Body Image

The expanding body of work available on the connection between body image, sexuality, and gender is a direct result of the progress made by the feminist movement and gender studies in twentieth-century European and North American culture. When people discuss sexuality and gender, it is very likely that the dialog will turn to the subject of body image. The links between body image and sexual practice, performance, and preference have increased during the twentieth century, largely due to the widespread consumption and availability of media images. These links can be identified in a body-building culture, or the hard body aesthetic, in the increased visibility of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and overeating, and in the rise of subcultural groups that directly relate their sexual practices to body image. These subcultures include the feeder/feedee culture, sadomasochistic or dominant/submissive culture, and transsexual and transgender cultures. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, reality television programs made the effects of extreme self-improvement more accessible and visible. Viewers witness the physical transformations of regular people (as opposed to celebrities), whether these people have lost several pounds or have undergone plastic surgery in order to drastically alter their appearances.

Although how one develops a body image is debatable, there is no doubt that the individual experience of body image is directly related to the subjective interpretation of other bodies. Body image affects sexual practices, drives, and performance, and there is a relation between body image and sexual preference.

LINKS BETWEEN BODY IMAGE AND SEXUAL PRACTICES

The increasing visibility of different representations of bodies both complicates the process of and opens up greater possibilities for exploring sexual practices. Indeed such visibility is essential in describing any socio-cultural link to body image. In addition a greater number of sexual subcultures is evolving, largely due to the increased availability of media images (i.e., the Internet) and the mainstreaming of pornography. Further the visibility of extreme bodies, whether excessively thin or excessively obese, continues to grow. As subcultures evolve and overlap, the topic of body image and its links to sexual practices continues to evolve.

Whereas body image evokes the interface between the inner and outer representation of any gender, it is also potentially connected to an individual's notion of identity. For example an anorectic individual does not usually say, "I feel fat," but rather, "I am fat." An anorectic person sees a fat body in the mirror, whereas to other people, that same body appears to be skeletal. A characteristic of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa is that the inner image depends on the outer reflection in the mirror as well as how the individual is seen by others. The anorectic's perspective is affected by a collection of images, or bodily ideals, that are dictated by the dominant media: film, television, and advertisements in magazines. In addition widespread research shows that young women in European and North American cultures are particularly influenced by these images because they have been exposed from childhood to the popular notion that the thin female body is a signifier of desire. According to Leslie Heywood, anorexia, "mental or physical, is central to the self-definition of most women, particularly educated women attempting to gain access to the white male power that requires them to cancel out their bodies" (Heywood 1996, p. 33). The goal of the anorectic adolescent girl (usually white) is, arguably, to be a woman who is not yet a woman, which suggests sexual timidity or fear. At the very least confusion is often experienced by one whom has an eating disorder because the degree to which one is desired seems to directly correspond to the degree to which one has conformed to the contemporary bodily ideal. Childhood sexual abuse may also account for many cases of eating disorders in women (and increasingly in men).

Body Image and Sexual Practice

If anorexia nervosa is a means by which people attempt to deny desire, both for others and as directed toward themselves, then feeder/feedee culture, which is the exact opposite of anorexia nervosa, is concerned with concrete connections between food and eroticism. In the context of fat fetishism, the feedee is the submissive counterpart to the feeder. As part of the relationship, the feedee is fed, either for the purpose of gaining weight, or for the sheer pleasure of the act. According to Octavio Paz, "[t]he erotic industry is the younger sister of the food industry. Private business expropriates utopia. During its ascendancy capitalism exploited the body; now it has turned it into an object of advertising. We have gone from prohibition to humiliation" (Paz 1972, p. 81).

As the numbers of obese people increases in the early twenty-first century, especially in North America, the emergence of a fat acceptance, or fat admiration culture has become more visible. The feeding subculture is often denounced by the mainstream fat acceptance community as misogynistic, because the submissive partners are almost exclusively women. The fat acceptance community also sometimes regards feeder relationships as pathological.

The growth of feederism paralleled the development of feeder pornography, with the increase of Internet websites not unlike those devoted to the celebration of the skeletal beauty of anorexic bodies. On these focused websites, the fed or starved chart their progress, whether losing or gaining weight, and have admirers that contact them. The dominant/submissive relationship lies at the heart of feeder/feedee culture, whereas the sadist and the masochist both reside in the anorectic's sense of body image. While the anorectic may deny food as a metaphor for denying sex, or the desire for sex, the feeder/feedee relationship to food functions as a metaphor for the unchecked immersion into unbridled desire.

FORCE FEEDING

Force feeding has had frightening connotations for women throughout history, particularly during the suffrage movement in the United States during the early twentieth century. In the Victorian era, such extreme outward displays, especially by women, of bodily expression such as that which occurred during the suffragettes' public protests, were subdued by police, who arrested the women, and doctors, who force fed them. Many women engaged in hunger strikes because it was the most powerfully visible way to attract attention to the immediacy of the suffrage movement. According to Barbara Green, "no image has been more provocative than the image of the forcibly fed woman…. The gesture of making public the private experience of the female body, exposing its secrets, describing its invasion, takes place in the realm of the spectacular, produces a speaking subject who is embodied, and who speaks from the female body in pain" (Green 1993, p. 71-72). This condition is at the heart of the dominant/submissive tension, where it involves body image and sexual practice. The act of bringing to the outside what has formerly been inside evokes fear, wonder, fascination, horror, and desire. The depiction of a hunger striker forcibly fed—that is, choking, spitting, and vomiting as food is forced down her throat—creates a body image that, due to its spectacular availability, can be considered pornographic.

LINKS BETWEEN BODY IMAGE, SEXUAL PERFORMANCE, AND PREFERENCE

The widespread availability of pornography, or its mainstreaming, has reinforced a hard body aesthetic in terms of body image. Since the late twentieth century, the increased use of plastic surgery, as well as demand for enhancements, such as anal bleaching, which were previously unheard of outside the pornographic film industry, have demonstrated society's growing interest in perfect bodily symmetry. Obviously, the term perfect is problematic due to its subjective and illusory meaning, but it is the term people of every gender often use to describe the kind of bodies they desire and/or want to attain.

According to Tom Venuto, a body builder, body symmetry "refers to the qualities of balance, proportion, shape and classical aesthetics. It was first described by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who explained it in terms of mathematical relationships" (Venuto 2004, p. 1). Venuto lists several male body builders who have historically fit this shape. The key physical qualities include low body fat; a tiny waist; broad shoulders; a wide, tapering back; slab-like pectoral muscles, developed top to bottom with a sharply defined, lower pectoral line; small hips and glutes; and the appearance of long legs. Some theorize that the quality of symmetry is what makes an individual sexually desirable, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Further a healthy, toned, clean body is often considered a signifier of virility and strength.

Whether addressing sexual drive, performance, or practice, and regardless of sexual orientation and gender, the discussion of body image will eventually turn to the issue of visibility and invisibility. Body image is based on a visual representation (inner and/or outer) of an individual. Philosopher Michel Foucault described the body as constantly "in the grip" of cultural practices (Foucault 1988, p. 55). Bodies, no less than anything else human, are influences by culture.

Stereotyping about sexual preference, performance, and gender is especially influenced by the practices of the dominant culture. However, the subject of sexual orientation, performance, and body image is complicated by culturally coded stereotypes that exist beyond the normal pressures imposed by the dominant culture on ideal body types.

see also Eating Disorders.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordo, Susan. 1988. "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture." In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quimby. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Green, Barbara. 1993. "Spectacular Confessions: 'How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed.'" Review of Contemporary Fiction 13: 3.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. An Introduction. Vol 1 of Histoire de la sexualité [History of sexuality], trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Heywood, Leslie. 1996. Dedication to Hunger. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jeffords, Susan. 1994. Hard Bodies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Orbach, Susie. 1986. Hunger Strike. New York: Norton.

Paz, Octavio. 1972. "Eroticism and Gastrosophy." Daedalus 101(4): 81.

Venuto, Tom. "How to Develop a Classical Body Shape." Bodybuilding and Fitness Portal. Available from http://www.bodybuilding-fitness.net.

                                                Amy Nolan