Orbach, Susie. 1986. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
REVIEW by Carla Rice
Unrealistic images of women that infect the media today are generally acknowledged agents of eating disorders. These socio-cultural roots have been separated by researchers from more personal causes: poor communication, rigidity, and over-protectiveness within the family, feelings of ineffectiveness and low self-esteem.
Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age, a new book by the feminist psychotherapist Susie Orbach, questions what others have previously assumed; why eating disorder sufferers harbor feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem.
Why do women as a group lack self-esteem? Orbach argues that mothers want their daughters to find acceptance so they teach them the way and means of being "feminine". Young women learn to suppress their own emotional needs to assume responsibility for the needs of others. Fulfillment is gained through the approval of others and, thus, is only temporarily rewarding. How a woman feels about her body, Orbach comments, is how she feels about herself; if she can make "it" acceptable, then she will be accepted. Ultimately, she says, women remain unfulfilled, need-ridden, unequipped with the psychological tools necessary for discovering needs and desires or having them met.
Increasing social and political lip service to changing gender roles have led women to believe that their options are endless. In reality says Orbach, society still expects the "ideal" woman to suppress her needs. The anorexic, to use Orbach's metaphor, initiates a hunger strike. Her denial of food is a protest against these contradictions of women's roles in today's society. Orbach believes the anorexic manipulates her body in the attempt to create a new person, one who will be accepted and entitled to having her needs fulfilled.
For all the strengths of Hunger Strike, there are weaknesses. At times Orbach is sensational, but her media-like treatment of anorexia is not as objectionable as her potentially dangerous commentary on bulimia. Orbach states it is frequently a "social activity in which women students get together, gorge themselves and then evacuate". For many it is not an addictive habit, she concludes, but one quite easily given up. Research simply does not support this opinion.
Orbach's basic argument, likening anorexia to a hunger strike, links the emotional causes of eating disorders to the psycho-social development of all women, and the problems every woman faces in attempting to fit into her gender role.