The Causes of Eating Disorders

A psychologist's controversial review of today's near epidemic of eating disorders. The author examines the meanings we attribute to our bodies, food, eating, body management, gender and identity, and lays the blame squarely at the door of current western sociopolitics and culture.

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A psychologist's controversial review of today's near epidemic of eating disorders. It lays the blame squarely at the door of current western sociopolitics and culture. The incidences of eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia has risen alarmingly in the western world, particularly among girls and women. A desire to be even thinner is increasingly prevalent. It has come to be seen as "normal", even commendable, to seek to remedy seeming imperfections through dieting, exercise and, more and more, through surgery. In a "post-feminist" age that claims women have never had it so good, why is this the case? In this work, based on interviews with women diagnosed as eating-disordered, the author examines the meanings we attribute to our bodies, food, eating, body management, gender and identity. She argues that the causes of such self-damaging attempts to manage our bodies are not to be found inside ourselves, in disturbed psychological interiors, but are located in the social, political and cultural contexts of western post/modernity.