November 2011
47 posts
“The Victorian ideal of femininity demands the control of female appetites and the submission of the female body to will. Contemporary advertisements that shame women’s appetites are not a new phenomenon but part of a tradition that can be traced back to Victorian gender ideology. The misogyny of patriarchal cultures manifests in a terror of the feminine. In male supremacist ideology the life-giving and transformative qualities of women’s bodies are feared and must be controlled. Ideal Victorian femininity was thought of as thinness, frailty, weakness and a death-like appearance, emphasizing an extreme passivity. Extreme control of female appetites, both sexual and for food was considered necessary because of a misogynist terror of women’s bodies. If not intensely managed it was imagined that female appetites would spiral dangerously out of control. The underweight and starving female body that denies its hunger was considered a triumph over the terrifying powers of the devouring feminine. These ideas persist and continue to manifest in disordered eating today.”
—Victorian Femininity and Anorexic Culture: Starvation as the Suppression of the Monstrous Feminine by Clementine Cannibal http://clementinecannibal.com/2011/11/25/victorian-femininity-and-anorexic-culture-starvation-as-the-suppression-of-the-monstrous-feminine-by-clementine-cannibal/ (via grrrlvirus)
