WHAT THE FUCK?

 

 

 As any young Davidson woman may recall, about a month ago, signs went up in the Union bathrooms stating, in not so nice terms, that whoever was throwing up in there should either call the counseling center or find a different location. A Union staff member decided to put up this sign for the sake of the janitorial staff, who were in the unfair position of cleaning up bulimic incidences. This echoed a sign that has hung in the stalls of the basement library bathrooms for at least two years that implores unidentified women to seek help with their eating disorders, disorders that we are only aware of through the physical evidence found after-the-fact. While I realize the that both of these signs aim at helping individuals suffering from bulimia, their location implies that as a community, we are only concerned with such a problem when it crosses into our public spaces, dirties our bathrooms, and disturbs our schedules. In other words, fix yourself, or take the problem somewhere else. We are hitting the symptom head on; but for the number of pre-med students we have at this school, we should know that this is a most ineffective strategy. Just because I don’t let you see my used Kleenex does not mean that I do not have a cold. Just because those signs have been taken down, and women have ceased using those bathrooms for purging does not mean that bulimia does not exist on our campus. The absence of it in our public bathrooms just implies that people have been driven to other locations, other lonely corners in which to expel their fears with their last meal. I have identified a symptom of what I see as a greater sickness that infects much of America with warped body image ideals and impossible standards. Lets not pretend that Maxim and Cosmo don’t cause us all to take one more glance in the mirror, second guess what we had for dinner, or wish for that bicep or that splendid curve. The sickness is quite public indeed: posters on our walls, magazines in our supermarkets, catalogues in our mailboxes. As Elaine Bordo comments in her book Unbearable Weight , given the standards of beauty that circulate publicly, the typical criticism that anorexics and bulimics misperceive their body is false, rather, "she has learned all too well the dominant cultural standards of how to perceive." Walking through the halls of Chambers two weeks ago, happily scanning the bulletin boards for my next excuse for procrastination, I encountered a glaring pink flyer that taunted me with a promise of losing thirty pounds like the now-thin, and thus happy, example of Jenny. Well, that sure is nice for Jenny, I thought, turning my attention to my average size frame before concertedly shaking off the temptation to criticize myself. Later I found out that these same signs went up in the bathrooms in the exact same positions that the previous flyers went up. Grrrrannnnd. How’s that for targeting your audience? Why is it that these audacious flyers hang in our public forums, insidiously undercutting self-esteem and infecting students with self-doubt , while the little signs offering avenues of assistance hang only in corners. We give our sickness free reign over the public sphere, and expect wellness to be an individual responsibility. By placing those supposedly helpful signs in the cellular, isolated stalls, the community merely reinforces the fiction that bulimia and anorexia are personal problems, an issue that one should deal with secretly, shamefully, and singularly. They imply that a bulimic is a perpetrator committing some crime against college property, while denying the existence of a crime that society commits on her body. Battles begun on public terrain cannot be won behind bolted doors.