For about three weeks last summer I was convinced that females were cursed to a more precarious existence than males. I'm not sure of the exact moment that it hit me. I found out about her problem one day in lunch senior year. Sara was a vegetarian. She was chewing Mentos, which are made with gelatin, so I made a stupid remark about how Mentos came from horse hooves. Her face contorted wildly in complete disgust and self-loathe and she stood, turned, and ran out of the cafeteria. One of our buddies turned to me and said, "Nice one man." I looked back at him, completely clueless, "What? What?" He looked me right in the eye and said, "She's bulimic, man. She's going to throw up right now."
So I was thinking about Sara. That got me thinking about a friend I have now at college. She writes haunting poetry about girls with eating disorders. Its power awes me, but on a deeper level it is frightening, dangerous poetry, because, unbeknownst to her teachers, she doesn't write art. Every piece she writes is suicide. She slits her wrist and pours herself out onto the page. With every poem she cuts anew into her consciousness, bleeding the same blood, and dying a new death. Then after dinner she makes herself throw up. The same girl was almost raped her freshman year in college (she got away, her clothes torn but her virginity still intact). Which reminded me of this other friend I have, who wasn't as lucky that day a few years ago when a guy she worked with gave her a ride home and stopped the car down a dirt road along the way. The list kept growing. Rapes, attempted rapes, eating disorders, friends, friends of the family. As more of these memories and images and thoughts came flooding into my consciousness, a helpless, sickening, rage of despair ate away at me. I thought about these wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, alive, young women: torn, broken, swallowed slowly, one small corner of their souls at a time.
This all changed one Saturday during a Slim Fast commercial. Interesting: no middle-aged woman in a wretched purple one-piece bathing suit. The subject in the commercial was a man. A young construction worker, strong as an ox, sucking down Slim Fast shakes. I'm pretty damned cynical, but I never would have anticipated this. As the diet industry and the clothes industry, and the beer industry, and every other freaking industry continues the mass recall on self-esteem for the women of this country, they begin campaigns designed to suck the men into the whirlpool of image-consciousness and eating disorders. We're really in for it, I realized.
What the hell are we gonna do? Maybe in a few years alcoholism and steroid use won't be the only eyebrow-raising problems some small town is shocked to find spreading like athlete's foot in the varsity football locker room. The star quarterback chews laxatives like Winterfresh and eats 750 calories a day, they'll say. The Student Council president and his soccer captain girlfriend binge and purge together.
Think about Disney. Think about Calvin Klein. Think about the JC Penny catalogue. Look at the standards we set for our young women (and now our young men). Then go talk to the parents. I ask any parents who are reading this: Are you setting good examples? You're worrying a lot about keeping your kids from watching MTV, from smoking marijuana, from playing Play Station before taking out the trash, but do you love your children enough? Do you think that loving them will make good people out of them? Is your daughter afraid to walk alone at night? She probably should be, because you haven't given her the tools with which she could protect herself. I'm not talking about pepper spray, or a key ring around her knuckle... You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? What about your son: does he offer a handshake to women, the same as men? Does he listen? Have you ever heard him admit he was wrong?
I worry for us all: for the boys and the girls, the GI Joes and the Barbies. Oh, you say, those old chauvinistic toys are fading into America's past. You know something? You're probably right. We're all becoming Pokemon. Void of personality; androgynous; homogenous. The figures have changed, but the problems haven't gotten any easier. When are we going to face them? We, too, continue to stand, turn, and run out of the cafeteria. Mothers: are you hiding the ingredients of your beloved Prozac-flavored Slim Fast shakes well enough? I'm afraid your daughters have been finding your recipes for years, and it's taken us a while, but we boys may need to check just one more drawer before we're onto them too.
Bryce Dastous is a senior majoring in international relations with a minor in English.
