“The Good Body” (excerpt) by Eve Ensler
Don’t get me wrong. I pick up the magazine. No, no, no. it’s the possibility of being skinny good that keeps me buying. I discover a Starbucks maple walnut scone expanding in me, creeping out. Flabby age leaking through the cracks. Big Mac’s French fries, Pizza Land, four helpings, can’t stop. My stomach is America. I want to down in the cement. Obviously I’m missing something. Maybe if I go find the women who thought this up, she’ll reveal the secret.
My body will be mine when I’m thin. I will eat a little at a time, small bites. I will vanquish ice cream. I will purge with green juice. I will see chocolate as poison and pasta as a form of self-punishment. I will work not to feel full again. Always moving toward full, approaching full but never really full. I will embrace my emptiness, I will ride into holy zones. Let me be hungry. Let me starve. Please.
Bread of Satan. I stop eating bread. This is the same as not eating food. Four days in, a scrawny actress friend tell me, “Eve, your stomach has nothing to do with diet.” What? “It’s the change of life,” she says. ”All you need is some testosterone.” I try to image what I would be like, totally bread deprived and shot up with testosterone. “Serial killer” comes to mind.
I’m walking down a New York City street, and I catch a glimpse of this blond, pointy-breasted, raisin–a-day stomached smiling girl on the cover of Cosmo magazine. She is there every minute, somewhere in the world, smiling down on me, on all of us. She’s omnipresent. She’s the American Dream, my personal nightmare. Pumped straight from the publishing powerplant into the bloodstream of our culture and neurosis. She is multiplying on every corner. She was passed through my mother’s milk and so I don’t even know that I’m contaminated.
Don’t get me wrong. I pick up the magazine. No, no, no. it’s the possibility of being skinny good that keeps me buying. I discover a Starbucks maple walnut scone expanding in me, creeping out. Flabby age leaking through the cracks. Big Mac’s French fries, Pizza Land, four helpings, can’t stop. My stomach is America. I want to down in the cement. Obviously I’m missing something. Maybe if I go find the women who thought this up, she’ll reveal the secret.
More about “The Good Body”, click the links below:
https://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/goodbody.html
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