Excerpts from my thesis
"To watch a woman eat becomes salacious, and women are therefore meant to control their appetites, especially in public. A lovely piece of advice given in my family cautions against taking too large bites while on a date, because to display appetite is unladylike. What I believe is meant here is to display appetite is to attempt to verge into the masculine, to not be concerned with appearing unchaste.
The appetite for food and the sexual appetite are encoded within each other; sex is often represented on the page or the screen by eating, and the two are closely related, each a different kind of consuming. Thus the sight of a woman eating takes on a lascivious tone that in a society that restricts and seeks to control sexuality can become threatening and terrifying. Not only that, but a lot of the courting or dating process revolves around the shared meal, food becoming foreplay. Representations of women eating, particularly in ads geared at women, show female appetite as something indulged furtively, as if eating were a dirty act, whereas men are allowed to eat and are encouraged or shown as having appetite, to the point where masculinity and appetite are conflated—see the “manwich.” The caveat to this being that men do not allow themselves to become fat, because fleshiness is “gross” regardless of gender, and also to become fat moves man closer to woman—the development of “moobs.” Fleshy protuberances of the bodies are strictly encoded as being feminine; there is no ungendered term in common usage for the breasts. Fleshiness is very much femaleness.
Women are meant to be the preparers of food, not the consumers. There is an ongoing myth of the maternal that maintains that women are somehow nourished by nourishing others. Personal appetite is supposedly sublimated into the satisfaction of seeing others eat, and even now it is common practice in advertising to show women cheerfully cooking in the kitchen, only to place the food out in front of her family. Very rarely does this smiling maternal avatar eat. This ads become especially prevalent around Thanksgiving and Christmas, when meals are at their most grand and indulgent. The denial of personal appetite is insinuated into the fabric of the mythic domestic space, the home of the “home cooked meal.” This is the special site of femininity, and in the same way that the female is associated with the body, the female body is associated with food. It is something that again harkens back to the biology of childhood, when the nursing mother is literally the source of food for the child, to the image of the mother in Western culture, which is nearly always in the kitchen, cooking for the family. The connection between female body and food becomes even closer when food is sublimated for sex, as it commonly is. “Peaches and cream complexion” to song lyrics like “she’s my cherry pie” to the recent email disseminated from Kappa Sig, which compared different races of women to types of pie. The female body is both intended for consumption—sexually and aesthetically, for to be female is often to be looked at, or looked at ness—and paradoxically the thing that cannot draw attention to itself, or its functions. Female appetites sit in the cultural imagination as monstrous—sometimes literally as monster.
In a recent advertisement for the Weight Watcher’s Program a short, orange furred monster terrorizes an office of women. It chases after them with various junk foods and snacks, leaping out of such unlikely places as the photocopier. The women, of course, all slim and coiffed, are cool in the face of temptation because they use Weight Watchers online for tips on how to beat “Hungry.” Hungry—and notice it is specifically female hunger—is a furry orange monster. De-fanged, because it is shown without a mouth, and more like a muppet than a horror movie nightmare, but it is a monster nonetheless. Keep this image in mind; this is the image of monstrous female desire, made benign and controllable."
tl;dr
GORGE YOURSELF LADIES. EAT TO TAKE DOWN PATRIARCHY.
