Never Too Thin

by Éva Székely

Szekely argues that anorexia and bulimia should be understood as rational responses to social and political structures and not as individual psychological problems.

216 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1989

Reviews

[seroquelle]

she begins the introduction of the book with this to say about women with anorexia/bulimia: "they seem to know very little about the world outside patriarchally-defined women's roles, and, in general, their lives appear to me almost exclusively focused on their individual happiness. the women's notion of independence seem to boil down to their control of the body, of their appearance". i mean i should have stopped at that, but i was curious as to how she attempted to disprove the idea that these eating disorders are products of individual pathology, she really wants to prove they're "sociocultural", and she tries to do this by depicting every interviewed woman as shallow, narcissistic, passively devouring media representations of the "ideal of the fashion model's body"- the sole motivation being to attract/impress men. in this respect she adopts an air of distain and superiority which is carried throughout the book, sometimes masked by a strained, maternalistic sympathy.

there were far more complex ideas she had the opportunity to explore but she ignored them, devoting the entire book to her trite, simplisitic and infatilizing thesis. she failed to actually listen to the words of the women themselves; she could have expanded upon the idea of anorexia as ascetic practise, the idea of hunger being connected to emptiness/purity/riteousness was evident in the stories of all the women, but this would have required research outside of elementary gender studies.

helen malson gives a more nuanced treatment of the topin in 'the thin woman' but her writing is stringently academic to the point where it is just unreadable. i mean i just got sick of wading through the in-text citations like who has time for that.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a bad time to read this book, what with the mess the USA is making of women's rights and the #MeToo campaign showing how widespread the horror of treatment of women. It was a struggle to get through this book...depressing. Another book filled with underlining from previous reads and to see that after more than twenty years...nothing has changed for the better and some things have changed for the worse.

[Jerry]

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