On Male Privilege and Just Eating the Damn Cake

This week, I decided to work on my relationship with food. My goal was to have three healthy, reasonably-sized, balanced meals a day, and I would allow myself a small amount of chocolate at around 3pm. 

This was a plate of Costa Rican food I had. nomnom <3

On the face of it, that seems like a stupidly mundane goal to set yourself. Surely that’s just what everyone does. Or, as I've been asked several times before, mostly by men, “Why are you so weird with food?! Why can’t you just eat normally??”

Sure, let’s “just eat normally”. Would you like some fries with that male privilege?

As with most little girls, my first female role model was my mother, who was constantly on some diet or another. I remember one week, all she would eat was stale bread and warm milk. The diets were marked on the calendar, too, followed by lots of exclamation marks, right next to my school outings and overdue bills. I must have been around four or five. How many little boys watch this kind of behavior in their fathers?

When I started primary school, I quickly learned that chubby girls get made fun of. In fact, one literature review (1) finds that in school, overweight girls are more likely to be bullied and stigmatized than overweight boys. As I remember it, at my school, girls were much more likely to be bullied for their looks in general, and their weight specifically. Boys would be bullied mostly for crying, or not being “tough” enough, and I’m not arguing that this, or the unhealthy ideal of hypermasculinity that it stems from, isn’t awful. But I don’t think boys get bullied for the way they look very much. 

In middle and high school, I watched my girl friends go on yoghurt-only diets, heard of people having competitions at lunchtime to see who could eat the least, and listened to my male classmates, who by that time had obviously adopted society’s overall attitude on these things, deliver their judgment on women’s bodies. 

“Ugh. She’s fat.” 

“Wow, look at that perfect little ass.” 

“What a fucking whale”. 

At a time when having a boyfriend made you cool, and fitting in was most everyone’s primary concern, the message was very clear. No one will like you if you’re fat. 

Meanwhile, boys did not receive that message, and instead were encouraged to see their bodies as instruments that would help them throw a ball further, run faster or jump higher. I would hypothesize that this contributes to the disconnection between body image and self-esteem in males. They are taught to see their body not as a reflection of how much they are worth, but as a tool. In fact, it’s been shown (2) that whether boys are satisfied with how their bodies look has nothing to do with their  self-esteem. You know when men look in the mirror, go: “Oh, I seem to have gotten a bit of a belly, better cut down on beer for a bit”, then go about their day without it affecting their self-worth at all? I have NEVER seen a woman do that. 

Instead, I have seen close friends tear up and tell me that they’ve been trying to, or succeeding in, throwing up their meals. I have seen brilliant, beautiful, kind girls subsist on eight hundred calories a day and run for two hours, because they thought they weren’t good enough. I have seen them fade away, losing the sparkle in their eyes along with their beautiful curves. And I have fought with myself for over a decade, constantly going from ‘I will be skinny and pretty and perfect and I will never eat again’ to ‘FUCK the patriarchy I will eat five pizzas and three chocolate donuts’ (neither of which, by the way, I would recommend).

Because a lifetime of body-shaming, being judged for what you put on your plate, and seeing the fashion industry label perfectly healthy women as ‘plus size’ makes it incredibly difficult for a lot of women to “just eat normally”. I think men, or really anyone who has never had to face these things, should be aware of that. 

(1) Tang-Péronard, J.L., Heitmann, B.L. (2006). Stigmatization of obese children and adolescents, the importance of gender. Obesity Review, 9, 522 – 534.

(2) Furnham, A., Badmin, N., Sneade, I. (2002). Body Image Dissatisfaction: Gender Differences in Eating Attitudes, Self-Esteem and Reasons for Exercise. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 136, 581 – 596.