File 29: Appetite

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The baseness of male sexual violence against women is in the news once again, following the harrowing CNN investigation that uncovered ‘rape academies’, a phenomenon befitting of the word evil. This post is not directly about that story. I’ve written in the past about my experience of Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault (DFSA) in Sensuous Knowledge, and I also shared an excerpt from the book in an earlier Kaleido post.

This piece is about appetite, a notion which sounds innocent enough until one remembers that, in a woman’s body, very little is ever merely physiological.

I’ve been thinking about appetite because mine has recently become rather conspicuous. Gone are the days of restraint; these days are defined by multitudes. As a result, I’ve put on a little weight, which has had the curious effect of returning me to myself at thirteen — the age I was when a man first molested me.

I was walking home from school when he followed me. He entered the apartment building where I lived and got into the lift, where his filthy hands groped me. He then slipped out before the lift ascended.

By this point in my life, I was growing accustomed to a certain kind of attention from men. Not the attention from boys at school. Not the crushes expressed through teasing and chasing. I, too, paid attention to those boys. I found them beautiful, although I would have preferred to engage in less adolescent behaviour — yes, even from adolescents.

Nor was this new attention straightforwardly what Laura Mulvey meant by the objectifying male gaze. In Mulvey’s theory, men are active viewers of women. They ‘coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’.

The gaze that I was becoming aware of was transgressive and taboo, rather than active and assured. It came specifically from older men. It was omnipresent yet hidden: a peeping, ogling, leering eye that followed you everywhere, all the time.

One of my responses to this ominously voyeuristic gaze was to increasingly hide my body, which by then had become a woman’s rather than a girl’s. But I was a girly-girl, so I scoffed at the baggy-jeans tomboy look. Instead, I took to dressing like those women who now style themselves as ‘trad-wives’. Conservative. Demure. I wore prim blouses buttoned up like a good church-girl while the real me wanted to show her figure off in hot pants and crop tops.

That version of me had to wait.

When she eventually appeared, so did raving and experimenting with amphetamines, which had the side effect of reducing from a curvy size twelve/fourteen to a more androgynous eight/ten.

It is not that the male gaze disappeared as my body changed — it did not — but the more bellicose form of it seemed to recede in proportion to the number on the scale.

In the years since, I have not dieted in any formal sense. I have, however, eaten in ways shaped by yoga, and later by an endometriosis diet. I have, broadly speaking, remained slender, and my relationship to food has felt, if not entirely neutral, then at least balanced.

Until recently.

At first, when my appetite suddenly increased, I wondered if I might be pregnant. I craved fats, snacks, treats. I ate them. Then I noticed the effects on my hips, my waist, and everywhere.