2) these women thinking they somehow invented deprivation is WILD
3) my mom is anorexic. She’s in her 70s and she almost died because she literally stopped eating and fucked her body up so much a couple of years ago. My family does not discuss this AT ALL.
4) my entire family praised my teenage niece for losing all this weight…. Turns out she was developing type 1 diabetes. She went into a diabetic coma in the middle of the night and would have died if her dog hadn’t lost her shit and woken up my sister-in-law.
5) when I was a junior/senior in college (so about 2005/2006) my mom and a friend tried to talk me into getting bariatric surgery so I would have better luck launching into a career.
6) I’m so very fucking tired. At this point in time I don’t WANT to be skinny because ABSOLUTELY FUCK EVERYONE who praised the women in my life for disappearing when they were actually dying and FUCK the people who want ME to be less, especially when they want it out of “love”.
7) that got weirdly emotional lol apparently I have feelings about this.
8) Body positivity was fake but I miss it now that it’s gone.
CW disordered habits incoming: my mom (in her sixties) had bariatric surgery in 2017 and I fully believed it propelled her into anorexia/orthorexia. she barely eats and when she does, is absolutely vigilant about every bite of food. she also compulsively exercises to the point she now needs a shoulder replacement surgery and doesn't want to get it because she's afraid of taking time from the gym to recover. my sister, seeing all this unfold over the years, just had the surgery done, too. my dad, the most fatphobic of them all, has been on ozempic for months.
all this to say, solidarity. I see you and I am with you, internet stranger. this shit is so fucked.
I’m about halfway through and internally screaming about how this is all textbook orthorexia!! It’s also not lost on me how much of the advice sounds like intuitive eating if you skipped the first few principles and went straight to the food/eating part but made it worse
Yeah…. I agree that she is just naming something everyone is already doing… and that’s a larger systemic issue… but I guess it’s how she’s naming it — is she criticizing it? No, she’s glorifying it…. And yeah if you’re creating content that is inarguably exacerbating mental and physical health outcomes in vulnerable populations, it’s a problem….
Caro your point about how the voice in your head doesn’t go away after you find a partner made me cry. I had a breakdown this week because I’ve convinced myself that if I don’t lose weight my partner is going to leave me because all her friends are skinny and beautiful and are so confident and just generally better, and she was like “literally what are you talking about they all have completely different bodies and that also has nothing to do with who they are or who you are.” It didn’t even matter what they looked like or that my partner tells me constantly that she loves me and my body, my conditioning just completely overrode everything I saw and logically knew.
The Evie quote about “pretending to feel empowered in my own body” made me go THERE IT IS. Evie is all about convincing women that empowerment is a scam.
Did anyone else - when Katie was talking about fatphobia connected to anti-blackness - think about Annie in “Sinners”???? Because she was curvy and sensual AS FUUUCCCKKKKK and that’s all I could think about.
“She’s not trying to shame anyone, she’s just telling the truth” evie repeats twelve times, with the obvious subtext being that if you feel shame for your weight thats just you struggling to accept “the truth”
yeah that felt like a solid throughline in all the content; this assumption that fatphobia (whether internalized or externalized) isn't learned, but natural
“Obsessing about your body means you’re never in your body” is an eye-opening statement. It verbalizes something I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Thank you for that ❤️
Love you guys and have so many thoughts, as always. I see a capitalism angle — our bodies are being turned into something that can be sold back to us. Also, anecdotally, having a baby helped me finally love and respect my body. Pregnancy and childbirth and caring for a newborn kind of forced me into embodiment…. It held a mirror up to me like “you fool, you are your body and your body is fucking amazing… “
Such an undercurrent of capitalism throughout this entire topic. Even dating back to the ancient cultures where the attraction of plumpness related to it's signifying having the economic means to access food in times of scarcity. In the modern era, weight loss and thinness have now been idealized and commodified for a long time. So this is nothing new, but like Katie said, it us a unique moment with respect to the rise of glp-1 agonist drugs, which are further commodifying thinness, because we know that people with means are buying these drugs even without medical need. It is very interesting to see the rise of someone like Schmidt, who is valorized and also politicized by conservatives largely because of her emphasis on Self Discipline, against the backdrop of the rise of this drug which actually kind of removes the need for self discipline - so long as you can afford it. So if GLP-1 agonists become increasingly accessible and affordable, does it deflate this glorificatiin of self-control, or just up the ante? There are so many avenues for discussing the intersections of these topics, and I could have easily listened to Caro and Katie talk for another hour or two - you ladies are amazing!
And, I have also found having kids to be healing in some ways. When the most beautiful little people in your life look just like you, it's hard to give space to negative self talk about your appearance.
What a mic drop moment at the end. I love you guys. You always give me so much to think about. I always listen first and then listen again with my teen daughters. I appreciate how you have informed yourselves on weight neutrality and fat activism as part of your feminism.
I keep meaning to jump on here and give real feedback, but y'all are evolving in your perspectives so fast I can barely keep up. It's awesome to see, and even when we slightly disagree, the places that y'all are headed with this work are very much what I was hoping to support with my money, so thank you.
The only other thing I really wanted to drop in today was that—and I don't have the bandwidth right now to investigate the etymology, so feel free to check this—Body Positivity (#BodyPos) really emerged out of CrossFit-type fitness culture in the late-aughts/early 2010's, where the idea was that training wasn't supposed to be about what your body *looked like*, but rather what it could *do* (lift, run, throw, etc). It was very much a response to bodybuilding/Men's+Women's Health body standards, in the same vein that the annual ESPN "Bodies" issues were a response to the S.I. Swimsuit Edition.
Like so many things that started small and purpose-driven, it was completely changed by social media and redefined by an opportunistic cultural movement. Hence, backlash.
Also: "collapse of context" is both a great bandname and a phrase that I'm going to be borrowing at scale.
It's like I go through something in my own personal life and Diabolical Lies magically does an episode about it weeks later?! Didn't think I could love this discourse any more than I already do, and yet here I am.
To be vulnerable, I'm unfortunately also someone who's dealt with my own experience of this narrative. I recently fell into the marketing of a brand that sold me another "lifestyle change" program ahead of my upcoming wedding. At first, it seemed like checking in with a 'macro coach' who appeared to care about my sleep, social life, and even digestive system was so in line with what I felt was 'different' than the rest. Then, $200/month later for several months, I was given constant feedback that my 8k step counts weren't ideal, my workouts weren't good enough, my numbers could be better. When they were better? Sodium was too high, fiber could be better, better luck next week. And even though I was feeling okay for a while, I realized my "calories" were slowly becoming smaller, and smaller, and smaller. After a truly ~mental spiral~ after weighing my cucumbers on a digital scale, I canceled the program. (Not to mention the $$$ in payments owed) because even though I canceled, I signed a contract (internal scream.)
At the end of the day, despite how appealing their message may seem, wellness influencers and brands are a BUSINESS. They care about maintaining an image that keeps you paying them so that you too, can keep changing yourself. And arguably, make yourself the smallest version you can be.
Here's to the wonderful liars that listen to this podcast who know their worth, and rise above it all, as hard as that may often seem.
Thank you for sharing your story. Perfect example of the 'trap door' analogy Caro discusses! I hope you have a wonderful wedding, free of body guilt and full of love ❤
I was so excited to see you post this and I have so many thoughts!! These are all very first draft so pls bare with me lol
As someone who has struggled with pretty much every version of an ED (anorexia, orthorexia, binge-purge, binge), a lot of this will be coming from my personal experience! My ED nearly killed me, not just from starvation, but from the aftermath of suicidal ideation while trying to “recover” (using quotes because a lot of recovery in my experience was actually cycling through different forms of the disorder). That’s actually part of what makes ED’s and anorexia in particular one of the most deadly mental illnesses: so many sufferers end up committing suicide. The thing that fascinates me so much is that anorexia (and I think now orthorexia to an extent) live at the intersection of brutal mental illness and culturally celebrated symptoms. The goal of anorexia is to kill you. The combination of these factors make recovery so so difficult because you end up having to chose to live, and likely live inside a body that you fully believe you will hate and suffer eternally in. Choosing the path of recovery in the depths of illness feels completely counter intuitive and in fact more harmful and dangerous than the disorder itself. I’d imagine this to be multiplied tenfold for someone like Liv, who as you pointed out, has built her business around having a body type that she must maintain through disordered eating.
Okay, onto a few notes I scribbled while listening!
- Lightness and freedom: When Liv describes feeling light and free, she’s probably expressing a truth. She feels light because her organs are shutting down. All energy typically used to think, experience joy and pleasure, etc. is being sent to keep her heart pumping. Cortisol is rushing through to keep her energized. It’s incredibly spiritual experience to starve, because you are literally being liberated from your body. You feel in control because all you think about is food: an absolute singular focus reduces the noise of the world. And because you can’t really experience sensory pleasure, there’s also a numbing effect on emotional pain. Again, the goal of an ED is to kill you, providing the sufferer with ultimate freedom from a) society and b) your body and corporeal existence.
- The Ease Aspect: Having an ED is in no way easy. It’s fucking brutal, but because it is such a singular focus, once you are in it, the disease kind of takes over and it feels easier to exist in a singular plane with blinders on than to engage with the entire world around you. It’s like wearing noise cancelling headphones and listening to the same album on infinite loop. Also, I think there’s a huge moral superiority complex happening within an ED of doing it the “right way”. Because you are viewing yourself as “in control”, there’s a validation that’s provided that you aren’t “cheating” (like someone who is taking a GLP-1). You’re doing the hard work, you’re strong, you’re powerful, and you’re better than other people, who are “lazy”. And the illusory ease of existence is your reward. I’ll touch on this in a second, but that’s a tie in to the capitalism-brain of it all; you’re doing good, honest labor, and also (in the disordered brain) reaping the benefits of your own product because existing in a smaller body in a fat phobic society is objectively easier. The irony of Liv Schmidt’s business model is that if everyone gets skinny, and everyone reaps the benefits, then…there’s no hierarchy where being thin presents an objectively societally easier existence. It also strips it of the moral superiority that comes with the idea of “control”.
- Feminism!!!: I was so struck - embarrassingly so - by the reminder that feminism is a political movement and empowerment does not really equal feminism under a capitalist system. It had me thinking so much about the current Sabrina Carpenter discourse. (**I’m looking at the comments now and seeing how everyone else is on this same page lol) To be honest, I am still trying to pick apart the different stages of feminist thought that I’ve personally aligned with. I’m Gen Z, and I think I spent a majority of my time really confused about how to square the elements of choice feminism I find compelling with the wider context of a patriarchal society in which I don’t feel free to make any decision ever without the influence of that system. I think I’ve also fallen down a less sex-positive viewpoint rabbit hole at times because porn made me straight up scared and uncomfortable, and I really couldn’t picture someone wanting to enter the field of sex work without some sort of trauma or coercion etc. (shoutout to your Lily Phillips episode because that one really sparked a lot for me and challenged me in really exciting ways). Okay so, the choice of album cover IS probably empowering for Sabrina as an individual; kink can be empowering. But that doesn’t make the singular album cover - and Sabrina by extension - necessarily a “feminist statement” because as a political ideology, feminism requires collective action. I think forcing women to shoulder the responsibility of performing feminism by both “empowering” themselves and dismantling the oppression of the system is where we get caught in choice feminism vs radical feminism. I think the focus on that discourse is necessary to engage with, but can keep us trapped in a cycle (much like an eating disorder, in fact. We can legitimately feel empowered and liberated through destroying ourselves and arguably others). There’s also so much focus online on blaming women for catering to the male gaze and centering men without presenting an actual alternative (because empowering women by “rejecting the male gaze” is still…centering men, and outside the context of a much larger political movement often ends up “disempowering” women on a societal level). And yet, arguing that a woman has no agency in her choices because she’s so brainwashed by society is infantilizing, assumes a subjugation of the woman in question, and posits that the world must be perfect before women can make “real” choices at all. But that focus on the individual is so neoliberal; instead of (god forbid) political action, women should be content with the choices they have, and continue being consumers, and be in solidarity with other women through silence and non judgement around the choices of other individuals (!!!). I think criticism that encourages political action should be engaged with, but what IS that political action when we continue to harmfully place the burden on the individual (who is shaped by the political reality)? So I guess what I’m saying is that feminism and anti capitalism go hand in hand! And I’m really grateful to you for helping me get there (even though I know I still have a ways to go). Back to Liv: her decision to center her life around being thin is a) potentially legitimately providing her a sense of empowerment, b) providing her with that power - illusory and real - on both a societal and individual level, c) arguably not a free decision at all given the societal structure AND the likelihood that she’s suffering from an extreme mental illness, d) harmfully influential to plenty of people also suffering under the system and e) also potentially providing some of them with that same freedom and power she is experiencing. And it all feels like fucking capitalism, baby.
- Mind vs. Body: I love love love that you guys linked all of this to the separation of mind and body. The concept of that separation I think, for me at least, is what drove my ED as both a trauma healing experience, and a spiritual one as well. It ties into what I was thinking about earlier regarding the legitimate sense of lightness and freedom, and like you pointed out, the optimization of self-as-worker and body-as-capital. In an ED, you do definitely feel as if you are liberating your mind from your body, which I think we associate with experiencing suffering. In physically suffering through the initial pain of separating the mind from the body (the early stages of anorexia where you are just starting to restrict), you eventually reach a sense of “enlightenment”. And the baseness, the carnality, the animalism, the traumatic experiences of the body, which we deem so disgusting, are finally “conquered”. It’s very carceral and fascistic. This is where the sexlessness of it all came in for me. By disconnecting from the most basic needs of humanity - literally sustenance - I was personally able to experience feeling something I thought was better than sexuality or sensuality or embodiment. I was able to experience feeling “correct” and utterly untouchable. The sexlessness was something that felt paradoxically incredibly sexy to me, because for the first time I could escape the body that had been deemed inherently sexually promiscuous by society, a body that I felt made me incredibly vulnerable. I felt like a piece of art; something that was so beautiful that it inspired awe and respect, rather than a desire to touch. I felt autonomous. And experiencing being “in control” of the perception of your sexuality and sensuality (by punishing the body into a vision of a specific physical presentation that we associate with POWER, not actually sex appeal) was intoxicating. Disembodiment is ascetic. I really appreciated the reference to Fearing the Black Body as well. Because why do we think of flesh as morally bad...? Hmmmmmmmmmm
- The ties to MAHA: Thinness as an indicator of health furthers the promise of their agenda that if you strip everything to purity, your body will be pure. What’s also interesting about EDs and the healthcare system is that so so so many people suffering do not receive medical treatment for their disorder because they don’t “look the part”. If you are suffering from anorexia but are not underweight, the likelihood that you will receive care is very low. And of course, that is if you are even able to see a doctor.
Sorry this was SO DAMN long and that many of these thoughts are half-baked but I just wanted to jot them down because this felt so personal to me. Thank you for continuing to put out such awesome work. In fact, seeing how all of these things intertwine with capitalism and how much my embodied existence boiled down to that has been really helping me in my continued ED recovery. The things you present in Diabolical Lies makes me want to actually apply a different way of thinking about myself and my body and that has been so powerful for me! Can’t thank you enough. ANyways, fuck ED's, fuck capitalism, fuck fatphobia, and fuck being fascist to yourself and others :)
“Income inequality is the real public health crisis” GO OFF KATIE!!
Legit mic drop moment 🎤
Really girding my loins for this one as a fat lady *laughs uncomfortably*
As a fellow fat lady, the first past is a little rough but Katie and Caro do an excellent job tearing it all apart.
I agree!!! I actually have MAAANNNYYYY thoughts to share lol
looking forward to it!
A few thoughts in no particular order….
1) I really like embodiment vs empowerment.
2) these women thinking they somehow invented deprivation is WILD
3) my mom is anorexic. She’s in her 70s and she almost died because she literally stopped eating and fucked her body up so much a couple of years ago. My family does not discuss this AT ALL.
4) my entire family praised my teenage niece for losing all this weight…. Turns out she was developing type 1 diabetes. She went into a diabetic coma in the middle of the night and would have died if her dog hadn’t lost her shit and woken up my sister-in-law.
5) when I was a junior/senior in college (so about 2005/2006) my mom and a friend tried to talk me into getting bariatric surgery so I would have better luck launching into a career.
6) I’m so very fucking tired. At this point in time I don’t WANT to be skinny because ABSOLUTELY FUCK EVERYONE who praised the women in my life for disappearing when they were actually dying and FUCK the people who want ME to be less, especially when they want it out of “love”.
7) that got weirdly emotional lol apparently I have feelings about this.
8) Body positivity was fake but I miss it now that it’s gone.
CW disordered habits incoming: my mom (in her sixties) had bariatric surgery in 2017 and I fully believed it propelled her into anorexia/orthorexia. she barely eats and when she does, is absolutely vigilant about every bite of food. she also compulsively exercises to the point she now needs a shoulder replacement surgery and doesn't want to get it because she's afraid of taking time from the gym to recover. my sister, seeing all this unfold over the years, just had the surgery done, too. my dad, the most fatphobic of them all, has been on ozempic for months.
all this to say, solidarity. I see you and I am with you, internet stranger. this shit is so fucked.
We should make a message thread for fat lady liars!
THAT is a solid idea
I’m about halfway through and internally screaming about how this is all textbook orthorexia!! It’s also not lost on me how much of the advice sounds like intuitive eating if you skipped the first few principles and went straight to the food/eating part but made it worse
Yeah…. I agree that she is just naming something everyone is already doing… and that’s a larger systemic issue… but I guess it’s how she’s naming it — is she criticizing it? No, she’s glorifying it…. And yeah if you’re creating content that is inarguably exacerbating mental and physical health outcomes in vulnerable populations, it’s a problem….
Caro your point about how the voice in your head doesn’t go away after you find a partner made me cry. I had a breakdown this week because I’ve convinced myself that if I don’t lose weight my partner is going to leave me because all her friends are skinny and beautiful and are so confident and just generally better, and she was like “literally what are you talking about they all have completely different bodies and that also has nothing to do with who they are or who you are.” It didn’t even matter what they looked like or that my partner tells me constantly that she loves me and my body, my conditioning just completely overrode everything I saw and logically knew.
Maybe our partners have points and we should let ourselves be loved!!! Easier said than done but also worth acknowledging lol
The Evie quote about “pretending to feel empowered in my own body” made me go THERE IT IS. Evie is all about convincing women that empowerment is a scam.
Did anyone else - when Katie was talking about fatphobia connected to anti-blackness - think about Annie in “Sinners”???? Because she was curvy and sensual AS FUUUCCCKKKKK and that’s all I could think about.
“She’s not trying to shame anyone, she’s just telling the truth” evie repeats twelve times, with the obvious subtext being that if you feel shame for your weight thats just you struggling to accept “the truth”
yeah that felt like a solid throughline in all the content; this assumption that fatphobia (whether internalized or externalized) isn't learned, but natural
This really seems like the “pro-ana” Reddit communities that promoted self-harm to get skinny. It’s frightening that this is out there.
yeah i think it's noteworthy that all the comparable "communities" that are worthy of parallel also happened online
“Obsessing about your body means you’re never in your body” is an eye-opening statement. It verbalizes something I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Thank you for that ❤️
Love you guys and have so many thoughts, as always. I see a capitalism angle — our bodies are being turned into something that can be sold back to us. Also, anecdotally, having a baby helped me finally love and respect my body. Pregnancy and childbirth and caring for a newborn kind of forced me into embodiment…. It held a mirror up to me like “you fool, you are your body and your body is fucking amazing… “
Such an undercurrent of capitalism throughout this entire topic. Even dating back to the ancient cultures where the attraction of plumpness related to it's signifying having the economic means to access food in times of scarcity. In the modern era, weight loss and thinness have now been idealized and commodified for a long time. So this is nothing new, but like Katie said, it us a unique moment with respect to the rise of glp-1 agonist drugs, which are further commodifying thinness, because we know that people with means are buying these drugs even without medical need. It is very interesting to see the rise of someone like Schmidt, who is valorized and also politicized by conservatives largely because of her emphasis on Self Discipline, against the backdrop of the rise of this drug which actually kind of removes the need for self discipline - so long as you can afford it. So if GLP-1 agonists become increasingly accessible and affordable, does it deflate this glorificatiin of self-control, or just up the ante? There are so many avenues for discussing the intersections of these topics, and I could have easily listened to Caro and Katie talk for another hour or two - you ladies are amazing!
And, I have also found having kids to be healing in some ways. When the most beautiful little people in your life look just like you, it's hard to give space to negative self talk about your appearance.
Starting this episode while in the gym 😅 Peak irony over here.
"Also: Palestine" 🫠
What a mic drop moment at the end. I love you guys. You always give me so much to think about. I always listen first and then listen again with my teen daughters. I appreciate how you have informed yourselves on weight neutrality and fat activism as part of your feminism.
I keep meaning to jump on here and give real feedback, but y'all are evolving in your perspectives so fast I can barely keep up. It's awesome to see, and even when we slightly disagree, the places that y'all are headed with this work are very much what I was hoping to support with my money, so thank you.
The only other thing I really wanted to drop in today was that—and I don't have the bandwidth right now to investigate the etymology, so feel free to check this—Body Positivity (#BodyPos) really emerged out of CrossFit-type fitness culture in the late-aughts/early 2010's, where the idea was that training wasn't supposed to be about what your body *looked like*, but rather what it could *do* (lift, run, throw, etc). It was very much a response to bodybuilding/Men's+Women's Health body standards, in the same vein that the annual ESPN "Bodies" issues were a response to the S.I. Swimsuit Edition.
Like so many things that started small and purpose-driven, it was completely changed by social media and redefined by an opportunistic cultural movement. Hence, backlash.
Also: "collapse of context" is both a great bandname and a phrase that I'm going to be borrowing at scale.
(also the crossfit tidbit is fascinating)
thank you PC! this means a lot
It's like I go through something in my own personal life and Diabolical Lies magically does an episode about it weeks later?! Didn't think I could love this discourse any more than I already do, and yet here I am.
To be vulnerable, I'm unfortunately also someone who's dealt with my own experience of this narrative. I recently fell into the marketing of a brand that sold me another "lifestyle change" program ahead of my upcoming wedding. At first, it seemed like checking in with a 'macro coach' who appeared to care about my sleep, social life, and even digestive system was so in line with what I felt was 'different' than the rest. Then, $200/month later for several months, I was given constant feedback that my 8k step counts weren't ideal, my workouts weren't good enough, my numbers could be better. When they were better? Sodium was too high, fiber could be better, better luck next week. And even though I was feeling okay for a while, I realized my "calories" were slowly becoming smaller, and smaller, and smaller. After a truly ~mental spiral~ after weighing my cucumbers on a digital scale, I canceled the program. (Not to mention the $$$ in payments owed) because even though I canceled, I signed a contract (internal scream.)
At the end of the day, despite how appealing their message may seem, wellness influencers and brands are a BUSINESS. They care about maintaining an image that keeps you paying them so that you too, can keep changing yourself. And arguably, make yourself the smallest version you can be.
Here's to the wonderful liars that listen to this podcast who know their worth, and rise above it all, as hard as that may often seem.
Thank you for sharing your story. Perfect example of the 'trap door' analogy Caro discusses! I hope you have a wonderful wedding, free of body guilt and full of love ❤
Really good episode, thank you!
thank you! glad you enjoyed
I was so excited to see you post this and I have so many thoughts!! These are all very first draft so pls bare with me lol
As someone who has struggled with pretty much every version of an ED (anorexia, orthorexia, binge-purge, binge), a lot of this will be coming from my personal experience! My ED nearly killed me, not just from starvation, but from the aftermath of suicidal ideation while trying to “recover” (using quotes because a lot of recovery in my experience was actually cycling through different forms of the disorder). That’s actually part of what makes ED’s and anorexia in particular one of the most deadly mental illnesses: so many sufferers end up committing suicide. The thing that fascinates me so much is that anorexia (and I think now orthorexia to an extent) live at the intersection of brutal mental illness and culturally celebrated symptoms. The goal of anorexia is to kill you. The combination of these factors make recovery so so difficult because you end up having to chose to live, and likely live inside a body that you fully believe you will hate and suffer eternally in. Choosing the path of recovery in the depths of illness feels completely counter intuitive and in fact more harmful and dangerous than the disorder itself. I’d imagine this to be multiplied tenfold for someone like Liv, who as you pointed out, has built her business around having a body type that she must maintain through disordered eating.
Okay, onto a few notes I scribbled while listening!
- Lightness and freedom: When Liv describes feeling light and free, she’s probably expressing a truth. She feels light because her organs are shutting down. All energy typically used to think, experience joy and pleasure, etc. is being sent to keep her heart pumping. Cortisol is rushing through to keep her energized. It’s incredibly spiritual experience to starve, because you are literally being liberated from your body. You feel in control because all you think about is food: an absolute singular focus reduces the noise of the world. And because you can’t really experience sensory pleasure, there’s also a numbing effect on emotional pain. Again, the goal of an ED is to kill you, providing the sufferer with ultimate freedom from a) society and b) your body and corporeal existence.
- The Ease Aspect: Having an ED is in no way easy. It’s fucking brutal, but because it is such a singular focus, once you are in it, the disease kind of takes over and it feels easier to exist in a singular plane with blinders on than to engage with the entire world around you. It’s like wearing noise cancelling headphones and listening to the same album on infinite loop. Also, I think there’s a huge moral superiority complex happening within an ED of doing it the “right way”. Because you are viewing yourself as “in control”, there’s a validation that’s provided that you aren’t “cheating” (like someone who is taking a GLP-1). You’re doing the hard work, you’re strong, you’re powerful, and you’re better than other people, who are “lazy”. And the illusory ease of existence is your reward. I’ll touch on this in a second, but that’s a tie in to the capitalism-brain of it all; you’re doing good, honest labor, and also (in the disordered brain) reaping the benefits of your own product because existing in a smaller body in a fat phobic society is objectively easier. The irony of Liv Schmidt’s business model is that if everyone gets skinny, and everyone reaps the benefits, then…there’s no hierarchy where being thin presents an objectively societally easier existence. It also strips it of the moral superiority that comes with the idea of “control”.
- Feminism!!!: I was so struck - embarrassingly so - by the reminder that feminism is a political movement and empowerment does not really equal feminism under a capitalist system. It had me thinking so much about the current Sabrina Carpenter discourse. (**I’m looking at the comments now and seeing how everyone else is on this same page lol) To be honest, I am still trying to pick apart the different stages of feminist thought that I’ve personally aligned with. I’m Gen Z, and I think I spent a majority of my time really confused about how to square the elements of choice feminism I find compelling with the wider context of a patriarchal society in which I don’t feel free to make any decision ever without the influence of that system. I think I’ve also fallen down a less sex-positive viewpoint rabbit hole at times because porn made me straight up scared and uncomfortable, and I really couldn’t picture someone wanting to enter the field of sex work without some sort of trauma or coercion etc. (shoutout to your Lily Phillips episode because that one really sparked a lot for me and challenged me in really exciting ways). Okay so, the choice of album cover IS probably empowering for Sabrina as an individual; kink can be empowering. But that doesn’t make the singular album cover - and Sabrina by extension - necessarily a “feminist statement” because as a political ideology, feminism requires collective action. I think forcing women to shoulder the responsibility of performing feminism by both “empowering” themselves and dismantling the oppression of the system is where we get caught in choice feminism vs radical feminism. I think the focus on that discourse is necessary to engage with, but can keep us trapped in a cycle (much like an eating disorder, in fact. We can legitimately feel empowered and liberated through destroying ourselves and arguably others). There’s also so much focus online on blaming women for catering to the male gaze and centering men without presenting an actual alternative (because empowering women by “rejecting the male gaze” is still…centering men, and outside the context of a much larger political movement often ends up “disempowering” women on a societal level). And yet, arguing that a woman has no agency in her choices because she’s so brainwashed by society is infantilizing, assumes a subjugation of the woman in question, and posits that the world must be perfect before women can make “real” choices at all. But that focus on the individual is so neoliberal; instead of (god forbid) political action, women should be content with the choices they have, and continue being consumers, and be in solidarity with other women through silence and non judgement around the choices of other individuals (!!!). I think criticism that encourages political action should be engaged with, but what IS that political action when we continue to harmfully place the burden on the individual (who is shaped by the political reality)? So I guess what I’m saying is that feminism and anti capitalism go hand in hand! And I’m really grateful to you for helping me get there (even though I know I still have a ways to go). Back to Liv: her decision to center her life around being thin is a) potentially legitimately providing her a sense of empowerment, b) providing her with that power - illusory and real - on both a societal and individual level, c) arguably not a free decision at all given the societal structure AND the likelihood that she’s suffering from an extreme mental illness, d) harmfully influential to plenty of people also suffering under the system and e) also potentially providing some of them with that same freedom and power she is experiencing. And it all feels like fucking capitalism, baby.
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- Mind vs. Body: I love love love that you guys linked all of this to the separation of mind and body. The concept of that separation I think, for me at least, is what drove my ED as both a trauma healing experience, and a spiritual one as well. It ties into what I was thinking about earlier regarding the legitimate sense of lightness and freedom, and like you pointed out, the optimization of self-as-worker and body-as-capital. In an ED, you do definitely feel as if you are liberating your mind from your body, which I think we associate with experiencing suffering. In physically suffering through the initial pain of separating the mind from the body (the early stages of anorexia where you are just starting to restrict), you eventually reach a sense of “enlightenment”. And the baseness, the carnality, the animalism, the traumatic experiences of the body, which we deem so disgusting, are finally “conquered”. It’s very carceral and fascistic. This is where the sexlessness of it all came in for me. By disconnecting from the most basic needs of humanity - literally sustenance - I was personally able to experience feeling something I thought was better than sexuality or sensuality or embodiment. I was able to experience feeling “correct” and utterly untouchable. The sexlessness was something that felt paradoxically incredibly sexy to me, because for the first time I could escape the body that had been deemed inherently sexually promiscuous by society, a body that I felt made me incredibly vulnerable. I felt like a piece of art; something that was so beautiful that it inspired awe and respect, rather than a desire to touch. I felt autonomous. And experiencing being “in control” of the perception of your sexuality and sensuality (by punishing the body into a vision of a specific physical presentation that we associate with POWER, not actually sex appeal) was intoxicating. Disembodiment is ascetic. I really appreciated the reference to Fearing the Black Body as well. Because why do we think of flesh as morally bad...? Hmmmmmmmmmm
- The ties to MAHA: Thinness as an indicator of health furthers the promise of their agenda that if you strip everything to purity, your body will be pure. What’s also interesting about EDs and the healthcare system is that so so so many people suffering do not receive medical treatment for their disorder because they don’t “look the part”. If you are suffering from anorexia but are not underweight, the likelihood that you will receive care is very low. And of course, that is if you are even able to see a doctor.
Sorry this was SO DAMN long and that many of these thoughts are half-baked but I just wanted to jot them down because this felt so personal to me. Thank you for continuing to put out such awesome work. In fact, seeing how all of these things intertwine with capitalism and how much my embodied existence boiled down to that has been really helping me in my continued ED recovery. The things you present in Diabolical Lies makes me want to actually apply a different way of thinking about myself and my body and that has been so powerful for me! Can’t thank you enough. ANyways, fuck ED's, fuck capitalism, fuck fatphobia, and fuck being fascist to yourself and others :)