SkaterGrrrrl]

I am pregnant and for the first time in my life - or rather, for the first time since I was about 10, I am being encouraged to eat. Relatives press a second helping on me: ?Go on ? have some more?. Female friends/ acquaintances encourage me to order cake rather than a salad or sandwich when we meet in a cafe: ?You?re allowed to! You?re eating for two!? and colleagues offer me the biscuit tin ?Make the most of it while you can!?

It has really hit me how throughout my adult life, I have never been encouraged to eat dessert or take seconds. It?s as if , by being pregnant, a temporary loophole has opened up on the lifelong strict cultural expectation on women to eat very little. (The terrible pressure on women and girls to diet is detailed better than this in The Beauty Myth and Fat is a Feminist Issue).

I am also beginning to realise why some women put on a lot of weight during pregnancy ? a friend of mine put on 55 lbs. Because for the first time ever we are allowed to eat, guilt free, ask for seconds and not be censured.

Kim do you have one ex who called chocolate her guilty pleasure, and one who doesn't have any hang ups about food? Or are you not joining up the dots?

Back on the pregnancy subject, I guess I was throwing up so that might have helped with hunger thing.

"Women are totally encouraged to be disengaged and alienated from our bodies all the bloody time. It's not that surprising that body dysmorphia, over-eating and under-eating, is a more female problem than a male one."

V. interesting point, Basil - and worth noting that in many misogynistic cultures (e.g. Arab world) women are very strongly discouraged from eating/drinking in public. Maybe eating is seen as too physical and vaguely disgusting for the delicate flowers that women are. In the same way, lots of men think it's funny to burp in public and do so on purpose, whereas women are covered in shame if they do it even accidentally.

Kim locating the problem with society doesn't mean sitting back and doing nothing. On the contrary. I would say that claiming the problem is located with the individual and that they should just buck up is sitting back and doing nothing. My feminism is about giving a shit about women other than myself. I don't have hang ups over food. It doesn't mean the right thing is to put my fingers in my ears and refuse to acknowledge there is a problem when other women report it, and tell them they are wrong.

Kim, I think that the problem with arming your daughters against the messages that society is continually sending them, is that as you rightly point out, we're all individuals and will respond differently to those messages. Some people get more harmed than others, by the messages.

In the short term, we can try and teach our daughters to not be vulnerable to those messages. We can try and teach our sons to withstand the different messages they will get. But what about all those kids whose parent aren't going to teach them, becasue they themselves have been too damaged by those messages? If we changed the messages society is sending them, we wouldn't have to bother - we could concentrate on raising happy, healthy children who didn't have to battle with the shit messages that their society is sending them.

We have to change society because changing each of us on an individual basis, just isn't going to work - too many people will fall through the net.

Ooh yes mooncupgoddess - and farting too, men are allowed to fart.

and sweating - you go into a gym and it's dominated by men working out, sweating away. Women aren't supposed to sweat, it's unlaydeelike.

Has anybody read Fat as a Feminist Issue? I've only read Hunger Strike, and it would be interesting to read both and see what the issues are for women who overeat, and in what ways they are different or similar to those with anorexia.

Analysing societal pressures and trying to change society, doesn't stop you taking action with regard to your own personal life, of course.

It's not one or t'other.

Yes, Fat is a Feminist Issue is a brilliant book.

It struck me as I was reading it, that Paul McKenna has taken all those ideas and made a bloody fortune from them.

Would you explain a little about the book Basil? I'm unfamiliar with the feelings of women who over eat.

Sometimes I don't think we've actually moved on that much from Victorian times when middle class women were encouraged to 'eat like a bird' at the dinner table, especially if there was a suitor present. When the men went off for their cigars and brandy the women could then stuff their faces with gingerbread and cake, while still continuing the illusion of being feather-light creatures whose requirements were so small they would cause no trouble in marriage.

'Since transitoning, I've become very more aware of the messages about body image that females receive. Clothes seem to be designed to hug the body.Pictures of the "perfect" female body appear in certain papers daily, Magazines obsess about bodies, clothes and diets' - so do you not think that maybe if this had all happened during your formative years maybe you would have a different outlook.

Basil - nodding along to your posts as usual.

That has just reminded me of a meal we had as students, where when of my housemates invited some male students over. My female housemates ate very little and then when the men had left, they went into the kitchen declaring themselves ravenous and ate all the food the men hadn't eaten.

One of them told me she couldn't eat a full meal if men were around.

yes seahouses - I think many women find it difficult to be honest in front of partners or males generally about their appetite. I think this is partly responsible for the solitary biscuit binges in the kitchen late at night - yes I've been there

While food has never really been an issue for me (luckily) i only really identified with my body once i had been pregnant, gave birth and breastfed

before that, me and my body were almost 2 seperate entities, the body was almost just the vehicle that the real 'me' happened to be in

our culture fetishes this kind of mind body split

people who see their flesh as actually them would not cavalierly consider cosmetic surgery -lopping bits off/augmenting other parts- it would be almost mutilative to do that to healthy tissue

That concerns me as well Chibi - that my daughter might feel the need to have cosmetic surgery.

I also found that mind/body split was something that didn't go away until I'd been pregnant, but of course DD might not want to have children, and I'd hope she doesn't go through that feeling at any point that her body isn't part of who she is, but some kind of other entity.

There's so much historically about women being 'of the body' and men being 'of the spirit' - from Confucianism to western monotheism. Women are always in the double bind - damned if they do or don't.

On the one hand women must be ashamed of being 'of the body' - ashamed for eating, shitting, farting, sweating, burping, sneezing, menstruating, pissing, getting pregnant, giving birth, breastfeeding, having a vagina, having a sexual appetite, having any bodily odour, having body hair etc, etc. Continuous shame for being human is the woman's lot. Shamed for not being the virgin/goddess/mother, shamed for being 'real'... The strain of this shame of being human and keeping up the pretence of not being human (more a delicate-goddess- lady-thing) is pretty gruelling and time-consuming.

So because there is a double-bind, women are also shamed for not just being 'of the body' - that neat little misogynist, patriarchal box given to them: the are also shamed for speaking too much, having opinions, having too many feelings, showing anger, for laughing wrongly, for having ambition, etc, etc, etc.

I'm about 14 weeks along with Dc2. What I noticed in both pregnancies was how I went, pre pg, from not too worried about how overweight I was to restricting my eating in a way I haven't done since I was a skinny teenager. Being violently sick and having real food aversions that have narrowed my food choices someone hasn't helped either. Being pregnant, both times, has been like a really good diet.

I'm aware this isn't healthy. I think it is my mind trying to take control over a body it hasn't control over any more. I think it is also duets my age, apart from my teenage years (which were kind to me in a patriarchaly acceptably way) my body hadn't changed so drastically before.

Going back to the OP I didn't find too much encouragement to eat from other women but I did get lots of pressure over having another a glass of wine or unpasturised Bree or whatever. It was like following the UKgovernment regs was an affront to these Aussie women who thought that not eating or drinking whatever was bloody precious.

Seahorses - just for you

Thanks Basil, and sorry for not realising it was in the book club section.

Oh don't apologise SH, it was ages ago.

Wow been offline for a day or so and very interested to come back and see so many responses to my OP. Off to bed now as pregnant = knackered but will respond tomorrow!

The feminist section rocks!

Even if ppl don't say it directly to you, by talking excessively about their own weight and the weight of strangers in the street, celebrities it still reinforces the idea that women should be skinny. Women are congratulated and congratulate themselves for being 'good' ie eating foods they deem healthy, no fat, no sugar. Men however talk about their massive meals with pride and ppl talk about how men need meat and huge portions. The reason pregnancy is seen as a time too eat is because it is the only time when women are not seen as a sex object, she is going to become 'unattractive' in terms of western ideas of beauty anyway so why not eat what you like too, you are no longer desirable so being fat makes no difference. It is positive not to be seen as an object but negative that pregnancy is seen as so repulsive.

Even when you're aware of the pressures on women to eat less and be thin, it's very hard to escape them. I've spent most of my adult life being fighty about the idea that women shouldn't eat much - I remember having a pub lunch with a couple of female friends; we were all having fryups and chips and some random bloke at the next table leaned over and said something like, is this the Weight Watchers table? I think my reply was, no, we're the ones who eat healthily, which did effectively shut him up out of sheer confusion, but I rather wish I'd been much ruder.
But over the last couple of years, due to different work patterns, I've got thinner. And thinner. And I sometimes get a bit conflicted about the whole business: I eat a reasonably healthy diet because I cook for myself and DS therefore try to make sure there's plenty of veg and that meals are reasonably regular, but we have plenty of puddings and biscuits too, yeah blah whatever. But my weight loss gets commented on, and I get praised for it, which is annoying, so I bark at people, and then I find myself explaining that I've not been on a diet, that it's just down to the job, and then feeling almost guilty, as though I'm implying 'Hey lardarse, you too could be thin if you tried' which is not what I think at all.

ANd then it all boils down to the same old thing - what the fuck has it got to do with anyone else how much I eat and whether or not my trousers fit me?