Meredith Ross-James (she/him)
Have you ever had a restrictive eating disorder? I have. Restrictive eating disorders (hereafter called REDs) are strange illnesses; it feels like society wants me to be this way. In my feminine upbringing I had it beat into me that being fat is the worst fate that could befall me, and that terror has steeped into me, so totally and completely, that it has permanently fucked my relationship to food and my body.
Michaela McSweeney is a philosopher. In 2022 she published “Maladjustment”, a paper arguing that the symptoms of PTSD don’t represent dysfunctions in the brain, but represent understandable and justified responses to injustice. Her paper spoke to me, as someone who also feels like the symptoms of my mental illness are the product of social injustice. Here, I will give you a brief overview of her argument, and show how REDs can be understood in the same light.
McSweeney says the ‘bits’ that make up mental illnesses are directed emotional states. Emotional states are ‘directed’ when they are about something, and they are responsive to facts in the world, just like beliefs. I can get angry about LAB increasing the price of their vegan muffin (my favourite campus safe food) from $4 to $5.50. On the other hand, sometimes I wake up and I’m mad for no reason—this is an emotional state that’s not directed. It’s not felt about, or in response to, anything in the world.
Since beliefs and directed emotional states are responsive to facts in the world, McSweeny reckons directed emotional states can also be, like beliefs, warranted or unwarranted. If LAB raised the price of their vegan muffins, and my reaction was uncontrollable mouth-frothing rage, most would say that is an unwarranted emotional reaction. If your best friend slept with your boyfriend, that emotional reaction would probably be warranted (in my opinion...).
Ok, we’re nearly at the point. Philosophy can be tedious. McSweeney says that the set of directed emotional states that psychiatrists label ‘PTSD’ can be understood as warranted emotional reactions to trauma caused by social injustice. She uses the example of a domestic violence survivor: if he has experienced some repeated abusive action, the PTSD-looking emotional states that respond to these triggers seem pretty warranted; in other words, it’s not unreasonable or unjustified for him to react in that way.
She goes further, though. When we refuse to see these mental illnesses as warranted responses to injustices in the world, and insist on seeing them just as ‘chemical imbalances’, we completely erase the injustice the sufferer is responding to. If we think the domestic abuse survivor or war veteran’s PTSD is just a result of a chemical imbalance—just a problem in their brain—we totally erase the injustices that caused those reactions and we lose sight of the injustice inherent in domestic violence and war (for example).
I think the same thing happens with RED symptoms, and I think the trauma the directed emotional states of REDs respond to is western female socialisation. When I talk of people who have undergone female socialisation I mean anyone who has felt like or been treated as a woman or girl at any point in their lives—this includes cisgender women, trans women, trans men, enbies, etc. When I talk of western I mean the kind of white femininity that prioritises thinness and submission as cornerstones of femininity. Men, I will touch on your plight at the end. I haven’t forgotten about you.
Ok, so for you to agree with me, I need to convince you of three things. First, that western female socialisation can be traumatising. Second, that this experience is actually what the directed emotional states of REDs respond to. Third, that these responses are warranted, justified, or understandable, and REDs don’t just indicate a dysfunction in our brains.
The process of female socialisation can be fucking traumatising, and the philosophers agree. To be a woman in a westernised culture is to experience an oppression that is obsessively self-policing and inward-looking. Sandra Bartky wrote Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression about this issue. She says oppression controls your body: when you move, where you move, how you move. And she’s right. Girls often get scolded for having their bodies take up too much space: for not crossing our legs, for gesticulating too passionately, for being too fat. She invokes panopticon to talk about womanhood. The panopticon is a prison design where a guard stands in a tower and the prison cells are arranged in a circle around him. The prisoner never knows whether or not they are being watched, but they know they can be watched at any second. Since the prisoner can never know when the guard could look at them, they start following the rules all the time, even when the guard isn’t there to watch them. The guard is now inside their mind.
Bartky says femininity does this to us, too. We’re held to higher standards of beauty than boys are, because we always need to be ready to be inspected by a man. Never knowing when we’re being inspected, the man moves into our minds, and we feel compelled to look perfect all the time, for him. We become self-policing, obsessed with self-surveillance. I wish I could keep supporting this point, but I have limited space.
The directed emotional states that make up REDs are responses to this trauma: the trauma of 24/7 scrutiny, of having your movements policed, of being forced to be small. When you feel abject terror towards hot chips (or insert your fear-food here), it’s not that you’re having an unwarranted directed emotional state towards those chips, it’s that you’re having a very warranted directed emotional reaction to all the injustice that made you afraid of those chips. It’s not about the chips—it’s about the injustice. When REDs are seen as ‘brain problems’ alone, the injustices inherent in femininity and womanhood, the injustices that people like Sandra Bartky and Susan Bordo and Simone de Beauvoir talk about—the injustices you feel—are totally erased.
To see mental illness like this is liberating. People say people with REDs have something wrong with our brains, but I disagree. We’re responding in quite a reasonable and understandable way to long-term oppression and injustice. To ‘cure’ eating disorders, then, requires us to uncover the injustice our mental states respond to. It requires fighting for liberation from mandatory femininity, and a mass transformation of our ideas about how women and girls ‘should’ act. It also means everyone pushing this kind of oppressive femininity is implicated in perpetuating our suffering.
Finally, on masculinity. It is very clear that men have lower rates of REDs, but they still get them. What I think this indicates is that thinness plays a much smaller role in masculinity than it does in western femininity. I could write this article all over again about ‘bigorexia’—a kind of body dysmorphia associated with one’s muscle size—and maybe I will, one day. Nonetheless, your REDs respond to injustice, too—an injustice we should recognise and overcome—but an injustice that comes from some place other than (western) female socialisation.