It takes “bro feminists” and humanists and sassy little girls, and the quiet ones too. It takes radical feminism, it takes theft of the master’s tools, it takes the servants living in the master’s house who realize how nice it is once their quarters are dismantled. It takes palatable feminism, it takes unpalatable feminism. I’m a believer in the idea that it takes all types to create lasting social change. No, feminism can be friendly! Feminism is concerned about men too! Feminists give better head! And part of this shows up in the dress-up clothes of my own politicization: I couldn’t get on board with the whole “ironic misandry” thing because so much of my energy as a feminist over the years has gone into turning cartwheels for men in an attempt to prove to them that feminism isn’t the big, bad, scary monster their bro-friends might have painted it to be. I cooperate, I play nice, I am a member of the getalong gang. I do what is expected of me, and indeed, of women in general. For I still think of myself that way-a good girl, despite being 38 years old, which should tell us something about exactly how much power we believe the good girl can ever truly have. Good-girl-ism had become a part of my own personal mythology to the point where I didn’t question it anymore, which means, of course, that I have an investment in protecting the good girl. I got mad because I’ve spent years trying to understand my own eatingstuffs and my own warped logic, and had come to categorize my improper behaviors as symptomatic of my chronic good-girl-ism: rule-following to the extreme, but with compliance, not the whiff of rebellion, as the goal. So at some point around here in my reading I began to get mad.
And I sure as hell was proven wrong on my first day there. They would be smart overachievers, sure, but they would be caught in the tragic game of trying to be what our culture expects of women-thin, pretty, docile-and isn’t it a shame that they don’t recognize their own potential? They wouldn’t be feminists, they wouldn’t be rebels, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be politicized. As Penny puts it about the cultural puzzlings over eating disorders, “The best answer we seem to have come up with is ‘magazines.’ This says rather more about what society thinks goes on in the minds of teenage girls than it does about the cause of an epidemic…” In fact, when I went through an outpatient treatment program for my own disordered eating, I had a definite idea of the kinds of women I would find there. Much of what has been written about feminism and eating disorders frames these diseases inaccurately, linking a girl’s refusal to eat to her wish to be more like the skinny ladies in all the magazines, the takeaway being that an unrealistic beauty standard-which, yes, is a feminist concern-is to blame. Instead, let’s begin where Penny begins in chapter 1: a treatment ward for women with severe eating disorders.
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